Tattoos and Permanence

Love precedes loneliness. The unconnected are not lonely. They are solitary trees in overgrown fields. Only the trees of the forest understand loneliness. They drop leaves onto small flowers too naive to understand how the sun deceives. 

I penned this many years ago in a journal and stumbled upon it today. I love it when this happens. It’s like meeting the guy I was back then; it’s Proustian. Younger me floods over

present me and strange feelings float to the top. These must be the feelings of many artists. I now read my old writing with a certain detachment from the ideas and style, an ability to look anew with fresh eyes and additional maturity and growth. This is simultaneously disquieting and stunning. What I thought was such a poignant observation expressed in such an organic metaphor, now I see as eerily naïvely eloquent. 

This is why I’ve never gone under the pen and tattooed my body. Who will I be ten years from now? I consider who I was ten years ago and barely recognize that person. 

Do I want to look at a cryptic Celtic design tattooed on my forearm from now until I expire? Will it still exhilarate me and represent me when I’m 60. Perhaps it will, but chances are it will not. My devotion to fiction reminds me of this. For years I could not get through War and Peace and then something clicked and I read it twice back-to-back. When I was twenty, at best, I would have tattooed a Bob Dylan lyric on my arm, at worst, the name of some girl I thought I was madly and eternally in love with. Today, both would have been sad mistakes. Strangely, the Dylan lyric would perhaps have turned out to be the more embarrassing. At least the old passionate love of youth is universal and thus aptly celebrated and manifested in permanence, but a song lyric? Really?

 

 

"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." 

Those who know I read avidly often ask me what is my favorite book. I cannot answer. One book does not rise head and shoulders above the thousands of significant works out there. Besides, the book I’m digging today, will not be the book I’m digging next month or next year. Like a tattoo, singling out one work and clutching it next to the heart for the rest of my life seems stifling. So to beat this point to a pulp, I ask myself what do I think about these lines I wrote all those years ago––these lines that back then I was so impressed with that I inked them into my personal notebook. 

I wrote, “Love precedes loneliness.” I still agree with this notion. If I do not value anything (love it), then I can not miss anything. Reminds me of Buddhism’s call for the

rejection of desire. Ok, maybe I could allow this body ink into my bicep. It still seems true today––it stands the test of time. I go on to write, “The unconnected are not lonely.” By buying the preceding line, I guess I have no choice but to agree here too. I am thinking of exceptions though, but most of these exceptions are people who have valued something and then lost it. The sad old guy in the chair valued family, health, possessions, idealized dreams, and perhaps lost some or all of these things; he is lonely. Yet I am uneasy with the idea that there could be an unconnected being. Isn’t desire inherent in us? Don’t we naturally long for companionship, feel lonely when we do not have it? Doesn’t a baby instinctively want to be held and nurtured? Aren’t we born lonely before we have anything to love? Freud would argue that we did 

have something we unconsciously loved––the womb. We are born lonely because we valued the womb and then lost it. Ok, let’s stop here, this is getting too much like Intro to Psychology 101, but perhaps the line is actually defensible. I’m also going to stop here because the rest of the jotting is metaphor. If metaphor is effective, it cannot be restated or translated without losing its impact. If it is trite and nonsensical, then it is not worth considering. I like that. Perhaps that is my tattoo. This is what the young me is teaching the present me. The young me would have attempted to literalize the metaphor and perhaps ruin it, but now I know when to leave things alone.