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Postscript (CatchingMy Breath) Countereroticism will not tolerate conclusion. There can be no end to love in the lives of saints, no end to the reading and rewriting of holy Lives. Nonetheless, readers, writers, and lovers alike honor the power of the interval, the necessity—even the intense desirability—of the pause. Let us pause, then, in the midst, in between. Let us catch our breath. Inspire: write and be read! Expire: let go of the self! In the midst, in between such daunting imperatives, our lives transpire. Heavy breathing, shallow breaths, suspenseful breathlessness: so we might measure the soulful , sensual embodiment of what Christians have traditionallynamed the "Spirit of God." More modestly, we might also note the persistent vitality of mortal creatures who continue—at times, seemingly against all odds, and thus not after all so modestly—to hope, to desire, to strive . . . to keep on breathing, for a little while longer. Such improbable aspirations! Can breath be "caught"? It is neither prey nor disease. Yetwe speak of "catching the wind": which is to say, being caught up by the wind, borne on breath—transported. "Catching the spirit": being caught up by the spirit. What else? A divine seduction. When my first child was born, after an exhausting twelve hours of mutual labor, he paused delicately—such a beautiful in-between blue, I thought dreamily. The doctor shocked him into his newborn senses: he breathed; indeed, he screamed. My second child, secretly tutored, arrived in half the time and already ruddy, with full mastery of her lungs—or perhaps already mastered by their power. Sometimes I too catch my breath. Sometimes I find, to my surprise, that I am already screaming. Either way, breath comes as a shock—it comesin shocking repetitions—as pleasure and pain, spirit and flesh, collude and commingle in a mysterious rhythmic attunement. Life draws close to death and death to life: we inhale; we exhale. (We make love, however we can.) We keep on doing it for a little while longer: the mortal measure of eternity, the impossible stretch of desire, the ambitious span of a life. We inhale the exhalations of other mortal creatures: this is the logic not only of ecosystems but also of history. Our children breathe our own breath in turn. Some of the fumes of the past—and these are not absent from ancient hagiography—have proved toxic, issuing in so many crimes of passion, homophobic, sexist, racist, ethnocentric, nationalistic,religious. Other holier breezes, equally ancient and equally fired by passion, may also blow our way—may, in grace, even blow us away, catch us up in the spirit. Yet the countereroticism that breathes through the ascetic Lives,simultaneously sensual and sacred, creates risk. Dare we inhale such dizzying drafts of desire? Inspired by the saints, perhaps we will take the dare. Our love will not, of course, be "the same" as theirs. The ascetics of late antiquity cultivated purposeful disciplinesof embodiment and textuality , pedagogy and prayer, which freed desire from the constraining and often violently oppressive structures of familial, civic, and imperial domination. For the most part, this was accomplished through ambivalent mimicry of those very structures—through enactments of resistance within power rather than simple opposition to power, through subversion rather than inversion. Ancient Lives of men—specifically, those penned by Jerome and Sulpicius Severus—typically focus on the erotic relationship of disciple and master, replicated in the relationship of the writer to his hagiographical subject, as well as in the relationship of the saint to Christ (a divine figure who remains, however, intriguingly distant in the context of the homosocially contained eroticism of these male Lives). The fundamentallyasymmetrical structure of classical pedagogical pederasty is thereby invoked and transformed, in the proliferation of reversals, repetitions, and displacements that both intensify and defuse dynamics of desire and power, while radically destabilizingthe social hierarchies reflected in "active" or "passive" roles (and thereby also destabilizing the implicit "gendering" of these roles). Lives of women— Jerome's Paula, Gregory's Macrina, Augustine's Monica—balance the erotic union of a woman with Christ against the intimate relationshipbetween the male narrator and his female subject,where the author becomes a character in his own history or, in the case of harlot Lives, where the holy woman is viewed from the perspective of a male ascetic who figures prominently in her Life and whose own ascetic journey is closely linked with her own. Here too traditionally asymmetrical relations of power—in this case, explicitly...

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