I have been writing all day. Trying to anyway. I have been working on a piece that talks about the Venus of Laussel bas-relief. The piece refuses to stop drifting off and I can’t seem to corral it. So finally in desperation I went into my files and copied all the bits of writing that talk about that carving or the person who created it. I found a lot. Can’t keep it all clear in my head so I created a little table with the titles and the first lines so I could see what issues were prompted by Laussel.

Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 in D is playing – the Allegro con spirito. I can feel myself like the music, a powerful current running but it’s skipping from instrument to instrument, like sparks of static jumping from roof top to roof top. A power that is beautiful, but not that coherent, and writing needs some form of coherence.

Laussel has been like that in my life since I came across her as a child. I have been overwhelmed by her beauty and her implications for what it means to be human. I have never been able to get the distance from her that coherence requires.

Is there a “should” here I asked myself after writing the last paragraph? “Should I try, now?” Is there a “should” here? Does it matter? Is it something that I can force? Will it work if I push against the beauty of it? Will it make the incoherence worse?

I feel like I am trespassing on the grounds of the spirits which may strike you as odd coming from an atheist but it isn’t. I use the terms because they most closely evoke the sensation of fear and awe that I feel in the face of a symbol as powerful as Laussel, especially backed by the con spirito.

How symbols like Laussel come to have such power is only marginally interesting to me. What really fascinates me is the power itself. I know that the bas relief is a carving – just limestone. I know that the person who created it was just another human being, and probably one I wouldn’t want to meet since we would have so little in common socially. Still, in my mind-world, Laussel – the stone and the carver – have melded into one human-like spirit that touches me like a bit of lightning. She leaves marks. Scortched experience. Remembrance of intense beauty. A trace of the sublime, I suppose.

Power like this is not within my control for all that it is a consequence of my existence in the world. The power’s surge comes from my brain, from the body’s chemicals, from my life as it has been lived. Still, it is not in my control and the experience of it, and my response to those experiences, have changed me. To be immersed in situations beyond our control triggers fear in people, so like any human being I make of the disparate experiences a story and project it out onto the world. Laussel becomes a spirit: a human being embedded in the land. It is my way of trying to comprehend a part of the void out of which the spirit that is Laussel issues.

This attempt is an act of power. It is one that says “this is my life.” And of course, in that act I align my life with the carver and the carving. That act of power embeds me in the world out of which I have come. It makes of me a spirit too.

Perhaps that’s it…I have to stand to speak to Laussel hand to hand, take a deep breath, keep my notebook near, my attention on her and wait for her to speak. Just like I would with any other human being.

And of course, being who I am, I have just disgusted myself with all this sloppy “spirit” talk. And as I experience that short-tempered response to myself, I can feel Laussel retreating into the cave that is my unconscious. I imagine her face holding an expression of the resigned frustration an adult feels when trying to teach a particularly slow learner to whom one is particularly attached. And of course both bits are myself. Ah well. Thank the stars this atheist won’t be dead today. I can try to contact the spirit world again tomorrow.