GOLDEN HOUR #009: alive, again.

two images of resurrection.

Happy Easter, friends!

Thank you for being here and supporting The Murmuration.

I’ve stopped and started writing today’s Golden Hour several times already, largely because my baby won’t settle. She’s asleep now; let’s hope she stays that way …

Today’s Golden Hour offers two images of resurrection made over five hundred years apart.

IMAGE ONE: Christ Appears to Mary Magdalene as a Gardener, unknown artist, c. 1500

The National Library of Wales owns an exquisitely illustrated medieval manuscript called The Vaux Passional. Covered in red velvet and decorated with 34 flemish-style miniatures, the book consists of two French texts. La Passion de Nostre Seigneur (‘The Passion of Our Lord’) which was translated in 1398 for Isabelle of Bavaria—the then Queen of France—and La Mirror De La Mort (‘The Mirror of Death’). It is thought that the two texts may have been collated into a single volume for Henry VII.

The entire manuscript has been digitised, and one night I find myself scrolling through La Passion looking for one miniature in particular, a depiction of Mary Magdalene kneeling before Jesus the Gardener, shovel in hand. Compared to the other ornate miniatures in the manuscript, this one feels quite different. The use of green and sparing use of gold gives it a more grounded, provincial quality.

The image places them in an allotment, sectioned off with wicker fencing. Christ’s empty tomb is also visible, just behind the gardener. The cloaked man holds a hand up, almost as if he’s saying, hello: don’t you recognise me? Mary Magdalene points to nail marks on his feet. It is a peaceful, intimate image, but still one of surprise.

This painting depicts one of the most moving encounters of the New Testament, in which Mary goes to the tomb intending to embalm Jesus’s crucified body. There, she finds the tombstone rolled away, and angels standing by the entrance. Mary is devastated, believing that someone has removed his body, and she’s crying. The angels ask her ‘woman, why are you crying?’

It is a moment of utter pain and anguish. She turns to a man who she believes is the gardener, and says: ‘if you have taken his body away, please tell me so I can go and get him’.

‘Mary’, he says.

Realising that the person she thought was the gardener is in fact Jesus, Mary says ‘Rabboni!’, the Aramaic word for teacher.

IMAGE TWO: Deborah Levy in her Writing Shed, by Chameleoneye Films

These are two stills taken from a 2018 film by Ana Godinho de Matos, in which the author Deborah Levy talks about her book ‘An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell: A Poem for an Angel Stranded in North Ilford’. They show Deborah sitting in a garden shed, surrounded by her books.

The film was made a few years after Deborah’s life had metamorphosed following the divorce of her husband, aged fifty. She wrote an essay for the Guardian describing this period and the way that it was ‘faster, unstable and [more] unpredictable’ than she had imagined those years.