2/14/96-2/15/96
Once more he stept into the street,
And to his lips again
Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;
And ere he blew three notes (such sweet
soft notes as yet musician's cunning
Never gave the enraptured air)
There was a rustling that seemed like a bustling
Of Merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling;
Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,
Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,
And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is
scattering,
Out came the children running.
All the little boys and girls,
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls,
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.
-Robert Browning
What bittersweet words. What joy those children must have felt. A joy so similar to the screams of a million youths as Madonna makes her grand appearance onstage. What irony! The greatest expression of a poetic sort of justice.
Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Madonna's actions are in revenge for being unpaid for her services. She has cleansed the modern world of its rats. The rats of sexual repression, lost identity, and deep strife. But unlike the Pied Piper of Hamelin, she was owed far more than a petty thousand guilders, and hence her revenge has been all the more severe.
What Madonna was owed but did not recieve was far more than anything that money could buy or will ever be able to. Madonna suffered the irrecoverable loss of at least one parent, and in many ways the loss of two. She is forever repaying the world for taking away her mother, and she is doing this by taking the world's children away from their own mothers.
She is also intent upon exacting revenge on the world's fathers, although since this was not entirely taken from her, she does it in a much less severe way. When her mother died, her father was also forever wounded, and this had the inevitable effect of forever wounding her. Indeed, the feelings she inserts between fathers and sons and daughters are those of distrust and a precarious suspicion, while her effect on mothers has been to alienate their children from them completely.
Her entire life has been spent in an attempt to cure the world of everything which ailed her as a child. To a large degree, she has been incredibly successful at this. Since, as humans, we naturally try to make sense out of everything even if it makes no sense, Madonna has inevitably fallen into this trap. She has placed the blame of her woes on sexual repression and a world which is closed to the feelings of a little girl. She has done everything in her power to make sure the kind of tragedy which has affected her will never again happen to anyone else.
Since she was never allowed to grieve when her mother died and she needed so much to do this, her adult life has been and always will be overshadowed with this grief. She never got a chance to say goodbye to the mother she loved so much, and for this she has made sure that the world will forever grieve the loss of its mothers.
"Can't kiss her goodbye, but I promise to try" -Madonna