Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene

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    For a woman to be a virgin and a mother, you need a miracle; when a woman isbbr></abbr> not a virgin, nor a mother, either, nobody talks about miracles. Mary, the mother of Jesus, together with the other Mary, the mother of St John, and the Mary Magdalehe repentant harlot, went down to the seashore; a woman named Fatima, a servant, went with them. They stepped into a boat, they threw away the rudder, they permitted the sea to take them where it wanted. It beached them near Marseilles.

    Dont run away with the idea the South of France was an easy option pared to the deserts of Syria, ypt, or the wastes of Cappadocia, where other early saints, likewise driven by the imperious need for solitude, found arid, inhospitable crevices in which to plate the ineffable. There were , square, white, Roman cities all along the Mediterranean coast everywhere except the place the three Marys landed with their servant. They landed in the middle of a malarial s, the Camargue. It was not pleasant. The desert would have been more healthy.

    But there the two stern mothers and Fatima -- dont fet Fatima -- set up a chapel, at the place we now call Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. There they stayed. But the other Mary, the Magdalehe not-mother, could not stop. Impelled by the demon of loneliness, she went off on her own through the Camargue; then she crossed limestone hill after limestone hill. Flints cut her feet, sun burned her skin. She ate fruit that had fallen from the tree of its own accord, like a perfect Mani. She ate dropped berries. The black-browed Palestinian woman walked in silence, gaunt as famine, hairy as a dog.

    She walked until she came to the forest of the Sainte-Baume. She walked until she came to the remotest part of the forest. There she found a cave. There she stopped. There she prayed. She did not speak to another human being, she did not see another human being, for thirty-three years. By then, she was old.

    Mary Magdalehe Venus in sackcloth. Gees de La Tours picture does not show a woman in sackcloth, but her chemise is coarse and simple enough to be a peial garment, or, at least, the kind of garment that shows you were not thinking of personal ador when you put it on. Even though the chemise is deeply open on the bosom, it does not seem to disclose flesh as such, but a flesh that has more akin to the wax of the burning dle, to the way the wax dle is irradiated by its own flame, and glows. So you could say that, from the waist up, this Mary Magdalene is on the high road to penitence, but, from the waist down, which is always the more problematic part, there is the question of her long, red skirt.

    Left-over finery? Was it the only frock she had, the frock she went wh in, theed in, the sail in? Did she walk all the way to the Sainte-Baume in this red skirt? It doesnt look travel-stained or worn or torn. It is a luxurious, even sdalous skirt. A scarlet dress for a scarlet woman.

    The Virgin Mary wears blue. Her preference has sanctified the colour. We think of a &quot;heavenly&quot; blue. But Mary Magdalene wears red, the colour of passion. The two womewin paradoxes. One is not what the other is. One is a virgin and a mother; the other is a non-virgin, and childless. Note how the English language doesnt tain a specific word to describe a woman who is grown-up, sexually mature and not a mother, unless such a woman is using her sexuality as her profession.

    Because Mary Magdalene is a woman and childless she goes out into the wilderness. The others, the mothers, stay and make a church, where people e.

    But why has she taken her pearl necklace with her? Look at it, lying in front of the mirror. And her long hair has been most beautifully brushed. Is she, yet, fully repentant?

    In Gees de La Tours painting, the Magdalenes hair is>..</a> well brushed. Sometimes the Magdalenes hair is as shaggy as a Rastafarians. Sometimes her hair hangs down upon, is iricably mixed up with, her furs. Mary Magdalene is easier to read when she is hairy, when, in the wilderness, she wears the rough coat of her own desires, as if the desires of her past have turned into the hairy shirt that torments her present, repentant flesh.

    Sometimes she wears only her hair; it never saw a b, long, matted, u, hanging down to her knees. She belts her own hair round her waist with the rope with which, eaight, she lashes herself, making a rough tunic of it. On these occasions, the transformation from the young lovely, voluptuous Mary Magdalehe happy non-virgin, the party girl, the woman taken in adultery -- on these occasions, the transformation is plete. She has turned into something wild and strange, into a female version of John the Baptist, a hairy hermit, as good as ransding gender, sex obliterated, nakedness irrelevant.

    Now she is oh such pole-sitters as Simeon Stylites, and other solitary cave-dwellers who uned with beasts, like St Jerome. She eats herbs, drinks water from the pool; she es to resemble an even earlier ination of the &quot;wild man of the woods&quot; than John the Baptist. Now she looks like hairy Enkidu, from the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. The woman who once, in her grand, red dress, was vice personified, has now retired to aential situation in which vice simply is not possible. She has arrived at the radiant, enlightened sinlessness of the animals. In her new, resple animality, she is now beyond choiow she has no option but virtue.

    But there is another way of looking at it. Think of Donatellos Magdalene, in Florence -- shes dried up by the suns of the wilderness, battered by wind and rain, anorexic, toothless, a body entirely annihilated by the soul. You  almost smell the odour of the kind of sanctity that reeks from her -- its rank, its raw, its horrible. By the ardour with which she has embraced the rigorous asceticism of penitence, you  tell how much she hated her early life of so-called &quot;pleasure&quot;. The mortification of the flesh es naturally to her. When you learn that Donatello intehe piece to be not black but gilded, that does not lighten its mood.

    heless, you  see the point that some anonymous Man of the Enlighte on the Grand Tour made two hundred years ago -- how Donatellos Mary Magdalene made him &quot;disgusted with penitence&quot;.

    Penitence bees sado-masochism. Self-punishment is its own reward.

    But it  also bee kitsch. sider the apocryphal story of Mary of Egypt. Who was a beautiful prostitute until she repented and spent the remaining forty-seven years of her life as a pe in the desert, clothed only in her long hair. She took with her three loaves and ate a mouthful of bread once a day, in the ms; the loaves lasted her out. Mary of Egypt is  and fresh. Her face stays miraculously unlined. She is as untouched by time as her bread is untouched by appetite. She sits on a ro the desert, bing out her long hair, like a lorelei whose water has turo sand. We  imagine how she smiles. Perhaps she sings a little song.

    Gees de La Tours Mary Magdalene has not yet arrived at aasy of repentance, evidently. Perhaps, indeed, he has pictured her as she is just about to repent -- before her sea voyage in fact, although I would prefer to think that this bare, bleak space, furnished only with the mirror, is that of her cave in the woods. But this is a woman who is still taking care of herself. Her long, black hair, sleek as that of a Japanese woman on a painted scroll -- she must just have finished brushing it, reminding us that she is the patron saint of hairdressers. Her hair is the product of culture, not left as nature intended. Her hair shows she has just used the mirror as an instrument of worldly vanity. Her hair shows that, even as she meditates upon the dle flame, this world still has a claim upon her.

    Unless we are actually watg her as her soul is drawn out into the dle flame.

    We meet Mary Magdalene in the gospels, doing somethiraordinary with her hair. After she massaged Jesuss feet with her pot of precious oi, she wiped them  with her hair, an image so astonishing aically precise it is surprising it is represented so rarely in art, especially that of the seveh tury, when religious excess aicism went so often together. Magdalene, using her hair, that beautiful  with which she used to snare men as -- well, as a mop, a washcloth, a towel. And a slight element of the perverse about it, too. All in all, the kind of gaudy gesture a repentant prostitute would make.

    She has brushed her hair, perhaps for the last time, and taken off her pearl necklace, also for the last time. Now she is gazing at the dle flame, which doubles itself in the mirror. Once upon a time, that mirror was the tool of her trade; it was within the mirror that she assembled all the elements of the femininity she put together for sale. But now, instead of refleg her face, it duplicates the pure flame.

    When I was in labour, I thought of a dle flame. I was in labour for een hours. At first the pains came slowly and were relatively light; it was easy to ride them. But when they came more closely together, and grew more and more intehen I began to trate my mind upon an imaginary dle flame.

    Look at the dle flame as if it is the only thing in the world. How white and steady it is. At the core of the white flame is a e of blue, transparent air; that is the thing to look at, that is the thing to trate on. When the pains came thid fast, I fixed all my attention on the blue abse the heart of the flame, as though it were the secret of the flame and, if I trated enough upon it, it would bey secret, too.

    Soon there was no time to think of anything else. By then, I was entirely subsumed by the blue space. Evehey snipp９9lｉb?ed away at my body, down below, to finally let the baby out the easiest way, all my attention was trated on the core of the flame.

    Ohe dle flame had dos work, it sself out; they ed my baby in a shawl and gave him to me.

    Mary Magdaleates upon the dle flame. She ehe blue core, the blue absence. She bees something other than herself.

    The silen the picture, for it is the most silent of pictures, emanates not from the darkness behind the dle in the mirror but from these two dles, the real dle and the mirror dle. Betweehe two dles disseminate light and silehey have trahe woman into enlighte. She t speak, wont speak. In the desert, she will grunt, maybe, but she will put speech aside, after this, after she has meditated upon the dle flame and the mirror. She will put speech aside just as she has put aside her pearl necklad will put away her red skirt. The new person, the saint, is being born out of this intercourse with the dle flame.

    But something has already been born out of this intercourse with the dle flame. See. She carries it already. She carries where, if she were a Virgin mother and not a sacred whore, she would rest her baby, not a living child but a memento mori, a skull.

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