You must take into account that I was under surveillance. That I was living in this panopticon where all its inhabitants had become surveillants themselves. Surveillants that constituted different kinds of male wills to power that made up this Order that oppressed me and ultimately oppressed them. This Order, made up of women and men, was neither feminine nor masculine, it was diabolical. Initially forged by men to invest themselves with power, it was a diabolical piece of machinery that subjugated all sexes and all genders but specially so called female gender. Brutally so, I would say. All my flights (mystical, artistic, erotic) were flights against this diabolical Order.

You see, as a child, I was accused of this thing which to me was an "enigma". I had to work out what this enigma was. It was thus that from very young, I realised that the only way to be accepted by this Order was to play one of the roles available for women. I became a docile body. I had to. There was no way out. Since very young those who raised me constrained me to. If we all constitute power, different kinds of power, all the women that raised me embodied the worse phallocentric power imaginable. According to their embodiments of the law, my mother constituted another kind of order. One that had to be repudiated. So did my father. So what could you expect from me but an ardent desire to be accepted, at odds with an inheritance to follow on from a tradition of difference?

My father also had his contradictions, but at least he did not present a monolithic view of things, he did not embody the then existing power to the full. There were gaps there. In retrospect, I think he was a beautiful man. Yet again, he was very much a man of his time. In his library, I discovered Greek mythology and wished to live my life the way the gods did. That is to say, beyond morality. I used to abandon myself to the most beautiful reveries. It was only later on that I realised that the Order also enjoined these flights of fantasy. I outwardly became cold. Restrained. Knowledge turned me arrogant. If knowledge is power, knowledge had the power to turn me arrogant.

This Order, this corset, I felt it more and more. I wanted to get out. I had realised by then that everybody was complicit with this Order. It was then that my father died. And I broke down. My submission towards my aunts' will was a necessity. I didn't even calculate it. It was so necessary.

I understood my aunts valued appearance above everything else. I studied their behaviour. And carefully imitated it. I was very thin. And my aunts started to stuff me with view to marrying me. I realised they wanted to get rid off me. I realised I had to compromise and choose the least damaging option. Although I was poor, I was accepted as part of the aristocracy. My aunts were proud spectators of my act of submission, of my performance, my gender performance.

You see, being under surveillance I had to adopt a public persona. This public persona had to undo the sexually precocious identity that had been thrown upon me. My first nanny had used me to channel her anger towards my father. Beautiful childhood, don’t you think? By then, I already knew that the most powerful thing I had was my inner space. Nobody could impose an alien order there. My world was in my inner space. I didn't want to jeopardise my world. It seemed more practical to conform in an ostentatious way to a notion of woman that was in vogue at the time. It was thus that I would safeguard my space. I was soon relieved to learn that although people were malicious they were not psychic. All the women who looked after me embodied this law made by men that crushed everything. Perhaps it was their age. The men around me all looked at me with lecherous eyes.

It was thus that I realised that the Order praised sexual non-existence in women, thus making you think about sex all the time. I would become a restrained, virtuous woman, the perfect wife. But then, in solitude, when I did not have to perform for anyone, I discovered a place that was full of wonder, I used to call it in secret "an orgasmic place of my own". I went there and revelled in secret pleasure. In a society that prioritises the visible over the invisible, I could not be accused.

But there was something about this emphasis on genital sex, this enforcement of compulsive heterosexual genital sex, that made me anxious. What was this will to sex? Where was it coming form? Why did I have to have sex if I did not want to? Those who have judged me throughout the decades thought I was repressed. Because for a long time I did not have genital sex. I thought they were repressed. For they did not know how to tune in with that orgasmic space that I had access to. They couldn't let go. All these people judging me had no inkling of the jouissance I encountered during my "raptures". I still find it rather oppressive to think of sex in purely "genital" terms. For what is sex? The release of endorphins in the brain is manifold.

My life had been planned out by others. It was either the convent or marriage. In a way, convents allowed women to live in their inner space. Romantic novels told of nuns that run away with attractive adventurers. Yes. I was hooked to intensity. The fate of a nun seemed much more seductive to me than the fate of a married upper class woman constrained to local discourses of social control. But when I had poetic experiences, my aunts laughed at me. And my literary aspirations were cut short. They did it. For they considered them ridiculous, and even more so in a woman. They saw literature as a manly thing. A vulgar manly thing. They all derided me to the point I doubted myself. According to them, my aspirations were monstrous and horrible. As if to be a woman writer was a crime. A transgression of some kind. I gave up my aspirations. But I carried on writing in my mind. I abandoned myself to reveries, but decided never to put them down in paper again: I had to eliminate all evidence of deviance from the Order.

From then onwards, my romantic-religious poems became mystical flights. Mysticism was an area allowed to women. I cultivated disdain for those who wouldn't let me be. They called me selfish! Ha! When I repeatedly had to exile myself from myself in order to be accepted by that bunch of castrating manipulators. It would be interesting to list every time I was called selfish and attempt to see what was meant by it. They mainly called me selfish because at some point they realised I had a space of my own. They were not happy with my public act of submission. They wanted everything. They wanted everything to be moulded by this crushing Order. As long as I had this space of my own, which before I termed orgasmic, I was safe from complete alienation. That is why they called me selfish, because I wouldn't let them make me selfless. I started secretly calling them the mystically repressed, the spiritually repressed. Spiritually, they were carcasses. Empty vessels full of preconceived ideas. They were mediocre. Prejudiced. Controlling. They all embodied the worst constraining powers. They were my surveillers. Their own surveillers. With this corset, I felt so suffocated no wonder I fainted sometimes.

Why couldn't I be taken for who I was? I was always on trial. My experiences were constantly denied as non genuine. Even now some feminists condemn my mysticism as a loss of self when I saw this loss as a desirable transcendence of the self.

Caught between reality and desire, I was always in search for this uplifting feeling. I was hooked to it. The priest’s speeches were eloquent. In his words, religion echoed my adolescent reveries. A fugitive from reality, which I found so crass, virtue was presented to me in a new light. Now, it was this radiant space, yet again uplifting. I pretended to be a docile soul. Pretending can be dangerous. The brain is a perverse device. In public, my soul embodied discipline. I was like a soul soldier. I made an army of me. It was all a simulacrum. I enjoyed it and perhaps it was then that it started becoming real. A copy became the foundation of my performative gender.

That I thoroughly enjoyed my mystical raptures did not preclude my curiosity towards what is commonly known as sex. But I was stubborn. And proud. And I preferred solitude to surrender. Repression to surrender. For a while, disciplinary technologies condemned me to overwhelming consciousness, to an endless rumination about whether my thoughts were bad thoughts. Thought is perverse. Sad thoughts stalked me.

My desire for transcendence transcended gender. It did not have a "masculine" object as its telos. My mysticism arose from a desire to fuse with God, where God was the Lacanian unconscious. A desire to enter a different state of awareness that gave you the powerful illusion of wholeness. The fact that this wholeness might be illusory did not bother me, for I was not interested in truth. It was an intense and blissful state. You see, for me artistic inspiration, mysticism, religion and desire overlapped, they all conflated in a need for transcendence. Transcendence of barriers, of binary oppositions, transcendence of hierarchies, transcendence of the Order. Transcendence proved to be polymorphous. I was lucky I could tune in with many different sides of transcendence. It enriched my inner life.

For a while, I revelled in a quiet rebellion. I knew my rebellion had to be quiet. My love towards the womaniser was the work of God, where God is the unconscious. The doctor and my abstract husband, partners in crime, insisted on defining my flights of fantasy (artistic, mystical, erotic) as "nervios". By defining me as "ill", they provided me with an alibi to continue living in my orgasmic space. What they called "nervios", and they never clearly defined what they meant by such word, for they couldn't, "nervios" was a word that had become fashionable, a preconceived idea that they applied to me without questioning, a handy label that saved them from thinking, as "hysteria" was going to become later on. What they called my "nervios" were nothing but my crashes against this Order that crushed me.

But where does this will to pathologise everything that doesn't abide to common experience come from? There are many realities, but yet again there seems to be a "hierarchy" that structures these realities and even invalidates them. They were whispering in my ear: "Your experience of reality is not valid". Thus what is not understood and shared is invalidated. The mystically repressed had not experienced those moments of wholeness that I would here term my "brain orgasm". For I have to confess that I polymorphously believe that the brain can be an erogenous zone. And as such it can be stimulated from within.

In any case, the important thing was for me to know that my illness was a symptom of an Order that was sick and therefore my illness was a sign of health. That as long as the "mystically repressed" defined me as "ill", or "selfish" or "regressive", my "orgasmic space of my own" was safeguarded. I would certainly see any comparison of my case, with Dora's case, as inadequate. A good example of the purpose behind pathologising is that even my affair was seen as symptomatic of my illness.

I was always being done for my "orgasmic space of my own". Everyone wanted to cure me from my jouissance. The priest. The womaniser. My abstract husband. As if my imaginings were not suitable to their intentions. There was nothing wrong with me. They just perceived it as something that got in the way of their intentions. That is why they pathologised it. Pathologising is an activity that goes on a lot. Yes, I had a breakdown when I was younger, but afterwards I was all right. They carried on labelling me "ill" to manipulate me. I accepted in order to safeguard my "orgasmic space". Sometimes I felt sad. The way I valued this sadness was different to theirs.

Confession time made me drunk. After all, it was a silent review of my reveries. And yes, I saw God in Don Juan. Don Juan was unbounded love, yet again, a democratic love that was judged by the inhabitants of the panopticon that had become panopticons themselves. I didn't see this love as reprehensible. I saw it as dispersed love, unfocused love, but love nevertheless. Yes, I saw God as love without boundaries. I found most of my ideas where at odds with that Order that spied upon me.

Call me "selfish", but I think I was too sensitive. I seemed to be able to feel a range of feelings others did not feel. The blunt judged me. That which was not acceptable to feel or to think was not only labelled "ill" but also "sinful". The priest labelled "sinful" my need and experience of universal love. Except for the womaniser, the others insisted on my faithfulness for their own ends. The priest promised me access to my orgasmic space through denial and meditation on God. I always experienced God in a literary, poetic, pantheistic way. I wanted to feel. I wanted intensities. Religion provided me with intensities.

If we see reason as the faculty that allows us to see there are things beyond reason, the irrational is not quite the opposite of reason, but that which reason acknowledges not to understand, therefore that which we understand as beyond us. We have to cease gendering these realms. There are few things less rational than phallocentrism. We cannot equate the phallocentric with reason. Nor women with the irrational. That is where Irigaray’s “Mysterique” goes up in smoke. My choice of transcendence was an individual choice. I was not setting up any example for women to identify with. I did not mimic Santa Teresa. I did not read her until much later. My abstract husband left me space for my "reveries". They all learned to respect "my space", if only to manipulate me later: while the womaniser wanted to enter my vagina, the priest wanted to enter my soul. I gained notoriousness for being "una mujer rara....histérica" mainly because for the first two hundred and ninety pages, my body, a body is always a soul, was not docile enough. The problem was not that I submitted to master discourses, as some have suggested, but that I was always ambivalent to all of them.

I prayed. I felt intensities. I realised I was not alone. I staged my nudity on a tiger skin so that Clarin and other would drool. My exhibitionism was an ironic reminder of my inaccessibility and if many of us live to satisfy the other’s gaze, in privacy, I also satisfied my own gaze. Christ seemed the very image of a desirable masculinity and I kissed his wounds. Naked to nude, for he was after all a representation of vulnerable maleness in the nude, I even fantasised about whipping myself. Let me be frivolous and say that it was all rather polymorphous. Being Jewish, Freud knew little of the polymorphous nature of Catholicism. For Catholicism's success is mainly based on its erotic undertones. Through denial and release, I explored a variety of sensations, including masochism, which had the plus of being legitimated by religion as well as redeeming my over intellectualised guilt. My idea of religion was always tainted with erotic undertones. It was a dreamy spirituality. Sometimes a fantasy. Erotomania it would be called nowadays. Being in love with the idea of God, was like being the fan of a pop star. Fans don't want sex from their idols. They want to revel in the orgasm of a sheer masturbatory fantasy. I now realise this is what I was up to. For me, the horizontal and the vertical belonged to the same axis. An axis that would put on the same infinite line eroticism and transcendence. A diagonal axis maybe.

I felt lovely things in my thought space. I was in love with my own melancholia. I fell in love with this womaniser. A well-hung guy. You should have seen him. A guy who, like the priests, also required women to undress their souls. I loved dreaming. I daydreamt about him. I had not tried carnal sex yet. But dreaming was so orgasmic already. Sometimes I dominated my soul, the more I dominated my soul, the more orgasmic my dreaming became. I was not the only one who got off on denial.

Everyone knows thought is perverse. Sometimes I feared madness. The priest brainwashed me when I was most vulnerable. Like he did with the little school girls. He was the masterly brainwashing master. From the womaniser I allowed romantic love. He accepted for quite a while. I thought: ¿Por qué no dejarle mostrar los cuidados de una madre, la fidelidad de un perro? I suppose I wanted a slave. A eunuch slave. Slaves can be manipulative. The priest, who was also a bit of a eunuch slave, was intent on enslaving my soul. I was caught up in a battle of male wills. Priest versus Womaniser. Conversion into beata versus seduction. Where to fall was not allowed and to ascend was judged negatively by those who did not understand my libidinal drives, I desired both. I wanted the best of both worlds.

Unfortunately, for these men I was a mere pawn of power. But now that I can manage some kind of coherent narrative I have a last confession to make: I have now realised that throughout I had an unconscious agenda which had the drive of that which is deliberate. Throughout I was forging out a strategy of mimicry. Initially, I assumed the feminine style and posture assigned to me within patriarchal discourse. Perfect wife. Devout woman. Hysteric. Then, through repetition and exaggeration to the point of parody this strategy of mimicry was set in motion. Through it, the mechanisms by which these discourses exploited me were uncovered.

Firstly, I was more chaste than the chaste. But more chaste than the chaste, the sexual non-existence that initially could seem a great unconscious strategy, became a monumental absurdity. The initial mimicry that made sense for a while didn't make sense anymore. My will-power oscillated in a masturbatory sub-dom game. I got stuck in my mimicry. I became my mimicry. I unconsciously thought "mimicry" would be a useful strategy. It didn't occurred to me that things weren't that simple. For if we see identity partly as a repetition of gendered social roles, although you might consciously choose mimicry, you might end up being that identity you set out to parody, you might end up terribly confused. I would say to Irigaray and Butler, that their strategies are dangerous, that souls do not work in such a straightforward way.

It was after my reveries that I realised to what extent my mimicry had been incorporated into my body. For I felt guilty. And I realised to what extent my initial performance of virtue had become performative aridity. This virtue was performing me. Mimicries start performing you. That is why Butler's and Irigaray's strategies are only partially viable. At least in the nineteenth century. Or at least with certain roles. By pretending to kill desire I was killing myself. Desire is not to be scorned. When you scorn desire, it deflates you leaving you almost dead. It will return the stronger.

My strategy of mimicry continued. This time, my head flooded by erotic imagery, I decided to become a devout slave. The priest was, in a way, in a similar position to me. I was "la mujer de su alma". He understood about such things. But this Order which crushed him and about which he felt ambivalent, made him into a power-hungry man.

Through my decision to become a devout slave, I could both parody and expose women's condition of slavery to male discourses. Being a virgin, my proximity to the Virgin, foregrounded the absurdity of such an ideal, while cross-dressing as "nazareno" or adopting for a day a male role, exposed the exchangeability and occasional ambivalence of gender roles and thus their artificiality.

If Obdulia was jealous, she was not jealous of the desire I arose. She was jealous of what she unconsciously realised was my mimicry. She knew I had taken my virtue to a point where the prescribed "purity" was foregrounded as "unnatural", a parody of itself. You see, she was trying to subvert the Order with her inexhaustible availability, whereas I was performing from within the existing structures. By becoming an exaggeration of submission, I foregrounded power and gender relations. She was both proud and jealous of this. As to the priest, he was not all that happy, for he was exposed before the whole town for what he was: a power-hungry brainwashing master.

I also performed the "slave" for the doctor. I must admit that I was scared about my health. But signing my letters "your slave" was again a way of highlighting who was who.

"Be quiet", I would tell the womaniser when he talked. You see, by then, I was all intent to explore his body and my body to the full. When I explored him, for I was eager to learn therefore I explored him, I experienced a different kind of pleasure. A pleasure that went from my pelvis to my head. But he soon got exhausted. Unlike mystical jouissance, the so much publicised bodily ecstasies depended on other who could become tired very quickly. I must say I was disappointed. I was completely self-reliant when I entered my orgasmic space of my own. I didn't have to rely on somebody else's stamina. If I felt tired, it was me. And it was through me that the womaniser became aware of his limitations and his performative gender as womaniser, although I ignore what he did with this knowledge.

As to my husband, it was through my mimicries that he realised there was a double standard as to faithfulness, it was through my beata mimicry that he wished I would have a lover, thus recognising a need in women that was not usually recognised at the time, it was through the advent of the duel, his decision to go on a duel being inspired by theatre plays, that he became aware how gender performatives came from without, coming face to face with the artificiality of the male notion of "honour", with the role of the avenged husband, it was thus that he became aware to what extent he could be called a husband and what claims he could have over me, but foremost, he came face to face with the theatricality of gender, the duel being a simulacrum of a play about male honour.

But it is getting late. And it is now closing time for the confessional. But let me finish. Towards the end, I became a speculum to the failures of the men around me. And if at the time, my unconscious agenda made me sometimes pathetic and confused and although I do not think mimicry is a healthy strategy, at least it exposed gender and power relations in such a crystalline way that they could be challenged in the future. As I am doing now, now that I have a bit of perspective to my story. As to my addiction to polymorphous intensities it was also a way of puncturing the Order, my way of arguing against Foucault and Lacan that there are spaces forged out of many mini-orders that the individual can inhabit beyond the control of institutions and that these spaces are not necessarily psychotic but powerful cracks that each individual must look for according to their taste and fancy.

2001 “Ana: towards a polymorphous confession”, King’s College, London.