2 July 2009: "Should I regret my bloghouse era tattoo?"

This post is about recursivity. Tattoo removal is a bit of an obvious metaphor for Carles, referring to the legacy of history and the impact of irreversible decisions. Time cannot be reversed, decisions can not be unmade. A tattoo renders a moment's choice into a space on the body, that is, time becomes space written on the body. Self-injury transformed into art; or art reduced to self-injury. The soul as logo; the body as a billboard. Carles asks, "R u ashamed of the person who u used 2 b?" The answer is moot. Shame is structured by our understanding of being in time, our thing-ness.

But as Wittgenstein writes, "We picture facts to ourselves. A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs." The relation to tattooing is self-evident. But a picture cannot "depict its pictorial form" -- the only thing you can't get a tattoo of is a tattoo. Therefore the only tattoo one can't be ashamed of would be a tattoo of a tattoo, a meta-tattoo. A tattoo of a religious symbol, as Carles illustrates here, doesn't qualify. Religion itself is protection from shame; it can't be represented in a logical picture and branded on the skin in a form that doesn't at once reduce it and make it perishable, removable; yet without becoming a brand it fails to fulfill the function of anchoring the self publicly. Thus this double-edged statement: "Can’t believe I am ‘just another bro with a cross tattoo’ even though I don’t even really ‘get’ God." You don't possess religiosity, don't assume the god-like powers over time and space, simply by visibly affiliating oneself with the iconography of the deity. Nothing about tattooing allows one to understand God, even though it purports to assume some of the deity's apocalyptic power of making irrevocable decisions, of marking indelible signs. When we presume to make dread decisions of such finality, we invite shame and regret; we lack the clarity to see through to forever and after. Tattoos are sad signs of our all too fallible nature; and as we age and the images fade, the symboliize the folly of our youth and the inevitability of our death. When Carles asks, "Are my glory days behind me?" he really says, you shall never know glory.