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 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 "heavenly" 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 wil