For about a year and a half, when I was fourteen to fifteen, I lived in Pittsburg. I didn’t like the school in which I was enrolled very much so when I left the house in the morning I usually just didn’t go. Instead, I went to the museum, the Carnegie Library, the zoo and the various parks within reach of my feet. It was in the library that I first recall seeing a picture of the Venus of Laussel. I don’t remember reading the text of the art book I held. I presume it was on Paleolithic, Mesolithic and/or Neolithic art. What I remember is the shape of the book in my hands, the press of the metal walkway under my bottom, the gloss of the page and the sense of space that opened up as I sat and stared at the picture. I knew nothing about the statue, nothing about art or the human history of the Paleolithic but in that space I felt a connection knitting between me, the statue, the sculptor and the crescent horn-moon in her hand.

I saw pictures form in my mind and I felt a surge of something moving through my body: pictures of the woman whose body was rendered; pictures of the woman staring at the moon, her hand on her womb feeling (as I imagined it at the time) the contractions that would result in blood between her legs. I imagined her being caught as I had been by the fulgent moon. As I continued to stare at the picture in the library, these imagined similarities of life explained to me the horn she held and probably the marks cut on its crescent curve. The fact that she held it in her right hand meant to me that the moon was waxing. Interestingly, I did not connect that observation with the possibility that her hand on her womb might mean she felt the movements of a child, but then I was fourteen and not at all in favor of the idea of pregnancy. Staring at the picture, it was if I was also staring at the moon inside the eyes of the woman who carved that bas-relief and a woman it was, of that I was sure. I lost sight of the book as it was swallowed up in the overlay of her eyes in a face with broad cheeks and black hair.

These moments are transfixing for me. They alter my perception of myself, of my place in the world and my sense of just how big the world really is, especially in time. I learn from them, and later when I read the text, or study the topic, these experiences help me comprehend the humanness of the social and scientific history. They don’t, I hasten to say, replace the study but they do augment it.

When I looked down again at the book in my lap it was if I could see her belly superimposed on my shirt and jeans. I could feel my hands on her skin and simultaneously it was as if I could feel her stirring deep inside me, moving into life through my body. It was profoundly comforting and deeply connecting. It was proof, to me, of my existence, although despite the sensations, I still didn’t click that the woman was pregnant.

Did I ever think that somewhere a sentient Laussel existed outside her time and place and that somehow I had contacted her? No. I never did. By some quirk of cerebral and bodily oddity I fall into profound imaginative states with the greatest of ease. I think it is maybe a kind of hyper-empathy. It’s as if my body acts as an amplifier for what is probably a completely normal process of connection to life outside oneself. Nevertheless, even as a very young child, I understood that what I could do was of this world because what is of this world is all that there is. Luckily, I also understood that this world is enough. The world (and its evolved creation imagination) is the source of the magic and the wonder. This world is the origin of both the experience of ecstasy and the ability to feel it. That is bloody magic.