Contamination as Epiphany

An Impure Reading of Thunder - Perfect Mind

(Microbial art by Dasha Plesen)

Excerpt from writing I did as I researched my novel The Madonna Secret:

“I am the first and the last. I am the honored and scorned. I am the whore and holy. I am the wife and the virgin…I am shameless and ashamed. Hear what I say. I am the disgraced and the grand being,” proclaims the ambiguous speaker of the 4th century Nag Hammadi Coptic text, immediately triggering vertigo in the reader. Where are we to locate ourselves? The speaking divinity’s only definitive trait is her femininity, but even that is unstable, oscillating between barrenness and motherhood, and even between gender roles: “I am the bride and the groom…” Heredity as associated with linear time is disrupted: “My husband produced me. I am the mother of my father and sister of my husband, and he is my offspring.”

What is the text teaching us? It certainly reads as instructive, advising, “In no place, in no time, be unknowing of me. Be alert. Don’t be ignorant of me.” But ignorance is highlighted as we struggle to locate the divinity amidst such dissonant phrases as “I am strength” and “I am shame”.