They saw a Samaritan carrying a lamb on his way to Judea.
He said to his disciples, "That man is round about the lamb."
They said to him, "So that he may kill it and eat it."
He said to them, "While it is alive, he will not eat it, but only when he has killed it and it has become a corpse."
They said to him, "He cannot do so otherwise."
He said to them, "You too, look for a place for yourself within repose, lest you become a corpse and be eaten."
-The Gospel of Thomas, Verse 60
Images of Words
In my life, I’ve found that tattoos are a little like fantasy football: many people indulge, but it makes for very boring casual conversation. It’s not that nobody wants to hear a good tattoo story, but that the personal meaning one has for their own tattoos (beyond the illustrated symbols) doesn’t translate to conversation. Close friends, girlfriends, spouses, etc. may take an interest, but “I like your tattoos” from a near-stranger is not an invitation for stories about how specific deities impacted your meditation practice, or what a flower symbolizes.
Every tattoo has at least two meanings. There’s the obvious visual meaning and there’s the experiential meaning. Tattoos are irrational desires, thus the motivation for acquiring one is always dramatic — unless one is merely acquiring tattoos for the aesthetic, in which case, why are you reading this blog? If the acquisition of a piece is motivated by irrational compulsions, then there is always a story for why. Sometimes the story is just “I like India” when someone has a Kali tattoo, but that’s rare. Usually it’s a big story.
Nobody wants to hear them, though. My first tattoo is a tattoo of words, specifically the last two words from a Tobias Wolff short story. When a stranger would ask what “they is” meant, I would tell them that the words are from that story, which is both technically correct and a complete evasion of their question. The words are tattooed on my body for personal reasons that this stranger both a) doesn’t want to hear and b) doesn’t deserve to hear, because I don’t know them or their heart. That’s a good thing, as I consider the motivation for my tattoos to be private. Meaning is personal because meaning is interchangeable with faith. How else could anything have symbolic meaning if not for divine purpose? Otherwise whatever meaning one projects is just drama queen stuff.
I love tattoos and tattoo culture, as I’ve written about in the past. I don’t ever shame people for their tattoos, or those choices. However, I have noticed something unique to the West the more I engage with tattooing ritual from around the world. In the United States particularly, people really like getting words tattooed on them. No pictures. No image accompanying it. Just FAITH or HONOR or FAMILY TIES in all caps across a forearm in black and grey. You don’t see a lot of that in Japanese tattooing, for example, where traditional tebori pieces can take weeks or months of regular sessions, as images are layered and built piece by piece. The Maori and Ainu did spiritual patterns, mostly, and these patterns communicated specific cultural meaning, which is arguably more elegant than getting SOLDIER tattooed across your shoulders.
In America, we get words. Big words. Important words. Meaningful words. TRUST. RESPECT. VIRTUE. Sometimes people also get a portrait of their dead dog with the dog’s name underneath it, which is another uniquely western tattooing tradition. I envy that kind of tattoo anytime somebody asks me what one of my tattoos “means.” I don’t think a lot of folks ask people what their dead dog tattoo means. I usually assume it’s about a dog they had once and skip to the next topic. The same is true about a guy with VIRTUE tattooed on their forearm.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what that person’s idea of virtuousness is in the America. That person might be a total freak. But the word is there. VIRTUE. Does this person’s definition of virtuousness include behavior that I find odious? Is this person’s idea of HONOR the same as my idea of HONOR if I had it tattooed across my rib cage?
I have words tattooed on my body (though not featured too centrally). I’m as American as the next guy, and I like American traditional tattooing. None of this is meant to critique the style of tattoo, or anyone who gets words tattooed on them. Tattooing is personal and esoteric. That’s what makes it beautiful.
One does have to appreciate the irony, though. A nation of people so obsessed with words that they permanently embed them into their blood, yet no apparent interest in aligning on a shared definition of virtue or morality. Free to believe in their own personal definition of a universal symbol. That’s the premise of Garvey’s view on God, for better or worse. One can’t prevent or control what someone else sees in their mind’s eye when they see the word God, whether it be a European God or the God of Ethiopia. Similarly, one can’t control the images of oppression that come to mind for many when the word God is uttered.
If God is in the Word, then any image that purports to be of God (whether in art or in the mind’s eye; whether benevolent or violent) is a human invention. Given that, how can one be certain that any image they worship is that of a prophet rather than that of a fraud? The Rastafari say His Majesty came to show us how to maneuver in this modern secular world.
I’ve decided to exit the business of deciding what is correct or incorrect, but I gotta tell you: H.I.M. was in power for a very, very long time despite many assassination attempts from less intelligent people in governments around the world. The Western playbook worked on nearly every other ruler on Earth. It didn’t work on the Lion or his territory. Every day I wake up and wonder why; try to find any rational explanation for it. I keep coming back to the Word, and the images of it we choose to embed into our blood with ink.