spine
art/iculation
Bending, tending, links, vertebrae, nestled just so, twisting, supporting, thorax / abdomen, the innards.
spine of book, apparently appears only as of the 1920s, according to etymonline:
Downstairs my husband runs a bookbindery, which is really a surgery clinic, spines being repaired, created from scratch, sewn together, all to support the endless imagination scrawled or printed on page after page after page. Heavy metal machines press the books at various stages, thousands of pounds of pressure, as my spouse creates them, leaf by leaf, flensed leather, by gilded edge…
(thinking now, Saturn rules bones/spines/structure, but also the leather skin he binds the books in.)
Some things have no spine, but have other forms of support or survival.
I think of the spine of an urchin. Naked urchins, spineless, make great molds for things like precious metal clay.
Mold to make, mold to decay.
I think of artists who show disarray, like that series of beweled rotten fruit.
Or others who work with nature to craft a human touch out of time and how structures rise and fall, like Andy Goldsworthy, or Neri Oxman.
I could hotlink those, but we’re in Saturn’s bound, so we gotta flex a bit of elbow grease of our own if we want to see what’s behind that reference. Sort of like old school, analog research. Look it up. Look up.
Spine, a bone system of support. When it snaps (depending on where), all movement stops. Spinal cord, the Aquarian secret to Saturn’s rulerships, the information superhighway of our entire nervous system.
On her desk, my favorite boss of all time used to have a tiny diagram of the human nervous system splayed out in that sassy 19th C sort of swagger. I think it was this or something like it:
Spine.
Casing that holds the information (cord) in safety, for posture/posterity.
Taking this bone structure of hollow interlinked supports, maybe some fused, maybe all free to move as their range allows, taking this, where is your spine?
Who is your spine made of?
This tiny time allows us to focus on systems of support. Our human ones, or perhaps our creative ones.
Where are you aligned? Where can you set something right. Art chiropractic?
Saturn’s water-logged inertia is starting to spark new life, rebellious in spirit, not trusting authority for authority’s sake. Trust in the old ways only comes through proof in action. Respect for authority is given upon earning it, not claiming it by name and acting otherwise.
A last image:
aversions. The last two degrees of the tropical zodiac ask us to examine our aversions, and maybe grow some spine by learning how to not let those aversions rule our reactions. Tender a response. Reengage them and negotiate a new relationship, from this vantage point now, not the vantage point that adopted the aversion as a survival tool or unconscious pattern.
Ok, one more… Saturn also rules ugly things.
I knew an artist who always added a moment of ugly to their work. I asked them why? They said, because the experience of seeing the ugly bit integrated into the rest… the reaction that the viewer gets when that happens… is the art itself.
See you in the blink of an eye for the Aries ingress and a third year of fresh Bound Reports. Thanks for reading!
-j
CAELien update!
Thank you to the 60 people who are showing up for CAELi, ensuring this community resource is resourced! It would be a dream to end the month of March like a lion and have 111 members rallying to the stacks and getting their research on! Are you one of them?
The digital back issues of the CAELi Review are up now, and I am working on the next print issue. And a member recently wrote to me that the scans they requested finally answered a long-standing question they’d had about some chart data that can now enhance their progress on writing about this topic. I love it when the right source finds the right home!