“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher;
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
—Ecclesiastes 1:2
There are two Venuses in my sky. My dead grandmother, who loved my hands, and my living grandmother, who loves my feet. Imogene called me, and made me, piano hands, a conveyance of her Virginian elegance—grace portending a woman. Margaretta called me God’s toe for the length of the second toe on each foot, a condition resulting from a short first metatarsal and said to presage total rulership over one’s husband. Like that, by a father-God woman and a mother-God woman, I came into being from the extremities, leaving the vague middle space open for someone else’s poetry and play. I never learned to play piano, and it bores me badly to be a man’s God.
All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
—Ecclesiastes 1:8
Being a flesh of ends, I experienced bodiedness as a humiliation. To be bodied was downward in character, an always gesture toward the navel. French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote that “grace is the law of the descending movement,” a movement by which we may “fall toward the heights.” Grace being the divine favor from God that we don’t deserve and could never earn—grace, the carnal knowledge shared by beauty and law. Grace for Imogene was the taut piano string her ballet instructor put into her back, the deceptive weightlessness he enforced in her hands. Margaretta says that some slaves were brought to California cotton fields because of their naturally long fingers. She told me one evening, between bites of greens, how they learned the length of their shadows stooping in cotton fields, and that cotton bolls sting and cut the cuticles just as they release their softness.
Instead of playing the piano, I used my hands to draw. To draw what can only be described as little fascinations. I liked the romance of modification first, so I’d draw lipstick and falsies onto the boyish heartthrobs in J-14, beauty marks and center gaps onto the plain white starlets, baby hairs onto their teased red carpet updos featured neatly beside the Cosmopolitan how-to-please-your-man manifestos of the early aughts. Later, I’d sketch so many aquiline noses in the gutters of my notebooks, worksheets, reading logs, dredging my imagination of what could be considered truthful about a face. I found out young that drawing is the safest non-speech act for a quiet, strange child, given God-fearing adults’ regard for the sacred act of creation.
Figure drawing corresponded with a triptych of migrations, from East to West, from the Catholic to the Baptist Church, from father to mother dominion. God became conspicuous in our lives, children and mother, for the first time as we entered the throng of proselytizers. Men in the church with their wives, and wives watching their men, and the unmarried women worshiping a god they imagine as a man that will love them eternal. Southern Baptist churches, congregations, and preachers can make it feel like God is present—in the room as much as in the after-service pound cake and the Lord’s sweet red punch. The Baptist preacher is a hand magistrate, doling out the laws of the spirit land at a scale discrete enough for the small harms—like those that accrete under the nails undeterred by litanous long washings—and capacious enough for the world-ending hurts that consort with eternity. Seeming hours-long praise and worship felt like toil for two almost adolescents, so in a bargain that earned my mother the peace to worship with focus, we the children were permitted to sketch during service. From liturgy to stigmata, I began those early attempts at rendering the human form. I never knew how to love being a little girl, so I would sketch the woman form. Always with her hands conveniently exiled from the frame: Covered by foliage, folded akimbo in an unseeable dimension, clasped behind the head in ecstasy. Hands, too, struggle to draw what they are.
After the sketchpad was sanctioned, I have just the one memory of looking up from my figures, seeing a balmy pastor palm quivering, churning the air above its head. Gesturing with and through Ecclesiastes, a book of wisdoms. Some words, like come forth to the front of the room if you’re tired, if you’re hurting, if your weariness has opened you up to be transformed by God’s grace. Then the swift pulse of the forehead of a woman congregant. Her braceless descent. And the feeling that we had borne witness to a public humiliation.
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
—Ecclesiastes 1:18
“Venus was once a cloud covered ocean world” a news report announces. Nothing like the tedious depths of the earth’s oceans, the pelvis-deep waters of Venus would have spanned the entirety of the now crackling orb. Brief as they were, or might have been, these waters reportedly sustained only due to a dense layer of low-slung sentinel clouds. But much the way they’ve regarded the handless de Milo, the world has never cared about who Venus is, only what it means. Venus, we understand, is not a place to arrive at or to leave, but a reflective surface, a beckon to turn inward. Not a body but a celestial cluster of impatient meanings. Turn your palm inward—you will find one of the exiled children of Venus, its mount, just beneath the thumb and above the wrist. Palm readers note that the fatness and protrusion of the flesh correspond to the person’s possession of and love for beauty. The landscape of one’s mount might speak to marital fortune, might speak to the disposition of the soul in matters of intimacy and relation, might speak to a person’s capacity for sensuality and art. If my Venus could speak, she would call down from the mount: I am what has always been soft. And I pray that would be the last thing to say. Meaning alters the body eternally. It burns off the clouds and the thing of beauty becomes a speech act.
In some versions of the Bible the “vanity” from Ecclesiastes is translated to “meaningless,” each from the Hebrew hevel, meaning vapor or breath or mist.——————————————
There are more tongues for deliverance in my vernacular than I can fit into my mouth. I read Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America” as a tongue cipher. On being brought, a critical elaboration of the instigating question on being. It seems we never have time to get to the question of being–-black folks, we remain in the long thrall of the brought. Delivered from evil. Seeking deliverance from law to grace in the house of God. My mother delivered a world-sick infant but it took three days. There are no words exchanged at the blood-stained gate, the last border I crossed and the first. Since then, I have always been a stranger. I have forever been painfully aware of not belonging in the world. And I love the world, the same way you love something you can’t have. Birth set me at war in all directions, at war with being. On mornings when I stand before the kitchen sink cleaning the soil from beetroot, letting the grit soften my palms, I dream awake of that crime.
For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its own nature alone.
—Gospel of Mary, Chapter 4
I wish I didn’t remember being born. I’d give my gardens to forget. The holy basil slouching away from the stunted pothos, the skimpy scallions that shoot from their sorry soil like dying fire, the lavender and its harem of bees, the purple coral vines, their peas, that have grown yearningly skyward in the Winter rains, the prayer plants that close their hands at night and open them when exhorted with their beloved “Tezeta (Nostalgia)” from Mulatu Astatke, the father of Ethio-jazz. Tezeta, translating to longing, memory, nostalgia in Amharic, sounds like memories of someone else’s blues. “Mary Magdalene was a black woman,” said the educator at the Little Ethiopia Cultural and Resource Center back in 2014. We sat where the children typically sat while a small copper man with cobalt eyes said “Mary was a black woman. Did you know?” But we wouldn’t be adequately preached to if we didn’t commit this occult knowledge to acrylic, so under his cobalt eyes we painted Mary. Silt rich red skin against a sky-blue sky. Giant eyes razed of desire, perfidious pupils. Marigold areola, and below it sheets of adoring fabric draped on her crown. Her shroud Marian blue, the color of private blood, the shade of a woman unfucked. Recent history has revealed Mary’s gospel despite the myth committed over and over to canvases that she was a tongueless supplicant. She is the conduit for a gnostic understanding of spirit, that matter is evil and salvation might only be gained through esoteric knowledge. If I could draw the pigment from the lapis lazuli with my prayers, I would blot my memory with that dye ‘til my mind was a pretend sky too thick to be illumined. Birth woke me up into the bedlam of light. A small Venus prised from the clay and pitied by the sun. Born with eyes wide open, stolen from that pagan darkness where memories are secular and forgetting is sacred.
Matter gave birth to a passion that has no equal, which proceeded from something contrary to nature. Then there arises a disturbance in its whole body.
—Gospel of Mary, Chapter 4
Forgetting, like condensed milk in the sky, splits the planet from the heavens and cements her feet—the forgetter—to the ground, I grind her coffee each morning and we smile with unknowing. The forgetter remembers going back to Africa. Forgets the number of the connecting flight but remembers Briana waking her somewhere above the Atlantic with Biscoffs and burnt black coffee. Forgets the feeling of being under a new sky, remembers her friend plucking absinthe from the garden for their mint tea. Remembers Rashid who called me sister and begged a taste of my tumescence with the same tongue. Forgets how to say my pleasure to meet you in Arabic but remembers shukran. Forgets the hour of the call to prayer waking both from their sleep, remembers Briana singing, forgets the song, remembers it was in Spanish. Remembers peering into the fresh darkness of twenty-seven years a body. Remembers that darkness falling in what looked like tea leaves from our naked bodies in the hammam. Black soap gets you cleaner. I remember it now on the ledge of Margaretta’s bathtub, charcoal foam like displaced soil that cannot recall what it made grow.
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SEARCH TERMS: Venus, Black, sable, Atlantic, cherubs, ocean, scallop, birth
I
Grainger’s engraving The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies depicts a being arriving at island shores on Aphrodite’s scallop, her black figure surrounded by tufts of white cherubim skin. Not like her white sister, Sable Venus pilots the scallop with the help of two grimacing water snakes, each tangled against Triton and an anonymous male figure. She is not brought but brings herself away from home. She is not born.
II
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus reveals the landscape of what might have been a portrait. The world expands from the hips out, with Venus centered between a forest and a universe of ocean. Her arrival is multiple, to the land from the sea, to the world from no womb, from not being to a woman. Her modesty beguiles as she covers her genitals with a bolt of golden hair. She is looked upon with the favor and hurriedness that accompanies those present for the gentle arrival of newborns. Hers is being itself. The sea softens against her. The flowers suspend themselves in her aura. The sky watches her in its patience.
III
OpenArt AI remembers Venus as a black woman. Prompt: Botticelli The birth of Venus as a pretty African Black woman with an afro rising from the sea on a shell, accurate face. The machine dreams of history, generating her form uncured by the saltless ocean. It seems to remember her softness and generalizes it to her every edge. Her knees share the same dimensional character as her cheeks, as her nipples, bulbous and lustfully swollen, as her eyes whose sockets seem packed with cotton. Soft untouchable deformities abound.
Prompt: express perfection as beauty
Her cola coils aggregate around her form airlessly. Form not flesh but fathom. Almost flowers dot the scene like gnats, against her flat oceans stacked. But the waves have never lavished their salt on her shores nor stones. The machine dreams her skin a light brown. Venus as a pretty African Black woman. It is dreaming about passing. Afro rising from the sea. It is dreaming about passion. Pathos. Afro rising from the sea on the half shell. It is thinking about passing, passion, pathos, pancreas, Pygmalion, pear trees and patience, patience. Accurate face. Patience.
Prompt: show birth inside of death
Language models are birthed by speech but don’t know what tongues can do. She is rendered without one. She closes her mouth and says she wishes she didn’t remember being born.
Prompt: make death-birth perfect
AI struggles to reproduce hands, though this fact will soon be history. A cursory search reveals that artificial intelligence is formulated on the basis of pattern recognition. Being that the machine is fed terabytes of information, data sets that exceed individual experience and knowledge, it has more hands to contemplate than we can divine. But hands, unlike faces, abscond from recognition, form illicit shapes, separate then rejoin. The machine memory searches for patterns. Hands are aberrations.
Prompt: desire
And desire said, I did not see you descending, but now I see you ascending. Why do you lie since you belong to me? The soul answered and said, I saw you. You did not see me nor recognize me. I served you as a garment and you did not know me.
—Gospel of Mary, Chapter 8
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I don’t know why my hands shake when I touch the person I love. Or why I think about the operation of caress more than I feel his skin under my palms. Long fingers, long palms, what palm readers would classify as water hands. But I learned from prayer circles, not palm readers, that they are damp. Damp with concern or prescience or impatience. When I push my wet worries around the topography of his skin, I ask questions of my hands that if uttered would render the thick happy fat of loving into muscle. And in the foreground of my mind, there are two hands that don’t shake and do pray and that thank God my flesh hands don’t have speech. They might tell him that I touch to imitate being. That I graze fear before fantasy. That the history of my hands is held together by petty deceptions. If it is true what Weil wrote, that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” I touch the other in supplication to myself.
