My mind moves slowly when it comes to cause and effect, so the first time I spied a full-sized pear in a narrow-necked bottle, I didn’t think to ask, “how’d that get there?” Ships in bottles are built in-bottle, a solipsistic shipyard, that is, if solipsism can even exist within the clarity of glass. Close your eyes, and solipsism can live anywhere.
The pear wasn’t built in the brandy bottle, it was grown there. A cylinder of glass slipped over its just fattening flower bud, then encased, entrapped, a ship without a sea and a fruit without its tree. Until the liquor is poured in.
Trees are categorized into taxonomically distinct species, but so are bottles. The Society of Historical Archaeology provides a thorough system of bottle classification.
From the “tall, moderately slender, bulged neck spirits cylinder bottles” and “decorative shoulder spirits cylinders” to “barrel flasks” and “dandy flasks.”
These corporeal categories bring to mind bodies. . .
. . . the moderately slender woman with a neck bulged from pulp after the swallowing of juice. . . .
. . . .or the barrel-chested man exposing his flask to the dandy in a show of erotic masculinity.
What type of bottle would I be? I’d be a mouth-blown Empire base milk bottle who dreamed of becoming a shapely, “hobble-skirted” Coca-Cola bottle.
Freeing the fruit from the clasp of glass can be done surgically by sliding a lithe-bladed knife through the mouth of the bottle and slicing the fruit inside, not unlike my laparoscopic fibroidectomy, except the bottle slicing was done via the mouth, and mine was laparo, the descendant of abdominal.
Otherwise,
break the glass.
Wash the fruit.
Chew and suckle as you wish.
Years ago, I was Internet-introduced to the sanctity of Auntie Angel. You know those women who are so comfortable in their bodies that they don’t even have to be confident; they just have to “be?” This is Auntie Angel.
Her “grapefruit technique” video continues to be posted, removed, reposted, and removed from YouTube because we live in a society that confuses sex with pornography, body with property, and flesh with threat. But I found a copy of it on Dailymotion.
“When you grapefruit your man, it’s going to feel as if you are giving him head and fuckin’ him at the same time”
She doesn’t falter on the word “fuck,” and her tongue doesn’t quiver at the word “head,” because she is not just bold in her body, she is at ease in her “self.”
If I was a linguist, would I be able to determine her origin of place based solely on her crisp “T”s and lush, unruffled “L”s?
If I was an inventive fruit grower, would I grow grapefruits in mouths instead of bottles? An orchard of jubilant trees bedecked in fruit-filled buccal* cavities.
Auntie Angel’s Grapefruit Technique is my go-to video when I need to remember Woman’s ineffable nature. A reminder that acidity and sweetness can coexist without contradiction.
*pronounced like buckle
I don’t know about bottle shaped, but my body looks a lot like Kermit the frog.
I'm something of a tall olive bottle myself, not to be confused with olive toned skin.