18
Tattoos
I have six tattoos. They all have meaning and stories behind them, and they all represent particular moments in my life that demanded an inscription in my flesh. For example, a friend once texted me words of comfort and support in a difficult time, ending with the phrase “Survive and advance,” and I now carry those words on my arm. My most recent one is a palm tree in honor of my thirty-year sojourn in Los Angeles, and a Nick Cave lyric I got with a friend to cement a relationship and a love.
By now, tattoos have claimed a place in contemporary society, and they no longer carry the taboo they once did. I think the trend is driven by the impermanence of our lives, the worlds we live in where things are always evolving and the body is the only constant we have to hold on to.
Once I was walking down a Soho street in London when I spied a man out of the corner of my eye whom I instantly recognized. It was the artist Lawrence Weiner. I love his work so much that I had once taken the typeface he uses in all his text art to form part of a work on my arm. That day on the street, I decided to do what I seldom do and approached him. He was sitting outside his hotel having a smoke and enjoying a moment of quiet. As we chatted, he was friendly and charming, and I told him about my love for his work. Then I thanked him for his work and his time, and I left.
The tattoo that Weiner’s typeface appears in is of a skull with two small crosses and the phrase “Doubts and loves” in purple ink. The skull is from a photo I took of a skateboard deck made by Damien Hirst, another one of my favorite artists. The words come from a poem by Yehuda Amichai that begins, “From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow.” The counter to this desire to be right that hardens our soils, Amichai writes, is that “Doubts and loves dig up the world.” That phrase appeals to me because doubts and loves are both means by which newness comes to our lives. I decided to get it all in violet because I once met an Indian guru who told me it was a good color for me, without knowing it is one of my favorites. And I got the type done in Franklin Gothic Compressed, which Lawrence Weiner calls the “last of the working-class typefaces” because it essentially disappeared after the Helvetica font was created. I felt it was a good reminder of my own working-class roots. All of that meaning is wrapped into a couple inches on the surface of my skin. But surface is depth in the modern world.
Much of the religious world has a complex relationship with tattoos. Judaism forbids idolatry and consequently prohibits tattooing (Lev 19:28) and Christianity followed suit by outlawing tattoos at the Second Council of Nicea. In his letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul says, “In future let no man make trouble for me, for I bear the marks of Jesus branded on my body” (Gal 6:17). Those words are often interpreted symbolically, but thereafter many pilgrims began marking their bodies after visiting shrines or making sacred journeys.
Tattoos turn the body into a symbol. But for what? Sometimes tattoos are so personal that only the vaguest interpretation can be made without a conversation. Nonetheless, in this age when tattoos have broken out of their backstreet associations and designs have become more personalized, there is little doubt that they represent a semiotic response to life in the modern world.
In 2018, the rapper Post Malone attracted attention by revealing a new facial tattoo on Instagram. The words “Always Tired” appeared in fresh script under his obviously tired and bag-laden eyes. His followers’ response was immediate, acknowledging that they too were also always tired. Rooster magazine, in a weekly roundup of music news, noted that with the tattoo, the artist was “representing the voice of an entire generation.” Why is a young, successful, popular artist so tired—tired enough to permanently mark his face? And why does his tattoo resonate deeply with so many people?
In HuffPost, journalist India Benjamin offered an interesting perspective on the tattoo and the cultural conflict it raised. Many people believe millennials are tired because they are entitled and consequently miserable from failing to get what they want, so instead they stay up all night drinking and doing drugs. The real reason, she proffered, is a much longer list of grievances, from despondency about life linked to expectations without opportunity, as well as a growing disillusionment with media, politics, economics, and most things they have inherited from previous generations. Much of Benjamin’s commentary focuses on millennial exhaustion, but I think it extends beyond the generational divides we often use to characterize the way things are.
Everyone I know is tired, exhausted, and burned out. It’s one of the marks of our time. In 2000, in Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, David Morris created a biocultural story of illness. He wrote that illness differs with time and context; we don’t become ill in the same way our parents and grandparents did, and we experience illnesses and cures that would have been unheard of to them. Always being tired might not often constitute an illness by itself, but I do think the cultural settings we find ourselves in—particularly the increased precariousness and uncertainty of life—contribute to the way we feel every day. Things hover beneath the surface of our daily existence like low-grade fevers waiting to break out. The gig economy; the vulnerability of relationships; political unrest; the turmoil over race, gender, identity, and refugees—all of that is piped to us in a continual stream of endless fearmongering. Then the addictive nature of social media traps us in a web of comparisons, celebrity, affluence, and perfectionism, driving us to think less of ourselves unless we compete with these perfect worlds presented via social media.
Part of the cause of all this exhaustion is our obsessive thinking about our own status in society and our envy of our peers who splatter their best lives over the web. The gift of technology is access and connectivity, but it curses us to feel that our lives need to keep pace with those of who we look up to. The hustle of technology and consumer capitalism has many dark sides, one of which is an environment of hyper-comparison that few of us are incapable of avoiding.
This is why I am troubled by the self-help industry. It gives people remedies to deal with the strains of life, but seldom takes the time to address the world people are so stressed by. We destress to deal with a life that creates stress. Is the “best life” sold to us online really the best option?
There’s always another option: get some rest.
