In her trance, Maria sometimes spoke nonsense. The sisters allowed no such breaches of logic, measuring all her sentences by the rationale, the ratio, of narration. She sometimes sobbed, pulled her hair, cried out loud, stuttered, and stammered. She sat silent for long stretches. None of that made it into the book. They yanked her from one world, orality, into a fairly straightforward kind of literacy, without ever deliberately waking her up. If Maria’s rapture may be described by us moderns – postmoderns – as an unconscious encounter, theirs was a highly alert, conscious one. Were those two worlds of orality and literacy interacting with each other? It doesn’t seem so, but maybe that’s the way they must always play against each other, the nuns, to use the language of politics, in effect colonizing their strange conversa.

For her sisters had stolen not just her voice, but her experience. They had translated it, if you will, turning her mystical orality into recognizable Italian. Moreover, they had made it permanent, providing a record for posterity, story slipping into history. Maria reacted violently. Learning that her sisters had made of her inner dialogue a public document, she searched out all the leaves of the book she could find and tossed them into the fireplace. Her sisters, thinking that Maria had lost her mind, found better and more obscure hiding places for their treasure, some of the pages lost for hundreds of years.

Maria speaks – and I use speaks here to mean something different from the sentences she typically uttered – Maria speaks on another level, with another kind of orality – one that breaks the usual constraints of grammar. For example, she relates the desire of the Word to have His being summoned. And summoned solely by Maria. Her words are – I am reduced to the inertness of such a verb to capture the vibrancy of the relationship – her words are the breathing substance of the heavenly non-being. She reveals God not through language, but in language. The spirit of the divine cannot be expressed in mere words, she insists, but only in her oral utterances – the Holy Lord finding substance in phonemes. She speaks as if writing had never been invented. For prose blasphemes the word, as she knows it. The stillness of prose – the very fact of words tethered to the page, enabling readers to criticize, analyze, fight against, interpret, and reject sentence after sentence – the very fact of literacy, that is, denies existence to the Other. The reader usurps authority by setting aside the author and taking control of the experience: the reader can slow the action down, skip sentences, even slam the book closed. Maria’s Lord has total hold of her. The nuns produced a lower ordering of prose, something quite corrupted from the glory that Hugh of Saint Victor and others promote in the divine contemplation of the text.