Maiden, Madonna, Crone- (or, How Madonna Taught Me to be a Fearless Writer)

Maiden, Madonna, Crone- (or, How Madonna Taught Me to be a Fearless Writer)

It’s hard to be a writer for many different reasons, but the fact that your parents might read what you write is no small censorship. The truth is, you often feel naked and exposed or embarrassed by a harsh opinion, a contentious phrasing, or good old- fashioned sex. But if you stopped writing those things just because someone might read it, well, that would defeat the whole purpose, now, wouldn’t it?

Well, I’ve always learned from the best. What if Madonna had run back to Michigan and given up the first time she met with opposition? What if she threw in the towel the moment she made a misstep? What if she had thought, gee, I can’t do that, my dad wouldn’t approve? Thankfully Madonna paved the way for us to be all we can be, and those who find her somewhat hard or brazen might do well to recall the tremendous drain of being the most famous woman in the world. It’s bad enough when they love, love, love you…but what about when they hate you?

Scandal is one thing, but that’s just a bit of blushing. It’s more difficult to stand naked in public with certain opinions, and find yourself unpopular. Contending with venom, or plain old hurt feelings, is hard for me to do- it is a fault of the sensitive bipolar to take everything very personally. It’s not easy to be super-sensitive and have a big mouth at the same time.

Of course, I had never anticipated any of this stuff, because up until I began to have a readership, however humble it still is, my idea of ‘fearlessness’ was getting my ears pierced fifteen times or wearing a Marshall Mathers t-shirt.  The writing part is easy- being read is far more difficult. And so I practice remaining open to

mixed-media by Lorette C. Luzajic

change: only a fool never changes her mind. I practice knowing you can’t please everyone all of the time. I practice standing firm for the convictions that aren’t negotiable. I practice drawing on a renewable resource of strength instead of buckling, because I’m going to be doing this for a very long time. It doesn’t matter if my bravado is just an act, and behind it lurks a very shy woman. I’m going to need it, so I best practice using it.

No fear, no fear, no fear. Recall that Madonna started insisting on women’s right, no, her obligation, to pursue full spirituality, sexual liberty, and creative recognition at a time when we were still supposed to submit to a man’s headship and vote for whatever he did. (Oh… we’re still there….) Today it’s commonplace to see naked women in the entertainment business, and so we forget. If Madonna had gone sobbing to her ladies knitting circle the first time they called her a slut, where would we be? Possibly nowhere. If she had faded into obscurity security the second they called her a faggot lover, where would civil rights be today? We can’t know.

Way back when, Madonna was a mouthy teenager in a billion rubber bracelets and not much else. Today she is blowing up that last frontier of stereotype. AGE. We razz her for trying to disprove she’s a washed up starlet, an aging rock star, for fighting her wrinkles with expensive creams promising the fountain of youth. We accuse her of trying too hard, being so over, of being past her prime, of being totally sexless, of being old enough to be a grandmother, bla bla bla.

Excuse me?

For those of you too dense to see the reign of Madonna as the mythic incarnation of the goddess, let me spell it out for you. Having been named Madonna by her mother, not by herself, she was born to the role. The role begins with maiden- you know, like a virgin. It continues to motherhood- you know, suddenly she started penning all those lullaby songs. Now it’s on to crone.

Maiden Mother Crone, the original trinity. It’s a tremendous duty to be the goddess in the public eye. Some still yammer such petty and ruthless idiocies like, “I don’t know why she’s so famous, when she has no talent.” Her talents clearly range from pop ditties to staying power to extreme yoga, to marketing, to choreography, to video making, to dancing…so what if she wasn’t the best actress? She tried. And so we, her minions, can be empowered to try new things, even if we fail. To explore the outer reaches of our powers, to discover our strengths and our weaknesses.

Now as Her Madgesty sails through fertility into menopause and older age, she shows us that we can continue to be productive, funny, creative, sensational, experimental, and fully sexual beings. She shows us that we may endure humiliations like divorce and disappointment, but not to just lay down and wait for death. Live, live, live.

It’s too bad that Guy was such a fuddy duddy. Their relationship is not my business, but I always wondered what she saw in him in the first place. He seems nice enough, but far too average. Of course, in the mother stage you long for stability, and you fancy that it might be somewhere outside yourself. A nice guy seemed like a safe bet after so many torrential bad boys and whirlwinds. Madonna’s husband, whoever it would be, should surely have been intelligent enough to know he would always be Mrs. Madonna, and that he’d better take that like a man. Instead, we get a pub scruff mumbling about how her body is like a piece of gristle, and she’s not all cuddly and not a stay at home mom.

Er, no. To be a woman of this kind of power, you unfortunately do need to work out five hours a day. I’m grateful that to do my job, I merely have to tend to my carpal tunnel issues. To work the stage like Madonna does, you need the training of a professional athlete with the practice of an acrobat. I’d love to see her a bit softer, too, and we might in her last years. But remember what she said: “This is who I am, like it or not, you can love me or leave me, but I’m never gonna stop.” Not even old age is going to keep her from raising the roof every time, from being the centre of the biggest show on earth. She will never just stand there and sing- remember? she can’t sing anyway. She takes her limits to the limit every time, using her body in every conceivable way.

So what do you do when you are a fifty year old Madonna and your bland, smarmy husband dumps you? Well, you head to Brazil in the biggest hussy wig you can find, and take up a torrid affair with a boy named Jesus, of course. Perfect.  Brazilian porn actor and model Jesus Luz has the kind of muscle definition any cougar worth her salt dreams about. Rippling, tan, with intense eyes, he was the perfect accessory for her Old is Sexy campaign. Hear that girls? We get better with age, and won’t have to worry about making babies, amen! I bet Madonna is not as pretentious as some conclude- there is a great deal of camp in the things she does, a deep vein of humour. Indeed, she said so herself: “You only have to have half a brain in your head to see that I’m quite often making fun of myself.”

What’s not funny is that to live out loud for a female still means cruel whispering, and worse, death threats from men who are completely threatened by the power of the goddess. The crone is the most frightening of goddesses, because she cannot be bound by virginal naivety or biology/pregnancy. She outlives her consorts. You can’t lock her up or knock her up. She is too old to worry what people think, so social sanctions mean diddlysquat.

“I will have the honour of to be the first one to cut the head off Madonna,” said the Palestinian leader. While certainly Madonna’s nouvelle-ancienne Jewish mysticism must miff a country scorned by Israel, all evidence guarantees that if Madonna embraced Islam, the tables would be turned. Come on, now, are the ancient wars in the Middle East, raging since Bible days, entirely the fault of this one woman? That said, he is inadvertently acknowledging that she has many heads, like the timeless Hecate, if he should be the “first” to cut it off. Hecate: maiden, mother, and crone.

Now the only death threats I’ve received have been from that fount of compassion, the life-loving vegans, for some food writing where I had the audacity to suggest that the human heritage diet is omnivorous. That was unnerving enough, but it wasn’t an influential leader of a furious country threatening me, nor was it the public at large. It would be terrifying to face the public fury after such grand scale trespasses. Recall that there is no greater sin than blasphemy, a convenient way for the church or government to assert that their interpretation of mystic events is the only way.

The very idea that there’s only one faith, or only one way of interpreting The Book, sprung up because the patriarchs of Mesopotamia and the surrounding regions wanted to stop the goddess worship of the time. Think about it: Iraq, today’s battleground, hides beneath its blood soaked soil all the secrets of Sumer, the first civilization, where the goddess reigned supreme in temples miles long. Purging pantheism was never entirely successful, but in the old days, it meant the only god left was a thundering war God who avenged and smote every city and left no one alive except the virgins, whom his people could make use of as they willed. Whenever new (old) philosophies began to surface, the monotheists burned/looted/stole/destroyed the literature, but some survived because they were so busy warring over the finer points of their own faith, killing one another over an interpretation of the same damn god.

No, I’m not implying that the days of primitive cults and goddess worship were not bloody. That’s a utopian dream. We’ve always used mythic names and ritual stories to explain things we don’t understand, and so her many names were also associated with storms as well as with fertility and harvest. War would rage regardless, with or without religions, but the danger of a ‘god said so’ kind of religion is that people are willing to kill and die for some apparent reward in the afterlife, without instead sorting out the issues here and now, whatever they might be. No era has ever been perfect, but with what we have evolved to become, with the information and affirmation we have, it is feasible to have an egalitarian society at long last without one gender or one ethnic group or one religion being threatened.

It was Madonna’s fate to carry out the terrifying and monumental task of encouraging society to evolve until the point where women would feel their power. While stuffy governments were still deciding whether it had been wise to let black people sit at the front of the bus, and church elders were squabbling over whether unbaptized babies go to heaven, Madonna was blasting the airwaves with empowerment and unity for all. She was unafraid to touch a black man, an AIDS patient, or herself. She put racist, sexist, homophobic garbage in your face, and then threw it in the dumpster where it belongs.

Dismantling the cumbersome terror of sex was no small task. Women have been the gateway of the devil for so long, disposable garbage, good for nothing but ensnaring godly men, that it’s high time the world had a mama who taught us how to use it or lose it, all the while engaging the rest of our brains and imaginations, too.

Listen:

Woman is man’s destruction, Tertullian said. “Woman is a temple built over a sewer, the gateway to the devil. Woman, you are the devil’s doorway. You led astray one whom the devil would not dare attack directly. It was your fault that the Son of God had to die; you should always go in mourning and rags.” Thanks a lot, Tertullian. Or the ‘great’ Augustine: “Only man is in the image of God.” So much for protestant “reform”- John Knox wrote, “Woman was made for only one reason, to serve and obey man.” His follower, John Wesley: “Wife: Be content to be insignificant. What loss would it be to God or man had you never been born.”

It’s 2009. Now that we know that famines and plagues and the crucifixion of Christ did not happen because women were screwing Satan, we can carry on with our evolution.

And so, Madonna, the angel of apostasy rose forth, carrying the name of the only surviving goddess in the monotheist tradition, disguised as a bratty dance student. Who knew she would be known the world over as the whore of Babylon, even as the hatred toward the fountain of life was dissipating, slowly but surely. Oh, it’s still out there- we are, after all, only in the first century of equal rights for a paltry few countries of the whole world, for the first time in about five millennia. And though Christian Dominionists want to restore Old Testament law and enforce the death penalty for apostates, unchaste women, adulteresses, and homosexuals, perhaps Madonna has taught us well and we won’t let them have us back. Freedom of religion, freedom of sex, freedom of race- these are basic human rights, and Madonna’s been mixing and matching ‘em for quite some time, now. And we’ve been front row centre for her private spiritual journey, too, from spoiled megalomaniac to mistress of Malawi. Madonna insists you can be old, sexy, fit, rich, and still follow the true words of Christ: feed the poor.

Some have said Madonna has a hardened heart, but if she were as vulnerable as I am, she would have offed herself a long time ago, against that constant barrage of fury and controversy, and the exhausting drainage of giving everything you’ve got and us all wanting more. To carry out her fate, she’s had to have ruthless moments, and she’s also human, a particularly ruthless species if I recall correctly. In fact, she’s strong enough to carry out the role, and has asked generations of fans and foes alike to question everything, to vote, to ‘don’t go for second best,’ to

Pretty AND smart!

take control of our bodies and sexuality, to flaunt what we’ve got, to explore spirituality, to fix our mistakes, to accept our bodies, to push them, to refuse limitations, to speak against racism, to refuse sexism, to refuse homophobia, to use our wits and our brains, to grow and learn, to read, to love without fear.

Maybe her ex-husband has personal and realistic reasons to see her as hardened ‘gristle,’ as a tin woman with a tin heart. But I see that as only one guise in the thousands of facets of Madonna/Ishtar/Hecate/Luna/Aphrodite/Venus/Medusa/Artemis/Ashera/Shakti/Freyja/
Sophia/Inanna/Kali/Isis (her names unto infinity).

She may not be the cuddliest grandmother ever, but not a piece of “gristle.” She’s a lean, mean dancing machine. I see bravado, courage, audacity, power, discipline, fury, determination, creativity, and persistence. Madonna’s mission isn’t over- and it’s hardly just her own career at stake, in my mind. She has come to fulfill something much larger, a terrifying and exulting fate. Perhaps I give one woman too much credit? Doubtlessly, there are many forces of freedom at work, in the law, in the home, in big and small ways. Yes, yes, yes. But Madonna reaches the masses in ways of considerable power, and her inspiration is huge. Who would I be if I had not hidden the True Blue cassette under my pillow, sneaking it along when I went babysitting? We were fundamentalist Baptists, and all I had to look forward to in life was listening to a man bark orders while I changed diapers. The Mother Goddess wouldn’t be allowed into my home or heart, even if I were to become a mother- which is, after all, the most sacred art, one that somehow got twisted into property and service to the man.

Instead, Madonna told me a secret- I could be anything I wanted to be. If I had courage, I could live the wild heart that was inside me, and become an artist and a writer with a progressive spirituality of reason. I could answer my calling instead of suffering through the cookie cutter life that society had planned for me. And I’d have to be brave enough one day to make mistakes in public, to tell the truth as I knew it, to speak against injustice, and not to be afraid to be naked, in more ways than one. My fate is to write, and I’m committed to that, to writing as if my parents aren’t reading it, even if they are.

It’s the height of tongue-in-cheek that Granny Madonna is now cavorting with a 21-year-old man named Jesus, in all his Adonis beauty and power. Is Madonna making too much of sex again? I don’t think so. I don’t think she’s trying too hard to be young again. That’s bullshit. She’s breaking down that last frontier, that old women are used up, washed up, frail, powerless, sexless beings just because their baby bearing days are over. It was one thing for her beauty and power to change the world while she was still like a virgin, and then like a harlot. Yes, she is showing the world that she’s not desperate, and nor is any other old lady. Sex and beauty are powerful at every stage of life, and a wrinkle or two can’t change that.

My critics will say it’s easy for Madonna to be sexy when she can afford surgery, makeovers, and clothing that we can only dream about. But I think she has worn so many various disguises (‘reinventions’) of mythology, from waif to whore to cougar to soccer mom for the very simple reason of revelation, revealing that artifice and masks may simply be ways to show us the soul. In theory, I could blame every Playmate model for appearing without a stretch mark or surgically fixing their sagging breasts. But I don’t. Instead I see the simple power of taking off my clothes, and see the possibility that stretch marks and lard and all, it might leave a man speechless instead of sending him running.

Indeed, it has.

We, too, are free to experiment with all of the guises and masks- and I for one love to play dress up, and dress down, and yes, I do have to put cover-up on my varicose veins. But I’m not going to hide in a potato sack because I’m overweight. Nor am I going to marry a Baptist boy because I should. I’ve been over both those things for a long, long time, thanks to Her Madgesty. Maiden, mother, crone- I embrace all three. It’s not over ‘til it’s over. Life begins at fifty.

Do not regret growing older.  It is a privilege denied to many.
-author unknown

Not bad for an old bag!

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

What the Conjure Man Can Tell Us

I finally went to see David Copperfield. This is how I want every weekend to be: I head into a comfortable arena and watch the impossible take place before my very eyes. It’s been a while since my mind was last blown by anything. What a trip.

No, he’s not on my “list of five” . But he does have a ribald humour that occasionally veers into genius and sometimes veers into the doghouse. This aside, Copperfield is witty, fun to be with, and well… evidently smarter than everyone else in the world.

Obviously, 13 people didn’t disintegrate into cosmic filigree, but where did they go? If I can’t see what’s happening before me with any relation to reason or science, how do I believe wholeheartedly my perceptions of reality each and every day? Certainly my forays into various altered or enhanced realities (that ‘we are astronauts’ thing I’m always babbling about) have convinced me that nothing is ordinary, that the pulse of God is wild and earth-shattering, that air is solid matter and the mind is infinitely deeper that we know. I believe that the things we don’t understand outnumber in the gazillions the things we do. Technology has not brought us to the end of our exploration, or even the climax of our knowledge. It’s more like we have finally cracked the window open. The impossible has become commonplace- not long ago it would have been considered voodoo that a tiny box held up to our ear meant we could talk to friends all over the globe. Our minds are set to sky dive through knowledge and explore realities glimpsed and not yet seen.

We haven’t reached our apex of creativity, not by a long shot. Art, invention, medicine, religion, science, and mathematics are mere tools to understanding what we don’t even know yet is out there. I hope our planet can sustain this illuminated path of our evolution and doesn’t conk out from the greed and exploitation in the darker part of our hearts. If it can’t, I hope we learn from our gluttony and warfare and resume a forward direction in the next world.

David Copperfield is the man who can fly, the man who can send a woman to Australia with a wave of his hand, the man who made the Statue of Liberty disappear before thousands of onlookers. Pulling ducks out of a bucket is astounding enough: though this old staple of sleight of hand has long been explained, it’s still an awe-inspiring warm up for the more fantastical illusions that shattered what I know about perception. Copperfield is obviously a man who can see more possibilities than your average Joe. The fact that his illusions defy the laws of physics merely means we aren’t as far into a full understanding of these laws as we think. Clearly, the most basic things we know to be true are false, and this man has glimpsed a deeper understanding.

Copperfield asserts that the answers are obvious- that he is an illusionist, and we are not witnessing what we think we are. Great thinkers in science and art are unable to fully explain his tricks, and yet they are tricks. Theories abound- a popular explanation for the disappearing Statue of Liberty is that the audience was on a rotating stage that moved imperceptibly to face another direction. Maybe- but at least one person would have noticed while stretching or something that the statue was looming behind him! The psychology department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell put a bit more thought into their explanation and drew up some fancy charts and graphs to depict ocular perceptions. “Psychophysicists refer to light intensity as a physical variable and brightness as a psychological variable,” Dr. David T. Landrigan wrote online. His assured understanding of the way light falls on our retinas is very likely closer to the truth about the illusion than anything else, but for your average bright-not-genius thinker like myself, statements like “patterns of voltage variations in the process called “transduction”” can only mean what I already know- that my eye is not seeing what I think it is seeing. In the case of Copperfield’s arsenal of mind games, even when someone figures out how it works, it still works.

Consider the magic trick sets we all gave our niece or nephew once. The instructions were easy enough for anyone to follow, yet most kids lost interest in perfecting the basic illusions after awhile. Even simpler, long-explained card and coin tricks took precision and practice to perform convincingly. Sleight of hand is not a skill that just anyone can master, even if their scientific prowess can determine how it would work. The why of it all doesn’t guarantee an ability to orchestrate the components or the patience to time them precisely. Copperfield says many of his tricks take two years of practice to develop, some take seven years, and all require committed repeating and tremendous imagination.

The science of conjure can teach us something we have forgotten: make-believe. Recall how nothing was impossible when we were toddlers, though the simplest things still required our learning and memorization. What is an apple? Why is red not yellow? There is still stuff to learn along these lines. Christ said in Mark 10:14-15, “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.” Perhaps he was referring simply to this whole concept I was seeing on Saturday- the knowledge that we haven’t figured out how everything works just yet. To enter into truth, whether we are physicists or painters, we have to suspend disbelief and not sit on our laurels. Of course there’s an explanation, but waiting for one that fits our understanding means missing out on just about everything in life. At the same time, we should show curiousity and imagination, for within the realm of make-believe, as children know, is the reflection of all truth.

Copperfield is a man of few predecessors. How many Houdinis or David Blaines are out there, compared to the other arts? The conjure man has been a rare entity, but whether that figure is a voodoo practitioner or the modern Copperfield, the lesson is that science IS deep magic. Scientists pit themselves against alien landings, angels, and the mass spiritual beliefs of the times, but the truth is that science is the explorer of these things. Science may say it opposes God, but it is actually actively trying to figure God out. Voodoo might be a good way into the understanding of this concept -how often does the mojo lady say in the movies that you have to believe for the spell to work? The superstitious arts stated clearly before science began debunking their world of possibilities that the illusion is in the perception and the power is in the mind. It’s not “magic”- or is it? Magic IS the manipulation of what we believe. It IS the power of our minds, which is largely untapped. Science is knocking at the door of mystery, which resounds loudly against all of our learning so far. Religion and superstition will abound eternally among humans, as long as we can remain humble enough to know we don’t know. Even scientists and psychologists must humbly admit that prayer and religion have untold powers- one of those powers is happiness. Cultures that value religion and imagination- the unknown- are happier and more fulfilled than cultures that focus solely on the few things we already know for sure. (I’m not going to get into all of the negative aspects of religion or argue whose is ‘right’- suffice it to say that humans of all faith persuasions have showed themselves corrupt at various junctures, and all human societies struggle with greed and power and the lust to kill. These weaknesses are not specific to a particular belief system, and atheistic cultures are arguably as corrupt as any other.)

Don’t get the impression that my unavoidable lapses into the science of magical thinking mean Copperfield’s show is anything like Sunday school. I’m a person who must embrace mystery and imagination because God gives life meaning and keeps my humble astonishment alive day-to-day. But there are no dry Old Testament lessons here- at least not on the surface. You won’t witness plagues of locusts or manna falling from the heavens. But unless you can explain exactly how a giant green car appeared on stage out of thin air, Mr. Copperfield is way ahead of you. One particularly astonishing feat was his “lottery number prediction”- the results were quadruple-locked in a caged box that was visible to us the whole time. Random audience members stood up and picked six random numbers between one and 50. When the box was opened, the written prediction indeed showed in clear black marker the very numbers selected! On top of that, two license plates that belonged to Copperfield’s grandfather showed the same six numbers!

From reading online, I discovered that many had seen this lottery trick. I was initially disappointed, assuming that the random number callers were planted. But then I learned that the prediction held different numbers each time, accurately “predicting” completely different variables every time. A related trick was actually predicting the winning numbers in a lottery, opening the box after the numbers were announced on the news.

Skeptics would balk that the audience members were not actually volunteers, but plants. Plants are a trick for amateur illusionists. Of course there is an explanation, otherwise he’d be winning the lottery on a daily basis and no one else would have a chance. The casino he performed in would go out of business. Yes, there is an explanation, but not one as easy as that.

Beyond Copperfield’s magnetic persona and monstrous intelligence, beyond his bag of tricks, there are “real world” reasons to admire him. He says his most important accomplishment is his Project Magic, a program adopted by over 1000 hospitals around the world. Here’s a simple and achievable trick: give kids an imaginative pursuit to help raise their self-esteem and sense of wonder when they are in chronic pain or are burdened with disabilities. By teaching tricks to sick kids, Copperfield helps them regain dexterity. He says that giving them an ability that able-bodied people don’t have is valuable to their sense of worth, which aids recovery.

Copperfield is also instrumental in preserving relics of a unique and rare heritage of illusion arts. His International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts in Nevada houses more than 80 000 artifacts, including a vast library of books, objects of illusion, posters and prints, items owned by Houdini and other magicians, and more. Sifting through these objects of fascination might provide an unexpected insight into science: recall how many inventors like Nikola Tesla were viewed in their day as “mad scientists” as they brought impossible things like electric light into the light of day. We don’t even think about it when we turn on the lights, but once upon a time this was a miracle.

The best part of witnessing these fantastic feats of the imagination is the effect the event has already had on my future. Often, we forget to be inspired. Life can take on a familiar but monotonous routine of work, cooking, and Law and Order reruns. Bearing witness to tricks of this scale has already reminded me of the magic within mundane tasks, like spicing my food- after all, once even paprika was so exotic that adventurers and conquestors had to cross the ocean for it. What a thrill again to conjure a few powdery herbs in a dish and presto- pesto magic! It’s so exciting to know that these new ways of thinking will inspire my paintings, my sense of “yes, I can”, my sense of wonder. How amazing to be assured that middle age doesn’t mean my life is half over- but that I still have half of it to live!

Even a few more weeks in this awesome wilderness is a gift. What a show it is!

Lorette C. Luzajic
www.thegirlcanwrite.net