A Snake Don't Slither it Crawls
January 2018
Hosting Projects, LA
In excavating an ideology of vessel we ask a question of power and, if given the choice, what might we hold onto and what might we expel. The decisive nature of deeming what has been given to you as inherent or as superfluous, becomes an appendage in and of itself.
Ganymede became Aquarius in a post-capture landscape, amidst a sort of freedom that only Stockholm Syndrome might provide. When tied to your boundaries but given free reign over them, one is allowed a certain sense of creation—of power. No matter the locked gates, alarm systems or cement blocks put before the door. I may do with this world what I please, the body says to itself, ignorant to its confines. Aquarius ignored their own shackles, choosing instead to embody that which they had been plucked from Earth to do. An Aquarian might say: yes I will carry this cup and I will quench Zeus’s thirst with it; I have no complaints. But so long as I am chained to this life as cup, I will at least pour out to you as river and as rain. Aquarius was once a teenage shepherd, but as of this day they grow gardens.
And now here we are, post Summer of Love, just below sea level and buried in the foothills of the Haight Ashbury. Waking up each morning to keep the grass clean. Figuring out how we might be able to fill ourselves just a bit fuller. If we pierce another hole, does that mean one more opening to hold?
When first greeted by a voice dressed in feathers, we hummed the word gift in repetition and said to ourselves: maybe the seasons can be what we make of them. They say our roots were dipped in a certain manifest destiny, but this garden seems light years away—written in wax during a darker age and different hemisphere.
We’ve decided to salt this body in the hopes of tenderness, soaking in over-seasoned baths so that we might become cured. This allows for a simpler stretch, as we develop our perimeters, attempt the definition of a line and relapse back into religion. This age is a new one, and it is measured in curves crawling through the grass. Quick flashes of phallic scales disappear into a vine covered tool shed. We call it ether. We acrylic our nails and grow our hair thick.
By Harris Bauer
Special thanks to Rachel Zaretsky and Harris Bauer