HENBANE GRAVITY (Pt. 3)

Ieajaita followed the macadam to a massive six-tiered nautilus, three floors above ground and three below. Albright’s Gallery hosted the work of the city’s aspiring painters, sculptors, illustrators, and photographers. The curators required no fees for admittance and took no commissions from sales. Madsen’s visual Artists, aspiring and otherwise, could exhibit their work to any and all interested.

Those interested were in short supply. The spectators pacing through the gallery talked among themselves about everything but the work before them. They choked on the scandals spilling out of the news cycle, standing on the shoulders of far-off calumnies. They traded judgments on their friends and neighbors, trading in gossip from the peak of an upturned nose. They dwelt on their dinner plans with the rigor of a physicist attempting to pick a lock on the cosmos. Flipping through television channels only half-paying attention.

Ieajaita could relate. She ascended the escalating spiral and let Her eyes listen to the walls. She looked upon paintings in oil and watercolors, illustrations in pencil, ink, and charcoal, sculptures in clay and stone, photographs, in both black-and-white and color, printed on paper and glass. She passed one photograph: black-and-white, high contrast, deep focal length, digital. It was a view of a building, some wide-assed edifice squatting somewhere in the city. Long, straight shadows sliced across the bone-white face of the building. Pure formalism.

Ieajaita could have run Her hand over any piece and not once come away with fingers coated in the fine, vestigial dust of Inspiration. There was merit to be found in that gallery, but nothing Spoke, not to Her or any others. The Artists had dipped their toes in Her realm, but they longed only for applause. A panoply of indifference, visions for the blind.

She circled the gallery’s uppermost tier and started Her descent, when ahead and out of view sounded a foghorn of a voice, strident and fearful. “Obviously the cup is vaginal. You’re all familiar with that symbolism. But note the scythe protruding out of the cup like a straw.”

Ieajaita followed the voice to an emaciated woman standing before and indicating the highlights of a collage. The composition was pure classical, right down to the geometric equations. It was a depiction of a view with which She was all too familiar: Nargory restored and Her Divine Queen resurrected. But it was no invocation. This was a hologram, a fractal Frankenstein’s monster. Each item had been drawn in moue-faced pixels, then shrunken like a head, copied, printed, cut out, and pasted together with its clones. Pinocchio pieced together from Geppetto’s homunculi.

“Lyuemper,” the collagist said, “is the only goddess in mythology to hold a scythe. Every other scythe-bearer, including the grim reaper, is unmistakably male. And reaping the harvest was a male’s job. But here’s Lyuemper of the Vanfiri carrying a very large and emasculating blade.

“If you go through all the old Vanfiri myths, the Uros-and-Lyuemper stories all follow the same formula: Uros does something Lyuemper doesn’t like, she calls him on it, he begrudges her wisdom. So Uros is only the petty, angry father figure because of his wife’s ceaseless hectoring. And she’s the philanderer, not him. Lyuemper is the Ur-embodiment of the female threat, and every misogynistic depiction in religion and folklore can be traced back to her.”

Ieajaita turned, swallowing Her fury, the taste of rust settling on Her tongue, and started down the spiraling gallery. One of the great virtues of Art was what the audience brought to it, She knew, the downside being that some saw blue and called it red. Had the truculent dilettante been looking for something other than the indignities she’d suffered, she might not have come to such a pig-ignorant fucking misunderstanding.

Ieajaita knew the truth. She had been there. Lyuemper had been The Great Mother. Man had needed Her advocacy to counterbalance Uros-on-High’s judgment. Discipline tempered by love. And Her infidelity: to whom was She to have shown fidelity? To Uros, King of All Gods? How could She not have remained faithful to the omnipresent and irresistible? Would metal spurn a magnet, or the earth its moon? Lyuemper’s fidelity had been to man, all of man, and She had remained faithful to The End. She had given Life, and it was not The Great Mother’s failing if cowardly bottom-feeders didn’t know how great a gift Life was. The Goddess of The Arts knew, and, like all Gods, She knew the alternative.

Ieajaita neared surface level when She felt the sudden gravity of henbane. She stopped. Someone was Speaking, the voice a thread woven through the air. Ieajaita followed it down the sloping floor. Every piece She passed stood mute. The other visitors pantomimed their inattention, Her every sense committed entirely to the Creation’s voice. At first she’d heard only a vague, intimated immediacy, but as the lure grew, as she neared the gallery’s depths, the taste of rust was consumed by mandrake. Black swallowed the winding corridor, leaving only a white glow that ballooned as She neared. What was it?

It was Her. A statue of The Goddess of The Art. Two-and-a-half feet tall, carved of cedar. The gouges were imprecise, sometimes violent. The posture was tired. Accented with hairs of watercolor, the paint seemed to be fading before Her eyes. A far cry from antiquity’s polish.

But that distance heralded Truth. This was not a depiction of traditional beauty in gleaming stone, of genuflection before a now-extinct glory. This was not the Ieajaita Who had traversed the cities of a civilization unknown even to legend, Who had sat before supplicants and graciously accepted their lionization, Who had with only a wave of Her hand blessed the Artist with the power to realize his or her most honest visions. This was a depiction that had never before been Created. It was Ieajaita as She was now.

The statue was Speaking to Her, Her own voice crying out in a nonsense meter. How? Ieajaita’s knees weakened and Her head bobbed in champagne. The surrounding blackness, already total, grew even darker, and the bursting white of the statue filled Her eyes with tiny pulsars that throbbed a rhythm conceived in strangeness. Ieajaita closed Her eyes.

“Do you like it?”

The young woman stood like a camphor bowed by storm. Her pale eyes, swimming in starlight, shrank into her skull. She was an entire world’s feelings embarrassed to a single point.

Ieajaita collected Herself. “I do, /” she said. “Very much indeed.”

“Thank you,” she said, then stood mute for moments, before she said, “Nella Davies. This is my piece.” She offered her hand like a rabbit peeking out its hole.

Ieajaita shook. “Very pleased to meet you, Nella, / and congratulations on an / exemplary piece of sculpture.”

Nella stage-whispered, “Thank you,” through a sheepish grin.

“I’m fond of your choice of degradable materials. / What prompted it?”

“Um…” she started, “well, I-I like working with a lot of different materials. You know, it all depends on what you want to do. And with this one I just hadn’t worked in wood for a while, so I grabbed a block of cocobola I had laying around, and… I just started carving without really thinking about it. And as it started to take shape, I just kinda felt like it should be in something that wouldn’t last. You know? Like, it’s more important that this sculpture is for right now and not, like, a hundred years in the future. You know? And that’s why I painted it in watercolor.”

“An astute choice, /” said Ieajaita. “And, may I say, / Your technique is remarkable, / Precise but passionate.”

Nella’s head drooped. “Thank you. I, uh, I actually think my technique is my weak spot. I was just kinda in the zone with this one.”

“All too apparent. / But tell me: / Why paint it?”

“Well, I figured since, like, all those statues from antiquity were painted, this one should be.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Just, like, as I was carving away at it, it just took on this female form that, I guess, it was… it felt like it was something that would’ve been made back then. You know? Like, even though it’s not marble and it’s not supposed to be anyone special, it just felt like… like it was this embodiment, this representation of something great but indefinable that we all have in common.”

Ieajaita smiled, nodding. She turned back to Herself. “Yes.”

Nella stood beside Her. “What do You feel when You look at it?”

Ieajaita gave Herself over to the statue and said, “I feel a kinship with unknown eyes, / a stranger’s voice that could be mine. / Everywhere I’ve never been / feels familiar. I’m one / link in a chain that / spans the breadth of / the entire / planet / earth.” Ieajaita turned to the sculptress.

The young woman beamed, her hair cast out of her face, her head high. “Thank you. Thank you so much. That’s all I wanted. That’s all I want people to feel, that they’re not alone.”

“I would like to buy your statue. / How much will you take?”

“Serious? You seriously want to buy it?”

“I never announce / disingenuous intentions.”

“You really like it that much?”

“It may be the finest piece I’ve yet to see / In all my time in Albright’s Gallery.”

“Then I want you to have it. No charge.”

“Please, my child, / don’t be foolish.”

“If you like it that much, I want you to have it.”

Ieajaita stood between Nella and the statue. “Do not devalue yourself or your endeavors. / You offer your work without recompense / and pussyfoot in speech and posture. / You are an Artist, / and you must be the first to endorse your own legitimacy. / Do not devalue yourself or your endeavors.”

Nella felt the knife twist and lowered her head. “I know. You’re right.”

“Then raise your head / and demand your pittance.”

Nella inhaled, raised her head, and said, “I’d ask 500 for this, but I’m not going to. I don’t have any good explanation, but I don’t want to charge you. And just so you know, I have charged people before. I usually make money off my work. But I don’t want your money.” She pointed to the statue. “You get it, and people don’t usually get it. So let me thank you and give you the statue.”

Ieajaita examined her in silence, tilting Her head to a more advantageous angle. “Under the condition, /” She said, “that I may buy you a drink / and plumb your mind for greater attitudes / and loftier considerations.”