American Ghosts & Old World Wonders (15 page)

           
Meanwhile, the door marked "Forbidden" opened up again.

           
It came in.

           
It rolled on little wheels, a wobbling, halting, toppling progress, a clockwork land galleon, tall as a mast, advancing at a stately if erratic pace, nodding and becking and shedding inessential fragments of its surface as it came, its foliage rustling, now stuck and perilously rocking at a crack in the stone floor with which its wheels cannot cope, now flying helter-skelter, almost out of control, wobbling, clicking, whirring, an electric juggernaut evidently almost on the point of collapse; it has been a heavy afternoon.

           
But, although it looked as if eccentrically self-propelled, Arcimboldo the Milanese pushed it, picking up bits of the thing as they fell off, tut-tutting at its ruination, pushing it, shoving it, occasionally picking it up bodily and carrying it. He was smeared all over with its secretions and looked forward to a good wash once it had been returned to the curious room from whence it came. There, the Doctor and his assistant will take it apart until the next time.

           
This thing before us, although it is not, was not and never will be alive,
has
been animate and will be animate again, but, at the moment, not, for now, after one final shove, it stuck stock-still, wheels halted, wound down, uttering one last, gross, mechanical sigh.

           
A nipple dropped off. The Doctor picked it up and offered it to the child. Another strawberry! She shook her head.

           
The size and prominence of the secondary sexual characteristics indicate this creature is, like the child, of the feminine gender. She lives in the fruit bowl where the Doctor found the first strawberry. When the Archduke wants her, Arcimboldo, who designed her, puts her together again, arranging the fruit of which she is composed on a wicker frame, always a little different from the last time according to what the greenhouse can provide. Today, her hair is largely composed of green muscat grapes, her nose a pear, eyes filbert nuts, cheeks russet apples somewhat wrinkled -- never mind! The Archduke has a penchant for older women. When the painter got her ready, she looked like Carmen Miranda's hat on wheels, but her name was "Summer".

           
But now, what devastation! Hair mashed, nose squashed, bosom pureed, belly juiced. The child observed this apparition with the greatest interest. She spoke again. She queried earnestly:

           
"If 70 per cent have lost an eye, 75 per cent an ear, 80 per cent an arm, 85 per cent a leg: what percentage,
at least,
must have lost all four?"2

           
Once again, she stumped them. They pondered, all three men, and at last slowly shook their heads. As if the child's question were the last straw, "Summer" now disintegrated -- subsided, slithered, slopped off her frame into her fruit bowl, whilst shed fruit, some almost whole, bounced to the rushes around her. The Milanese, with a pang, watched his design disintegrate.

           
It is not so much that the Archduke likes to pretend this monstrous being is alive, for nothing inhuman is alien to him; rather, he does not care whether she is alive or no, that what he wants to do is to plunge his member into her artificial strangeness, perhaps as he does so imagining himself an orchard and this embrace, this plunge into the succulent flesh, which is not flesh as we know it, which is, if you like, the living metaphor --
"fica" --
explains Arcimboldo, displaying the orifice -- this intercourse with the very flesh of summer will fructify his cold kingdom, the snowy country outside the window, where the creaking raven endlessly laments the inclement weather.

           
"Reason becomes the enemy which withholds from us so many possibilities of pleasure," said Freud.

           
One day, when the fish within the river freeze, the day of the frigid lunar noon, the Archduke will come to Dr Dee, his crazy eyes resembling, the one, a blackberry, the other, a cherry, and say: transform me into a harvest festival!

           
So he did; but the weather got no better.

           
Peckish, Kelly absently demolished a fallen peach, so lost in thought he never noticed the purple bruise, and the little cat played croquet with the peach stone while Dr Dee, stirred by memories of his English children long ago and far away, stroked the girl's flaxen hair.

           
"Whither comest thou?" he asked her.

           
The question stirred her again into speech.

           
"A and B began the year with only £1,000 apiece," she announced, urgently.

           
The three men turned to look at her as if she were about to pronounce some piece of oracular wisdom. She tossed her blonde head. She went on.

           
"They borrowed nought; they stole nought. On the next New Year's Day they had £60,000 between them. How did they do it?"3

           
They could not think of a reply. They continued to stare at her, words turning to dust in their mouths.

           
"How did they do it?" she repeated, now almost with desperation, as if, if they only could stumble on the correct reply, she would be precipitated back, diminutive, stern, rational, within the crystal ball and thence be tossed back through the mirror to "time will be", or, even better, to the book from which she had sprung.

           
"Poor Tom's a-cold," offered the raven. After that, came silence.

NOTE:

The answers to Alice's conundrums:

           
1
 
One.

           
2
 
Ten.

           
3
 
They went that day to the Bank of England. A stood in front of it, while B went round and stood behind it.

           
Problems and answers from
A Tangled Tale,
Lewis Carroll, London, 1885.

           
Alice was invented by a logician and therefore she comes from the world of nonsense, that is, from the world of
non-sense --
the opposite of common sense; this world is constricted by logical deduction and is created by language, although language shivers into abstractions within it.

           
For a woman to be a virgin and a mother, you need a miracle; when a woman is 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 Magdalene, the 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.

           
Don't run away with the idea the South of France was an easy option compared to the deserts of Syria, or Egypt, or the wastes of Cappadocia, where other early saints, likewise driven by the imperious need for solitude, found arid, inhospitable crevices in which to contemplate the ineffable. There were clean, 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 swamp, the Camargue. It was not pleasant. The desert would have been more healthy.

           
But there the two stern mothers and Fatima -- don't forget Fatima -- set up a chapel, at the place we now call Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. There they stayed. But the other Mary, the Magdalene, the 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 Manichean. 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 Magdalene, the Venus in sackcloth. Georges de La Tour's picture does not show a woman in sackcloth, but her chemise is coarse and simple enough to be a penitential garment, or, at least, the kind of garment that shows you were not thinking of personal adornment 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 candle, to the way the wax candle 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 whoring in, then repented in, then set sail in? Did she walk all the way to the Sainte-Baume in this red skirt? It doesn't look travel-stained or worn or torn. It is a luxurious, even scandalous skirt. A scarlet dress for a scarlet woman.

           
The Virgin Mary wears blue. Her preference has sanctified the colour. We think of a "heavenly" blue. But Mary Magdalene wears red, the colour of passion. The two women are twin 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 doesn't contain 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 come.

           
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 Georges de La Tour's painting, the Magdalene's hair is well brushed. Sometimes the Magdalene's hair is as shaggy as a Rastafarian's. Sometimes her hair hangs down upon, is inextricably 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 comb, long, matted, unkempt, hanging down to her knees. She belts her own hair round her waist with the rope with which, each night, she lashes herself, making a rough tunic of it. On these occasions, the transformation from the young lovely, voluptuous Mary Magdalene, the happy non-virgin, the party girl, the woman taken in adultery -- on these occasions, the transformation is complete. She has turned into something wild and strange, into a female version of John the Baptist, a hairy hermit, as good as naked, transcending gender, sex obliterated, nakedness irrelevant.

           
Now she is one with such pole-sitters as Simeon Stylites, and other solitary cave-dwellers who communed with beasts, like St Jerome. She eats herbs, drinks water from the pool; she comes to resemble an even earlier incarnation of the "wild man of the woods" 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 an existential situation in which vice simply is not possible. She has arrived at the radiant, enlightened sinlessness of the animals. In her new, resplendent animality, she is now beyond choice. Now she has no option but virtue.

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

           
Nevertheless, you can see the point that some anonymous Man of the Enlightenment on the Grand Tour made two hundred years ago -- how Donatello's Mary Magdalene made him "disgusted with penitence".

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

           
But it can also become kitsch. Consider 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 penitent 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 mornings; the loaves lasted her out. Mary of Egypt is clean and fresh. Her face stays miraculously unlined. She is as untouched by time as her bread is untouched by appetite. She sits on a rock in the desert, combing out her long hair, like a lorelei whose water has turned to sand. We can imagine how she smiles. Perhaps she sings a little song.

           
Georges de La Tour's Mary Magdalene has not yet arrived at an ecstasy 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 candle flame,
this
world still has a claim upon her.

           
Unless we are actually watching her as her soul is drawn out into the candle flame.

           
We meet Mary Magdalene in the gospels, doing something extraordinary with her hair. After she massaged Jesus's feet with her pot of precious ointment, she wiped them clean with her hair, an image so astonishing and erotically precise it is surprising it is represented so rarely in art, especially that of the seventeenth century, when religious excess and eroticism went so often together. Magdalene, using her hair, that beautiful net 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 candle 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 reflecting her face, it duplicates the pure flame.

           
When I was in labour, I thought of a candle flame. I was in labour for nineteen 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 intense, then I began to concentrate my mind upon an imaginary candle flame.

           
Look at the candle 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 cone of blue, transparent air; that is the thing to look at, that is the thing to concentrate on. When the pains came thick and fast, I fixed all my attention on the blue absence at the heart of the flame, as though it were the secret of the flame and, if I concentrated enough upon it, it would become
my
secret, too.

           
Soon there was no time to think of anything else. By then, I was entirely subsumed by the blue space. Even when they snipped away at my body, down below, to finally let the baby out the easiest way, all my attention was concentrated on the core of the flame.

           
Once the candle flame had done its work, it snuffed itself out; they wrapped my baby in a shawl and gave him to me.

           
Mary Magdalene meditates upon the candle flame. She enters the blue core, the blue absence. She becomes something other than herself.

           
The silence in the picture, for it is the most silent of pictures, emanates not from the darkness behind the candle in the mirror but from these two candles, the real candle and the mirror candle. Between them, the two candles disseminate light and silence. They have tranced the woman into enlightenment. She can't speak, won't speak. In the desert, she will grunt, maybe, but she will put speech aside, after this, after she has meditated upon the candle flame and the mirror. She will put speech aside just as she has put aside her pearl necklace and will put away her red skirt. The new person, the saint, is being born out of this intercourse with the candle flame.

           
But something has already been born out of this intercourse with the candle 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.