467. Hot Mama: Goddess, Mother, Virgin, Whore.

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An aside:  Those who follow this blog know what love I have for Goldman Sachs, the vampire squid of Wall Street, second only to my love for Monsanto, whose storied name, linked to diverse controversies, will now disappear, following its acquisition by Bayer in 2016.  But to get back to Goldman: I have just learned that it has been involved in a scandal with 1MDB, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund, whereby $2.7 billions in stolen funds were spent on luxury apartments, yachts, and diamonds.  I will say for Goldman that even in its most dubious and nefarious dealings, it aims high: not $2.7 million, but $2.7 billion.  And now, as usual, it is trying to avoid admitting fault, even though a former executive has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the authorities.  If Goldman is forced to admit guilt, it will be a shining first, for in all its dubious dealings in the past, it has never done so.  And this is the outfit that has provided so many executives to administrations both Republican and Democratic; scratch our  federal government, and you will almost always uncover a Goldman exec or two, usually in significant positions.  For example, Steven Mnuchin, Trump's Secretary of the Treasury, who is still with Trump, though other Goldman alumni have left him, following disagreements in policy.  Will the vampire squid at last be forced to admit guilt?  Stay tuned.  (For more on Goldman, see post #340 and scroll down; my apologies for the missing illustrations.)

And now at last:

                       Hot Mama

       Goddess, Mother, Virgin, Whore

The gods are still with us insists the Italian scholar Roberto Calasso, one of whose highly acclaimed books I am now reading in translation, and I’m inclined to agree.  For him, it’s especially the pagan gods of ancient Greece and Rome.  I can grasp this, in a certain way.  When we undergo a sudden rash infatuation, we’re at the mercy of Venus, or Aphrodite.  If we feel the urge to make war and kill, Mars, or Ares, has hold of us.  If a writer suddenly finds the needed words of a poem pouring into his head, Apollo and the Muses must be at work.  Without believing literally in the existence of the gods, we can see and feel them as real in sudden moods and urges not otherwise explained.  They are triggers in our psyche, murky motivators that sneak or wiggle or explode upon us.  They explain things otherwise inexplicable; they are a part of us, mysterious but essential.

Am I visited by this pantheon of urges?  Yes, like anyone, but the most basic and omnipresent of my gods is Hot Mama, of whom Venus or Aphrodite is only one of her many faces.  Hot Mama takes many forms, all related; you can’t have one without the others.  Where do I encounter her?  In sudden moods and urges?  Not really.  In my dreams?  Not that I’m aware of.  Where, then?  In my writing, especially, alas, poesy.  (My preference for this word instead of “poetry” indicates a deep suspicion, verging at times on hostility, regarding the whole enterprise — a hostility that I in no way feel toward prose.)  So let’s have a look at the many faces of Mama.

She is mother and goddess.

Here is Aphrodite or Venus, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, and Ceres or Demeter, the Greek goddess of harvest, fertilty, and agriculture.  Also Freia, the Norse goddess of love, fertility, and beauty, and doubtless many more.

Venus before the Mirror, Rubens, 1612-1615.
That's Cupid holding the mirror.

Venus/Aphrodite appears in Western art as naked, sensual, and seductive, often on the hefty side, as in Titian and Rubens, that being the ideal of the day.  But those hefty Venuses turn me off; their vast proportions could envelope you, smother you.  “Aha!” a captious critic may declare. “You’re gay, so you must hate women!”  Which on his part would be stupid, and ignorant as well.  Gay men get along fine with hetero women, once sex and romance are ruled out, for that makes room for friendship.  Romance lasts a year or two; friendship can last a lifetime. When Bob and I were together those many years, we had more women friends than men, and most of them were hetero.  As for Venus in art, if the hefty ones turn me off, I find Botticelli’s Venus, seen in his marvelous painting The Birth of Venus, vastly appealing; svelte and modest in her nakedness, she is less Mama than Virgin.  But for me, I repeat, vastly appealing.

The Birth of Venus, Botticelli, 1484-1485.

The mother goddess is a most necessary deity, given our need of fertility and harvests and grain.  But she can be a great mischiefmaker as well, as witnessed by the Trojan War.  When the goddess of discord hurled into a gathering of the gods an apple marked “For the fairest,” it was claimed by Heres, Athena, and Aphrodite (Juno, Minerva, and Venus), who asked Paris, the Trojan prince, to decide.  Heres offered power, Athena offered wisdom, and Aphrodite promised him Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world.  He went with Aphrodite, who helped him to abduct Helen, the wife of the Greek ruler Menelaus, thus provoking the ten-year Trojan War and the destruction of Troy.  Let’s hope that Helen made him happy … for a while.

She is fertility and growth.

 

For me, spring and summer are closely associated with gods.  Spring is a naked young god flaunting his erection and causing buds to open, flowers to bloom, and roots to suck juices from the earth; he is brazen, fearless, and provocative.  No particular traditional god, but any of them who matches this description.

Summer, on the other hand, is feminine: the mother and seductress, enticing, enveloping, smothering.  I sense her in hot, muggy August, when many plants usually labeled “weeds” — white sweet clover, coneflower, burdock, pilewort, ragweed, and mugwort — grow rank and thick in fields and tower over me.  Unless stopped by the cold weather of autumn, they seem about to take over the world, to embrace and suck and smother me.  Just as, when hiking, I have seen them creep over abandoned cars in remote parklands and fields and ravines, where they embrace and smother them, reclaiming them for a relentless, insidious, and triumphant nature.  This is Mama beyond nurturing and feeding and fertilizing; she can be cruel and lethal — an aspect that cultures other than our own have emphasized, as we’ll soon see.  

So do I hate the summer?  God no, I love it.  I love its berries and harvest them.  I love its weeds with their smooth or prickly stems and intoxicating fragrances, and the peppery or lemony or bitter taste of their leaves.  I have come back from late-summer outings sunburnt and tired, thorn-scratched, my skin itchy with rashes, my whole being drugged with the fullness, the luxuriance, the too-muchness of summer.  Summer entices, summer gluts, summer chokes.

She is violent, lethal, and horrifying.

      It is cultures other than our own who plumb the dark depths of Mama.  Those depths are seen in Coatlicue, the Aztec earth mother, with her necklace of severed human heads.  Her name means “Serpent Skirt,” and she is seen as having a skirt of writhing snakes. She is the mother of the sun, the moon, and the stars, as well as of gods and mortals.  As such, she is associated with the earth as both creator and destroyer, and the legends about her are full of violence and murder.

Coatlicue, National Museum of Anthropology
and History, Mexico City.
El Comandante

Akin to her is Kali, the dark goddess of India, who has been worshiped over time as the Divine Mother and the Mother of the Universe.  She is associated with sexuality and death, as well as with motherhood and mother love.  Variously visualized, she usually has many arms and a dark or blue skin, her eyes red with rage, her hair disheveled, with fangs sometimes protruding from her mouth.  She often wears a skirt of human arms, and like Coatlicue, a garland of human heads.  If Coatlicue comes off as a bugbear and boogeywoman of nightmares, Kali is not someone you would want to meet on a lonely road at night.  Yet her worshipers also see her as a benevolent mother who protects her children and devotees.

Kali, a 1770 print.   Here she has four arms,
and stands on her consort, Shiva, which
shows who's boss.

Somewhat differnt is Pele (pronounced PEH-leh), “the woman who devours the earth.”  The Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire, she dwells in the drizzle-shrouded crater of Mount Kilauea on the island of Hawaii, leaking smoke from fissures in the earth.  Then, when she so chooses, she erupts with earth-shattering violence.  Setting forests ablaze, she sends streams of lava down her slopes to make thousands of residents abandon their doomed houses and flee, until her lava pours into the ocean amid caustic fumes laced with fine specks of glass.  “Pele is coming down to play,” say the Hawaiians.  She is their grandmother, the creator of their island in all its stunning beauty, and must be indulged, appeased.  She can appear in human form, so if you see her hitchhiking, be sure to pick her up, and since she has a weakness for it, offer her some gin.  Like her descendants, she enjoys a little mischief, so if she destroys your home, shrug it off and build another.  (For more on Pele, see my post #380, “When Grandma Burns Your House Down," and scroll down past another mischievous female, my partner Bob's onetime significant other.)

The goddess of fire, Pele, meets the goddess of the sea,
Namakaokahai, as lava flows into the ocean.
Photo taken from a helicopter, July 31, 2018.
Anton

This fiery goddess does not trigger the horror inspired by Kali and Coatlicue.  In my opinion, every people gets the gods that they deserve.  The Jews of the Old Testament wanted a jealous and wrathy god, and they got one.  The Aztecs and the people of India wanted a fearsome mother goddess who bought both life and death, and who filled humans with horror.  But the Hawaiians are too gentle and too mischievous to worship such a deity; they got Pele instead: a loving but capricious grandma whom they can relate to.  They worship her, fear her, respect her; she is primordial, yet of their own time and all too immediate.   She cannot, must not be ignored.

She is lewd.

How could she not be, as the goddess of fertility and growth and too-muchness?  Fertility is not concerned with morality and restraint, only with procreation, with the endless and unlimited increase of life in all its forms.  “Increase and multiply,” God tells Noah and his sons (Genesis 9:7), and in this one matter my lady is true to the Bible.  She is the wantonness in all of us, uncurbed and unashamed: sexuality, overt or hidden, without any need of Freud and his analysis.  She is, in fact, inexplicable.  She does, she never thinks; consequences are not her thing.  A life-affirming, life-degrading slut.

She is virginal.

State one side of her, and its opposite pops up.  Yes, she is a virgin too, the Madonna of Christianity, giving birth to the Savior who will redeem humanity from the curse of the temptress and enticer Eve, who, as Adam’s mate, is yet another mother of us all.  The patriarchal early Christian church had no room for women, those temptresses and seducers, but the people did, and in time forced the cult of the Virgin on the Church.  If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em, and that’s what the fathers did.  Christ will judge us on the day of Judgment, sending some to heaven amd some to hell, but she will be there to plead for us and save all whom she can.  She is wise, accessible, compassionate; she understands.  How could a troubled and sinful humankind not worship her, praise her with litanies, light flickering tapers before her shrines, and build great Gothic cathedrals with exquisite stained-glass windows, and flying buttresses to lift their vaulted ceilings skyward.  Don’t try to puzzle out the Virgin Birth, a theological conundrum devised by the fathers of the church, those logic-chopping explicators and system multipliers.  Madonna needs no such guck.  She is the holiest of mothers, our glory, and our hope.

Madonna of the Book, Botticelli, 1480.
Like Rubens, Sandro preferred blondes.

So there you have it: my Hot Mama, who is goddess, mother, virgin, whore.  Can you blame me for being obsessed with a figure so many-faced and complex, so deliciously ambiguous?  She appears in my recently concocted poetry manuscript “Hot Mama and the Big Sneeze,”  a morality play on steroids.  Just as, in the old morality plays, heaven and hell fought for the soul of Everyman, so in this work Hot Mama, the First of the Red Hot Mamas, contends with the Big Sneeze, who may or may not be God, for control of the Hero, who has flat feet, wears glasses, and may or may not be Siegfried, Mickey Mouse, or us.  But don’t worry, you won’t have to unravel these ambiguities, since no small press will be so foolish as to publish so reverently irreverent a mishmash of alleged poesy, especially when there is plenty in it to offend believers.  

      So now I've told you about my Red Hot Mama.  What gods or goddesses do you have, and how do they affect your life?  And don't say you don't have any, because we all do.  So tell me, who do you worship?  I dare you.  But of course you won't: too busy and maybe too scared.  It would say a lot about you, probably too much.

Coming soon:  Maybe how New Yorkers communicate in and out of lockdown.  Stoops, fire escapes, the street.

©  2020  Clifford Browder