Black Madonna

Last week my mom and I traveled to some of France’s hot spots – those places where people have been drawn for centuries. Power centers strong enough that just the mention of them floods the mind with romantic notions, visions of the moon seen through a knot of gnarled vines and grand palaces upholstered with deep plums and burgundies.

Paris is a gorgeous tangle of tributes to itself. Each one is an attempt to prove its particular love to the city. Navigating through the gem-encrusted sediment of all those monuments, architectural acrobatics and displays of power, as well as the buzz of the live hive that continues to build it higher, one wonders what’s beneath it all? What’s the source?

When you make your way towards one of the world’s great treasures, it’s hard to feel anything but the pace of the multi-lane tourist highway that’s been constructed to herd as many bodies to and from the site as possible. The roads you walk have been trampled flat by a constant stampede of people hungry for awe. When your turn comes, you buy a ticket, you approach said wonder and you have a small handful of seconds to be or to not be wowed before you are pushed out of the way by an entitled German spinster. But this is da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine! And I didn’t get a chance to see the brush strokes!

On the fast-track tour of world wonders, I find myself peering behind strips of loose wallpaper and squinting between fence rails to see how a night light animates a messy backyard. When you find the thing that makes your heart race, instead of scheduling a time slot to have that particular sensation, you don’t have to share the energy with anyone. You get to revel in the thrill of the hunt. There is an intimate trade of your lavish affections for its energizing spark.

The big attractions have to work so hard to please each of the thousands of pilgrims in turn, to still have something to give the last stragglers that run breathless though the Louvre at closing time. The Mona Lisa has to have such steely reserve to keep her smile steady and hold onto her secret even when, in the mid-afternoon’s cacophonous crowds and claustrophobic jostling, it would be such a relief to toss it into the sea of greedy camera lenses and be done with it. But she holds it close so that she can present it again the next morning, all shiny, dark and whole.

We took a train to the south through the French countryside and along the ragged, sun-soaked coast. I don’t feel like I got a particularly pure draught of the French landscape, since, when we finally offered ourselves prostrate to the sun, we were on a manicured beach where our moves had been choreographed to minimize exertion long ago. Plush beach chairs and shade-chasing umbrellas. Beautiful boys with trays of sweet liquors that asked you if there was anything else they could do for you. But I could sense the nature of the place lapping at the shores of all the landscaping and human niceties. It was there in the rocky shallows where the water rose from ankle-height to wrap itself around your thighs and take you down in seconds. You could taste it in the thick, savory brine of the sea.

I happened to be reading a novel where the characters were conducting thorough, in-depth studies of the gods, demigods and magic properties of Provence. This was very fortunate for me, seeing as though it made for much less digging myself. Because, let’s face it, the land is really rocky. And I was on vacation.

After a particularly rigorous period of field research and before they attempted an involved summoning spell of a local goddess, my characters took a vacation to France’s south coast. This meant that I had the extreme pleasure of floating in and out of their beach trip and my own. The quality of light in each and the unforgiving, pebbled beaches were indivisible. Topless French woman would walk onto one shore and lay down in another. I alternated from letting the waves hypnotize me and reading sentences like “(She) watched the sea foam draw webs and Hebrew letters on the surface of the water and then erase them again.” I fell back more heavily into my own beach chair when my rumbling stomach suggested that the local rose we’d been gulping down all afternoon hadn’t quite made it to my bloodstream, at which point I would venture out into the crowded, unedited streets for a glass of my own.

“Like wine, Provencal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. It concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief.” (Lev Grossman, The Magician King, Pg 214)

Apparently there was also a strong thread of “mother-magic” in the region. Early stuff, possibly stemming from Cybele, Diana and Isis. There was a local goddess who reigned over the spheres of earth magic, sex and childbirth. Her face was always half in shadow. She was subsumed by the Christian Mary much later but not entirely diffused. The deeper the researchers looked into the old stories of the region, the landscape and its artwork, the more they saw her darker visage glow through Mary’s mask.

“(The) goddess dealt in gapes and olives, the dark, intense fruit of hard, gnarled trees and vines. And she had daughters too: the dryads, ferocious defenders of the forests. The goddess was warm, even humorous, and loving, but she had a second aspect, terrible in its bleakness: a mourning aspect that she assumed in winter, when she descended to the underworld, away from the light… A Black Madonna: the blackness of death, but also the blackness of good soil, dark with decay, which gives rise to life.” (Grossman, 325)