springtime is venus's season. like the undulating locks of the greek goddess of boticelli in the uffizi museum here, in a corner tucked away in boboli gardens i came upon saint & beloved disciple of jesus, mary magdelene, whose hair is not really a covering, but a framing of a raw & also pure nakedness, that, like the vine clinging to the sculpture that is growing to vividly extend her hair into the rest of the aliveness around her, is wild. her hair washes over her body in the abundant wooly fur-like waves of wandering mountain goats or buffalo, and is an outward sign of an inward or spiritual wildness and nakedness. she means to become naked and pure in spirit before she withdraws from the world into a cave to pray and meditate. by wearing only her hair, she has not merely removed the literal clothing of the world, but the wordly-woven lies that cover the truth and prevent her from fully becoming one with her god, love.
mary represents to me this wildly-nakedly-clothed-with-hair body that in popular contemporary trends is increasingly overly-domesticated, tamed, trimmed and plucked into a pre-pubescence that belies the full-grown female's visible signs of fertile maturity. it becomes instead the worldly-defined body where aggressive levels of exposure-through-absence is focused on the part of the wild body where in contrast nature furnishes a rich framing of the sacred gateway of life and birth, providing a cushion for warmth, comfort, and intimacy. this non-sexually-mature style of exposure has infiltrated popular culture directly from its origins in fetishized imagery which has exploded in proliferation & accessibility through the birth of online media. nakedness becomes nudity when body is seen as merely flesh, an object to be consumed. exposure is a type of vulgarizing, so actually a covering, of the naked body, that which the ancient greeks understood as the reality of beauty+truth+love they expressed in their all-in-one body/soul goddess, venus, and the christians re-naissanced by sculpting in greek styles while referring to their own beliefs that the human body is made in the image of the divine.
poet-extraordinaire walt whitman names the wild green grass growing in blankets on the ground the "handkerchief of the lord", and i see in the description of the earth's own flowing locks the samson-like power of wild-hairy-mary to reveal the naked truth of the body as not merely flesh, but the temple of the spirit in its wild, lush beauty.
