the needle and the damage done
THE TATTOO: SIGN OF THE TIMES
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012.His latest
book is Notes
from a Derelict Culture. A CD of his original
songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
Tattoos are not new. What is new is their ubiquity and extent
of body coverage. They meet the eye with livid starkness everywhere
one looks, turning the atmosphere and the culture positively
fluorescent. What was once a niche market has expanded exponentially.
Practically
everyone of a certain age group, say, late teens to early fifties,
seems to flaunt these decorative glyphs and totems on every
visible part of their bodies, including the head and face. (Actress
Amanda Bynes and rapper Post Malone are recent celebrity examples.)
And judging from my experience in the change room of the gym
where I work out, these chromatic blemishes, particle illustrations
of a much wider significance, appear on the less visible parts
of a person’s anatomy as well.
It’s
a phenomenon that continues to puzzle me. Every era, of course,
is marked by its own fashion anomalies once considered normative
or appealing, which we often tend to regard as quaint, ridiculous,
garish or merely amusing—to take just one example, the
dandyism of red waistcoats, green wigs and blue hair in 19th-century
Paris. Today is no exception, though we need not look back to
find them absurd or grotesque. How one can appraise sumptuary
excesses like the fade cut, pink hair, septum rings, tongue
studs, navel piercings, and the prevalence of the orgulous tattoo
as in any way attractive boggles the mind.
As
the World Journal of Psychiatry points out in a methodological
case study focusing on statistical distributions and issues
relating to epidemiology, tattoos were traditionally associated
with deviance and psychopathology, typically criminals, gang
members and “others belonging to marginalized and counter-cultural
groups.” (One recalls those Grade B gangster films featuring
Russian mafia members, their arms, backs and chests slathered
with lurid insignia rankings.) The tattoo serves “to align
the wearer with a specific group,” offering comfort, protection
and a collective identity. Tattoos are often also used as a
kind of rebus meant to “bolster low self-esteem”
or “repair a crippled self-image.”
Some
analysts believe that tattoos serve an ultimate evolutionary
purpose rooted in sexual selection. The “human canvas”
theory postulates that tattooing is an expression of human culture
and “symbolic thought,” with skin art developed
“as a means to illustrate one’s personal story.”
The “upping the ante” theory “suggests that
tattoos evolved as a fitness indicator, enhancing one’s
appearance in the context of intersexual competition.”
In either case, the tattoo was clearly a male emblem inscribed
on the flesh of the suitor and intended to interest the female
prize, who could read his history and appreciate his vigor.
Starting
in the 1980s, tattooing gradually became a mainstream phenomenon
as a means of personal expression and as an opportunity “to
explore core aspects of self-identity.” The authors of
the study isolate five different motivating factors behind the
increasingly popular phenomenon: identity-based personal narrative;
group solidarity; embellishment of “the body as a fashion
accessory”; a “badge that reflects pain tolerance
and physical endurance, as a means of emphasizing sexuality
[or] as an affiliation with a religious or spiritual tradition”;
and an impulse enacted “for no specific reason.”
The tattoo is no longer sex-specific, with women flaunting skin
art and regarding their bodies as an epidermal canvas almost
to the same degree as men—perhaps as another foray into
patriarchal territory. Bikers and felons are no longer conspicuous
in the mix. Younger people in particular tend to see tats as
rendering them sexy or painting them rebellious. But there is
more to it than that.
French
philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky in The Empire of Fashion:
Dressing Modern Democracy argues that standards of dress
and self-presentation are assertions of individual autonomy;
“the cult of novelty promotes a feeling of independent
individuality…becomes a source of discovery, of subjective
positioning…a little adventure of the self.” The
individual decides to free himself or herself from the tacit
rules of tradition. “[O]n the occasion of each shift in
fashion,” he continues, “there is a feeling, however
tenuous, of subjective freedom, of liberation from past habits.”
A new fashion statement is thus an expression of “the
individual mastery of the self,” shedding the manacles
of the “ancestral legacy.” When not imposed by the
totalitarian state as a uniform that erases differences between
people, the fashion statement, according to Lipovetsky, becomes
a cultural value that finds its “apotheosis in the democratic
state,” affirming difference and consecrating the “private
personality.”
Yet,
the irony is inescapable. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in
Democracy in America, “in democratic ages even
those who are not alike are bent on becoming so and copy each
other.” The absolute power of the majority which distinguishes
democratic epochs, Tocqueville feared, may have a dampening
effect on thought, “thus extinguishing intellectual freedom.”
In trying to be different, we all become the same, a herd of
individuals sporting the same ideas, the same tastes, the same
mullet or fade, the same bell-bottom trousers, the same body
piercings, the same ideological fashions, the same fondness
for tattoos.
Here,
as noted, Lipovetsky takes partial issue with Tocqueville, claiming
that the “epidemic of mimesis” still permits people
more freedom than times when “religions and traditions
attempted to produce a seamless homogeneity of collective beliefs.”
Lipovetsky’s thesis is moot; his book was published in
1994, three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991, and two years after Francis Fukuyama’s The End
of History and the Last Man, when the belief in the ascendancy
of Western liberal democracy was at its zenith. Now we see that
the Soviet Union did not collapse but spread its tentacles into
every corner of Western culture, that the ideal of coercive
and exclusionary “social justice” has obliterated
the principles of merit, competence, honest justice, freedom
of speech and intellectual autonomy, and that socialism is once
again making a robust comeback. Tocqueville’s warnings
would appear to supersede Lipovetsky’s hopes.
What
has this to do with the remarkable proliferation of tattoo culture?
In one of my more facetious moments I speculated that the tattoo
in its current manifestation may be the contemporary equivalent
of the Mark of Cain. Genesis 4:15 reads in part: "And the
Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance
shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon
Cain, lest any finding him should kill him."
It
is not clear precisely what this mysterious mark might have
been: a sign, a seal, a brand, an omen, leprosy, an aura, the
Tetragrammaton itself. The Kabbalah suggests that the
mark may have been a letter of the Hebrew alphabet intended
to ward off harm, perhaps the letter vav, the binding
token, the divine ampersand. If there is a subliminal recognition
or underlying fear pervading the culture that we are at risk,
that the values on which the life of the West is predicated
are rapidly deteriorating, that we inhabit an era of social
and economic insecurity, then perhaps we are unconsciously seeking
some means of protection from the threats that surround us.
The tattoo that “marks” both individual uniqueness
and group solidarity becomes a sign of our salvation.
This
is obviously a fanciful conjecture—and yet the problem
remains of how to account for so unprecedented a pandemic of
pictograms, ink splotches, gothic images, names, letterings,
theriomorphic (having animal form) images, esoteric icons and
various indescribable maculations inscribed on foreheads, limbs,
torsos and more discreet parts. I think of the mad painter Frenhofer
in Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre
inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), who believes he is depicting
something beautiful but whose canvas is an unintelligible swirl
of florid pigments and tangled arabesques.
Ray
Wronsov in The Mark of Cain: The Aesthetic Superiority of
the Fashionable takes a fascist view of the extravagances
of fashion, treating the Mark of Cain as something like the
Mark of the Beast in Revelations, but in this case
a laudable banner under which the bearers of beauty, strength
and originality “exclude and torment the unworthy.”
Wronsov would regard the omnipresent tattoo as a symbol of the
powerful and elect determined to set themselves off from the
commonplace and ultimately to eliminate those considered weak,
ugly and ordinary. His theory is also a fanciful notion but,
in its less bloodthirsty manifestation, would imply that the
tattoo is the sign of the new patriciate, the cultural elite,
the beau monde—quite literally, the glitterati
who embody Lipovetsky’s consummate ethos of aristocratic
privilege.
By
all accounts tattoos are not a benign phenomenon. They can expose
their bearers to HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C. Tattoos can affect
the way a body sweats, causing loss of electrolytes. They accentuate
the risk of infection and enhance the possibility of melanoma.
Pregnancy and weight gain can lead to tattoo distortion. As
plastic surgeon Cormac Joyce writes, tattooing “involves
the integration of metallic salts and organic dyes into the
dermal layer of the skin,” which may produce “malignant
transformation.” Justin Caba in Medical Daily
notes the rise of what is called “tattoo regret”
and “tattoo remorse,” especially in light of its
difficulty of removal and sometimes permanence. As people grow
older or gain in maturity, they may come to realize the indignity
and indeed deformity associated with the tattoo.
Nonetheless,
the tattoo persists as a sign of the times. It is not merely
a moderately popular eccentricity or cutaneous affectation,
which in itself or as a single instance need not be offensive.
But in whatever way its extraordinary prominence and body coverage
may be interpreted, it strikes me as a massively tribal phenomenon
involving the carpeting of the body on the assumption that such
overlays function as a species of armor or a web of apotropaic
patterns—that is, signs intended to parry or deflect evil
influences—or a narrative of the self graven in a visible
medium. Such figures or devices may come to the fore when a
culture senses the loss of authentic identity or begins to suspect
it has no right to exist, that it is subject to the curse of
erasure. They represent an attempt to impose meaning in a worried
recognition that meaning has gone out of the culture. We live
in a time of dark intuitions, a time of endings, in which the
integrated and substantial self is eroding under the corrosive
effect of the loss of historical confidence, of gender fluidity,
runaway multiculturalism, political correctness, vast educational
deficits and the rise of collectivist ideology. Like Cain, we
are under threat for our complicity in an act of violence—call
it cultural homicide.
In
such times a generation may strive to mark itself as singular
and separate, as an assembly of heroic individuals reminiscent
of Nietzsche’s Übermensch rising above the
“last man” of a dying culture—fighting the
recognition that they are themselves these “last men.”
They see themselves as the initiates of the future, as special
cases, as different from the common ruck, as “marked out,”
as deserving of redemption, as unique and distinctive. Unfortunately,
it is a generation that has little to distinguish itself apart
from the external excrescences of bark art, signaling an unmerited
estimation of the self. Such ostensible badges of uniqueness
are really emblems of desperation and one-dimensional effigies
of mundane sameness, in effect, disfigurements that betoken
an inner suspicion of weakness and vulnerability, and of the
need for protection.
What
a tale a tattoo tells! Admittedly, my reading of a cultural
contagion is merely a rarefied hypothesis, yet it may enjoy
a degree of plausibility. It may be argued that in the absence
of spiritual depth and intellectual substance, these stamped
epitomes of a culture in extremis seek to establish an epidermal
identity as the only psychic option remaining to them. In a
time of historical amnesia and hedonistic excess, they call
attention to themselves in the only way they know how—through
an emblazoned superficiality. Perhaps they may be saved. They
bear the Mark.
