3:00 AM Marginalia: The Blank Check That Bounced
Eternal First Words
Genesis, consciousness, and the shape of beginnings
In the Beginning, There Was a Body: Saartjie Baartman
In the Beginning, There Was a Body
Did you know Saartjie Baartman was born around 1789 among the Gonaqua Khoikhoi, and her birth name was lost? “Saartjie” was a colonial diminutive, and her 1810 “contract” was drawn up by Alexander Dunlop and backdated. This essay reads her story through Genesis and Babel as the reduction of a person to spectacle.
Sarah Baartman: The Food Story the Records Left Out looks at the food history the records left out.
Saartjie Baartman, the Gaze, and the Coin of Costless Consumption
The Gamtoos River Valley. A landscape of return and of silence and the computer gaze.
You scroll. A prophet in stocks, a woman on pedestal. Coin: attention for regulated state—moral hit, transgressive thrill, anxiety soothe. The human is fuel. This is old sin, wired into reward pathways. Saartjie Baartman's body maps it unforgivingly.
What does Genesis say about the gaze?
Genesis diagnoses at the start: reduction of imaged-God person to consumable spectacle. God speaks order/naming ("Let there be light," calls it Day); gaze speaks chaos/erasure, leaving generic shape. Lust/revulsion: currencies in broken economy—person as tool for self-management.
Who was Saartjie Baartman?
Born ~1789 among Gonaqua Khoikhoi, cattle-herding life, kinship, oral tradition. Birth name lost; "Saartjie" colonial diminutive. 1810 "contract"—drawn up by Dunlop, backdated, signed under duress—fabricated consent. Linguistic imperialism inverts Babel: God confused tongues to protect; Empire unifies to enable power/consumption.
"Hottentot Venus": mocking onomatopoeia + stolen beauty archetype. Double negation: culture/soul erased. Genesis names/orders; gaze generics for market/myth—anti-creation.
What is the coin of costless consumption?
Crowds: leering desire or pious horror—same coin. Augustine's games: costless catharsis. Lust/thrill dominance; revulsion/moral superiority—both dopamine hits for regulation. Body as external regulator; relationship → consumption, covenant → contract.
Aftermath: she dies in Paris, December 1815; Cuvier dissects her body, preserves brain/genitals. Scientific gaze completes consumption—particularity sought for hierarchy, annihilating dignity. Counter: Genesis 16, Hagar names El Roi—"God who sees me." God sees particular/suffering; consumptive gaze generics/useful.
How do we witness instead of consume?
We inherit encoded gaze, supercharged digitally: true crime binges, viral suffering, comment frenzies—old liturgy at broadband speed. Turn: refuse coin. Pause on image—step back, let transaction fail. Wonder particular person (name/history/humanity) behind label. Not empathy (another hit); witness—hold weight without converting to fuel.
Lust and revulsion are not moral opposites. They are biochemical siblings. Both use another's body as a dial to tune one's own nervous system. This is the original trade: a person for a hit.
Cross refutes: body exposed to lust/violence/revulsion—God enters/suffers, redeems by participation, not consumption. Resurrection vindicates erased particular body. 2002 repatriation/burial in Eastern Cape: shadowed return—body home, life/name in silence. Faint echo of El Roi. Witness arrives grieving, centuries late.
This is the hard beginning. The only one that has ever mattered.
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