Written on the Body
Would you ever get a tattoo? (This is the first thought worthy of the name I've had for a week or so, hence my uncharacteristic blog silence.) I considered it for the first time recently when I came across a couple of lines of poetry which I have known for years but suddenly read with new eyes, and wondered how it would be to have them indelibly etched on some hidden bit of me. I also made a new friend who has many tattoos and piercings and who looks rather beautiful for it. Or maybe he's just beautiful.
So, Tom's post about things one would never do was timely. Not long ago tattooing would definitely have been high up my list, along with going to bed with more than one person at a time, drinking milk from the carton and becoming a management consultant. (Incidentally, it is very hard to think of things one would never do. Most are criminal, or obviously grossly immoral, which is surely not the point; otherwise I can only think of things which would only arise out of some kind of psychological distress, and are therefore outside the relevant realm of volition. Just about everything else is something I would conceivably do, and/or have probably done, but am embarrassed about. I don't think this counts. We could all claim never to listen to Radio 1 or that we would never cheat on our partner, but the first case is just snobbery and the second mere optimism. The project seems to be designed to highlight quite specific moral convictions, of which I have none, or to give an opportunity to air high-mindedness, which I am not going to take. Can anyone do better?)
I digress. Tattoos haven't appealed to me in the past. I have never had a rebellious streak, phase or even idea. I am a physical coward. I am ineffably vain and never fancied my lovely skin sullied with grubby blue-green smudges. I have an absurd but residual anxiety that they are essentially downmarket. I am easily bored.
I have also never quite understood the need to impose these marks of ownership on a body which, for better or worse, is plainly mine in any case. True, I don't think of my body as being *me* in any real sense, but it is the only one I have, and satisfyingly and distinctively mine in all kinds of ways. But then, if one is happy for one's body to be a physical testament to the cumulative story of one's life, I wonder how considered and deliberate markers and modifications might be different from or worse than stretch marks and appendix scars and wrinkles, muscles you did or didn't tone, weight you gained or lost. Why not a message, or an image, which is both as ephemeral and as permanent as a healed scar?
But amid all these good reasons not to bother, here, if anyone is interested, is the poem which makes me want to do it anyway. We can't be wholly sure about all the words: the first line is fairly secure, but the second is a mess of textual conjecture. As one critic has it, "While the statues at Olympia are beautiful in their broken state, with only empty air to suggest what has been lost, it is difficult to leave the lovely first line of this couplet sitting atop a pile of ruins. We can only hope for Sappho's indulgence."
Evening Star, you bring back everything the shining Dawn scattered,
You bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child back to its mother.
So, Tom's post about things one would never do was timely. Not long ago tattooing would definitely have been high up my list, along with going to bed with more than one person at a time, drinking milk from the carton and becoming a management consultant. (Incidentally, it is very hard to think of things one would never do. Most are criminal, or obviously grossly immoral, which is surely not the point; otherwise I can only think of things which would only arise out of some kind of psychological distress, and are therefore outside the relevant realm of volition. Just about everything else is something I would conceivably do, and/or have probably done, but am embarrassed about. I don't think this counts. We could all claim never to listen to Radio 1 or that we would never cheat on our partner, but the first case is just snobbery and the second mere optimism. The project seems to be designed to highlight quite specific moral convictions, of which I have none, or to give an opportunity to air high-mindedness, which I am not going to take. Can anyone do better?)
I digress. Tattoos haven't appealed to me in the past. I have never had a rebellious streak, phase or even idea. I am a physical coward. I am ineffably vain and never fancied my lovely skin sullied with grubby blue-green smudges. I have an absurd but residual anxiety that they are essentially downmarket. I am easily bored.
I have also never quite understood the need to impose these marks of ownership on a body which, for better or worse, is plainly mine in any case. True, I don't think of my body as being *me* in any real sense, but it is the only one I have, and satisfyingly and distinctively mine in all kinds of ways. But then, if one is happy for one's body to be a physical testament to the cumulative story of one's life, I wonder how considered and deliberate markers and modifications might be different from or worse than stretch marks and appendix scars and wrinkles, muscles you did or didn't tone, weight you gained or lost. Why not a message, or an image, which is both as ephemeral and as permanent as a healed scar?
But amid all these good reasons not to bother, here, if anyone is interested, is the poem which makes me want to do it anyway. We can't be wholly sure about all the words: the first line is fairly secure, but the second is a mess of textual conjecture. As one critic has it, "While the statues at Olympia are beautiful in their broken state, with only empty air to suggest what has been lost, it is difficult to leave the lovely first line of this couplet sitting atop a pile of ruins. We can only hope for Sappho's indulgence."
Evening Star, you bring back everything the shining Dawn scattered,You bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child back to its mother.
posted by Scarlet at 1:40 am
1 Comments:
Er, no. I only need to look at photos from 3 years ago to think ''god what was I wearing, that's hideous!'', so I reckon if think that about clothes, god knows what I would think about a permanent ink marking.. Plus, when I was 14 i thought the coolest thing, that I would love *forever* would be a daisy chain around my ankle. And now I think it would be unbearably naff. 'Nuff said.
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