Snake Cult

It's hard for me to believe that the events described herein happened when I was awake.

On a recent Sunday morning I left my house and started my normal route to the subway. In front of my neighbor's house I saw a glint of metal with decorative lines lying on the ground. Almost stepped on it. When I held it squarely in front of my face (it had been a late night) I could start to take in the details. An earring , a snake woman. Her mouth open, fangs bared, dragon-like wings on upper back, breasts on her snake chest.

It was too early for details like that. Fierce, reptilian, feminine, with the energy of Kali, the fury that drives her mission to kill every demon in the universe, to decapitate all ego-derived personas. The milk/venom she offers is the milk of karma, how, in the long run we never really let ourselves get away with anything we know is wrong . Our innocence and purity are too important to us, and to her.

Yikes!
What time is it?

I get to the subway station. Am struck by the posters for the Brats movie. It's too early in the day for this. No bratitude until after 10 please.

But I can tell from the poster, it will be revealed that the brats are angels. The sass has its place, no?

Once seated on the subway my view drifts over to a poster for a movie called something like "Skin Crawlers." The poster shows a woman, you only see a little of her shoulder and back, the profile of her face, mouth wide open, full of fangs, her hair swarming around her like gorgon snakes.

Can this stop now?

She scared me. She gave me the feeling of a woman in a jealous rage. She appeared as a personification of the way we undermine ourselves when we feel guilty and want to be caught. The traps we set for ourselves. Isn't that what horror movies are always about?

I get where I'm going, and fall into a conversation with an acquaintance from the shammanic circle. On her arm there's a tattoo of a rattlesnake, rising from it's coil, ready to strike.

Somebody, slap me!

She got the tattoo during a period of her life when she felt really vulnerable, needed a protector. Since then the landscape that held the snake softened, as sky and stars were added to it. I loved talking to her about the evolution of her tattoos.

That was it for the day, but a few days later I saw the NYT article about the Pythons let loose in the Everglades, pets abandoned when their size made them inconvenient, scarfing down native fauna at an alarming rate. The photo shows a close up of the predator's head, its mouth lined with needle-sharp teeth. uhhh....

A few days after that I'm chatting with my neighbor, an art student at SVA. He's been drawing.

What have you been drawing?
Snakes...
Oh... My daughter wants to get a snake, she really likes them.
Not this kind of snake. I'm drawing cobras. You don't want these for pets.

He goes on with the details regarding snake viciousness, which is not limited to the potency of venom but includes the damage caused by the trauma of the bite, which sometimes costs several thousand dollars to repair.

Joinx, jeepers!

I tell him about the earring I found, the other snakes, the pythons. He thinks it's a coincidence. Random pattern. He is covered with tattoos. Deliberate pattern. He believes the earring I found belongs to his girlfriend. I don't doubt it but he feels the need to prove it, drawing my attention to smears of purple dye that bled from her hair. He sees them. I don't.

2 days later I get PMS. Here comes the gorgon.

Here she comes!!

The gorgon does some good work. Drawing boundaries for two young children with whom mommy the door matt is often too patient, too easily charmed. Things change for the better. A snake can be a circle, but also a line you don't cross.



note: The Gadsden flag above hangs at the Ft. Greene Park Visitors Center. A similar image was painted on drums during the revolutionary war, with the motto "Nemo me impune lacesset," i.e. "No one will provoke me with impunity. ... What exactly does that mean in contemporary vernacular? Pay to play? Oh no, you didn't?

note: We can thank Walt Whitman for the "lung" we call Ft. Greene Park, as I learned from the literature I came across on a recent visit. Thanks Waltzy! It's an amazing place.