I Am the Venus of Laussel

by Ken Sanes

1.
My name is the Venus of Laussel.
At least that’s the name people use
when they talk or write about me in English.
I am the figure of a woman
that was engraved on a limestone block
more than a thousand generations ago,
and I’d like to tell you about myself.
To begin with, as you can see, I am nude,
with large breasts and a large belly and hips.
As you can also see, each of my hands
seems to have a story to tell.
One hand is touching my belly,
which suggests that I'm carrying a child
and that I'm about fertility and birth.
The other is holding a bison horn
that has the shape of a crescent moon,
as if I’m saying there's a connection
between the cycles of my own fertility
and the cycles of the moon in the night sky.
Unfortunately, I don't know for certain
if that's really what I'm trying to say,
because I’ve forgotten a lot of the details
that explain who and what I am.
After the first 10,000 years, things get a little fuzzy.
But a surprising number of people
have tried to help me recover my identity.
Some of them say the bison horn I’m holding
may be a primitive musical instrument
or a cup I’m lifting to my mouth to drink.
Some say I’m a priestess or a goddess,
and that I played a role in magic rituals
for fertility, good fortune or a successful hunt.
And some say that I am the female principle,
embodied in women and the changing moon,
or even that I am Mother Nature,
who is a cornucopia overflowing with life,
and not really an individual at all,
which may explain why my face is blank
and can’t give you a sense of who I am.
Of course, any of these ideas may be correct
since I pack a lot of meaning into a small space,
despite my meager seventeen-inch height.
You see, I am a pictogram, created by a people
who were as observant as any of you today.
But they had less to work with then,
so they created me to embody their vision
of a world governed by natural law and imbued with life.
That makes me an early form of religion and philosophy,
and a forerunner of the science you developed later,
as well as an early effort to engage in writing
to say something about your place in the world.

2.
I waited for someone to find me,
as the red ochre on my surface wore off,
and the centuries seemed to go on forever.
Then they discovered me in a rock shelter
in a region known as the Dordogne, in France.
Later, I was placed in a museum in Bordeaux,
with other engravings from the same location.
Now people from around the world come to see
la Vénus à la corne, or the Venus with the horn,
which is how I’m referred to in France.
And, as they do, I’m learning about the world
from the things they say, and the clothes they wear,
and the way they carry themselves.
Most stand there briefly and take me in.
And it is obvious they see me
as something more primitive than themselves,
with only this simple bison horn for a tool.
But a few visitors spend a lot of time looking,
and some discuss the thirteen lines
that have been etched into my horn,
and they wonder if it refers to numbers
associated with the cycles of the moon
and to the number of times in a year
some woman have their fertility cycles.
Unfortunately, I can only suggest that as a possibility,
since the truth about the past is lost to me, as well.

3.
So, as you see, this is my situation,
as I stand here, silently,
trying to communicate with all these people,
and uncertain what I even have to say.
But there is also something specific
that I want all of you to know,
because I keep seeing a vision,
which reveals something different
from anything you are familiar with today.
I’m not certain if it is a memory of a time
when I played a role in people’s lives
or if it is a dream – or something else entirely.
But I see a vision of people dressed
in animal skins, with long thick hair,
dancing and chanting by a campfire.
Some are in a trance, intoxicated with repetition,
as they move around the crackling fire,
and sparks fly in the cool night air,
under a sky that’s alive with stars and a full moon.
They are dancing inside the cycle,
which is the only place they can dance,
traveling along the circuits that define their lives,
of spring, summer, fall and winter;
birth, child-rearing, aging and death,
as the waxing moon expands, night after night,
and becomes fully rounded (like me)
in thirteen days and a handful of hours,
only to contract and then disappear.
And the dancers are also moving
from a bright morning to the darkness of night,
as the sun moves across the sky --
until they end up back at the starting point
of every cycle and begin again.
As I stand here watching them,
I think they are dancing for abundance,
and for the birth of new life. And they are dancing
the waxing and waning of their own lives,
as they are carried along by the cycles of the moon,
which is born and dies, and gives birth to itself again,
in a world where everything returns and begins new.
I see all of this clearly, like it is actually happening,
but I don’t know if it is a memory,
or is it you I’m experiencing, right now,
as you really are, without all the technology,
and beneath the veneer of decorum and personality?

4.
But you’ll have to forgive me –
I tend to get carried away with my thoughts.
Standing here in a museum all day can do that to you.
So let me just tell you instead that,
having lost much of my memory,
I have lost the essence of who I am.
But if you will find a way to understand me,
maybe I can still recover myself, after all.
Yes, I know it is easy to see me
as merely a relic of the dead past
and as a work of confusion
in which visual poetry was mistaken for science.
But there is something I can still teach you
since I am a testament to your own capacity
to give birth to deeply felt ideas.
And I am one of the last bearers of the soul of a people
who will never revisit the Earth.
They were members of your own family and, like you,
they saw, with a dim clarity, the miracle of a world
that re-creates itself from an unknown matrix.