[Alright. I have to write a proper academic paper this afternoon, so this is going to be a bit of free association, a little palate cleanser. This post is the tiny scoop of sorbet (with the tiny silver spoon) before I get down to the main course, before I get my fingers all greasy and eventually have to ask for a WetNap. I like the lemon-scented ones the best.]I caught one of several "Seinfeld" reruns the other night, the one where Jerry catches Uncle Leo shoplifting in Brentano's. When he mentions later to Leo that he saw him in the store, Leo takes offense that he didn't say hello. This minuscule breach of etiquette, of course, is a big deal that totally eclipses (in Leo's mind) the fact that he was busy smuggling books out in his coat at the time. So later there's a quick sequence where Leo's doing pull-ups (a la De Niro in Scorsese's Cape Fear and Mitchum in the original), and there are tattoos visible on his fingers (after De Niro again, and Mitchum in Night of the Hunter) as they wrap around the bar. One reads "JERRY," the other reads "HELLO," and he keeps repeating this as he's doing pull-ups that terminate their upswing in a close-up. "Jerry!" "Hello!" "Jer"--well, you get the point.
So that reminded me of this argument I wound up in one late night (more likely an early morning) in Miss Mae's at Napoleon and Magazine. There was this heavily tattooed cat (on one hand "HELL," on the other "FIRE") playing pool against me, and for some reason (!) he brings up the subject of tattooing, asks me why ain't I got any ink. Tipsy off dollar doubles and red-can Beast, I tell him that I'm reserving the blank canvas of my pasty flesh for some South Seas native tattooing with the long stick barbed with fish teeth. It's a rite of manhood in some cultures down there, and if you wince or cringe or cry out "Motherfucker quit POKING me with FISH TEETH!" you've gotta like retake the oral and written portions before they try inking you again next year. So HellFire starts in on me (don't know what he was drinking, but it was probably some really angry gin), calls me a fucking poser or something for not wanting a "real artist" over here to ink me up. And by now he's taking personal offense, getting really pissed off. I'm thinking "Man, that's a cold bowl of chili for this time of night," but I defer to HellFire (never know who's got a shiv at 5 in the morning at The Club) and eventually just sink the eight ball and assent that yes, indeed, I'm a fucking poser-ass sissypants. Point taken, game over. Peace. Out.
Then I'm reading in The Believer a couple of months ago (Dec/Jan issue) that there's this author, Shelley Jackson, who's tattooing 2,095 people from all walks of life, each with a different word of a short story that will never be published on paper, the entire text known only by the people who serve as her canvas/word processor. Called "Skin," it's being hailed as a landmark in literary deconstruction, entirely removing paper and print from the literary equation. Everybody's got a different reason for going along with the idea: "One participant is a book collector who saw the project as an opportunity to collect a rare manuscript. Another liked the notion of 'a text written on bodies and the idea that the text would encounter erasure with death and time.'" Some bitchin' ink right there, if a bit high-concept.I'd definitely get in on that (mostly because I want to read the story), but alas, Jackson's got more than enough volunteers. Until then I'm sticking with my original idea, which involves a large, stylized hammerhead shark on my back. The hammerhead is a potent symbol of the sea for the Maori and in other island traditions, both for its unusual shape and the way that strange physiognomy helps it get around. A shark's snout is embedded with thousands (millions?) of little jelly-filled pores that detect electrical currents in the water. They're collectively called the ampullae of Lorenzini, and they're the reason you can chum a spot in the open ocean and attract sharks from dozens of miles around. It seems the hammerhead has more of these ampullae--or it's their arrangement across the broad "hammer" of its "head," I forget--but either way the shark can navigate along a hunting field that stretches hundreds of miles from a home territory, which is usually near a seamount in shallower water. The hammerhead follows the lines of alternating polarity in rock extruded from rift zones, and can get out and back because of its extreme sensitivity to the magnetic fields on the ocean floor. So this silly-looking beast is actually a highly-specified product of evolution. Pretty cool stuff.
Which reminded me of an ad campaign run by New Orleans' Aquarium of the Americas a few years back, where billboards and taxitops featured a picture of a shark charging the camera. The copy read: "This is not a shark." And they were right, in the strict literal sense. The real shark, they were playfully suggesting, could be found on a visit to the Aquarium. It's something like Rene Magritte was getting at when he painted "The Treason of Images," a picture of a tobacco pipe with the inscription "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." ["This is not a pipe."] Both of these drew a fine line between art and experience, between representation and reality, a line that we often take for granted. Sure, it's not a pipe. You can't hold it, light it, or smoke it, right? Magritte asked the question "What is art, and where does it fit into our experience of life?" Marcel Duchamp made an earlier statement on a similar theme when he signed a urinal and displayed it at an exhibition in 1917. He called it "Fountain," and he was declaring that it's the intention, not the medium or the final expression, that matters in art. It might seem like he was taking the piss (pun obviously intended), but the questions he raised (along with the snickering) continue to influence our conception of art as it relates to a life being lived.
Aristotle said something in his Poetics (and I'm paraphrasing here), that "Art completes Nature as Nature would complete herself, were she Art." Given that most people will tell you they got a tattoo to commemorate a particular event in their lives, or to memorialize a fallen friend or relative, or to remind them of the beliefs they hold dear, the tattoo would seem to be the ultimate convergence of art and the existential human experience. Whatever the reason--even something as simple as "I enjoy getting tattooed" is unassailably valid as an assertion of principle--the commitment of an idea to skin is a unique expression of one's identity, a personal reminder of place and time. That being said, if I ever meet HellFire again in a darkened alley, I might want to have some temporary tats on hand in case I haven't yet made it to the South Pacific. It might be difficult to explain the greater significance of a hastily-applied Huckleberry Hound's location on my right knee, but I'll take an ounce of humiliation over a pounding by an unstable fascist any day of the week.
