By
DAN BROOKS
Somewhere
between the release of “Reality Bites” and the closing of MTV’s sports
bureau, my generation got tattoos. We were not the first Americans to do
so, but we were the first to do it en masse. Now, two decades later, we
are becoming the first to carry them into middle age. It turns out
tattoos are permanent, even when little else is.
Like
many important signifiers of the 1990s, tattoos began as a gesture of
rebellion and became so ubiquitous as to carry no stigma at all. There
was a time when a visible tattoo disqualified you from most jobs, many
families and several religions. To be tattooed was to declare that you
would no longer rely on strangers’ good will, either because you were an
adventurer — sailor, yakuza, heavy-metal musician — or because you had such poor judgment that you were likely to alienate people anyway.
Now
the tattooed type has expanded to include hairdressers and graphic
designers, accountants and yoga teachers and — perhaps most disturbingly
— cool dads. I know a dozen people with full sleeves, and all but one
of them have children. Their sleeves now read as an indictment of
nonconformism rather than an assertion of it — which is weird, because
the tattoos themselves haven’t changed.
I
have two tattoos. The one people see is on my left bicep: a barn
swallow, which we had around the house when I was growing up. I got it
when I was 22 and obsessed with the metric shape of sentences. I
believed that I could describe the swoop of a swallow in a sentence
whose syntax paralleled the path of flight, itself reflected in the
Bézier curve between the bird’s shoulder and head. After weeks of
increasingly crazy rewrites of the sentence, I got the tattoo to
exorcise a demon from my craft.
I
also wanted poetry girls to look at my upper arm. I got my barn swallow
at New York Adorned, and I like it. They do good work there, and my
tattoo reminds me of a slightly different East Village, where I could
walk down Second Avenue with plastic wrap on my arm, covering the fresh
ink, and have a beer in Mars Bar. The bartender listened to my crazy
syntax explanation and asked relevant questions, even though no sane
person could actually be interested in that. Prosody as a visible line
doesn’t mean much to me now, but the tattoo does. That once was, the
tattoo says, and the memory remains, even as it becomes strange.
The
tattoo that most people don’t see is a six-inch asterisk on my right
shoulder blade. I got it my sophomore year of college, just after I
turned 19. The tattoo guy asked me to bring in a pattern for him to
trace, but all the asterisks I could find to print out had five points,
and I wanted one with eight. Twenty minutes of brisk outlining and six
hours of bloody fill work later, I had a recreation of the asterisk on
Anthony Kiedis’s wrist, which I hadn’t realized was the central motif in
the logo for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Over
the next few years, the Chili Peppers went from a band I sort of liked
to one that annoyed me immensely. They sound like Vinnie Barbarino
arguing with a pinball machine. Occasionally someone will see my
eight-pointed asterisk and ask if I am a Red Hot Chili Peppers fan, and I
claim to be the victim of a bad coincidence. Really, I saw Kiedis’s
asterisk and thought I could get away with it.
Now
I am 36, and if I had it all to do over again, I probably wouldn’t.
Like leaving the dishes in the sink or throwing out all the cigarettes,
getting a tattoo is a way for your past self to exert power over your
present self. But the bad tattoo involves an element of guilt that raises it beyond a simple mistake.
Consider
my high-school classmate who went to Acapulco to have her first
experience with Mexican culture and people pouring liquor directly into
her mouth as they blew whistles. She experienced a period of missing
time and woke up with “Pink Floyd” tattooed on her ankle. “I don’t even
like Pink Floyd,” she complained when she returned. It is a pleasing
story, though it is missing one crucial element: agency. Blacking out
and getting a tattoo you immediately regret is not the same as growing
to loathe your own tattoo as you get older, because it does not carry
the same terrifying implications about free will.
Getting
a tattoo may be a way for your past self to dominate your present self,
but getting sick of your tattoo is a way for your present self to
betray your past. That’s what makes the ubiquity of tattoos among
Americans my age so unsettling: When we all got them together, they
became a symbol of youth, which is a substantially less fun symbol to
have around when you are old.
Students
of Jean-Paul Sartre will recognize here the problem of existential
anguish, which he explains in “Being and Nothingness” through the
metaphor of vertigo. The sense of vertigo you feel when walking along a
narrow mountain path, Sartre writes, is not the fear that you will fall
off but rather the fear that you will suddenly decide to jump. Free will
is terrifying because it necessarily entails the freedom to change
radically in the future.
The
freedom to do anything we want later becomes the freedom to thwart our
present desires. I decide to quit smoking now, but later, when someone
offers me a Lucky Strike, I exercise my free will to decide that what I
really want to do is quit smoking tomorrow. Halfway to the filter, I
realize that actually I wanted to quit all along, and the question of
who is in charge becomes depressingly complicated.
The
tattoo tries to make an end run around this problem by indelibly
marking the one part of the self that remains tangible and consistent:
the body. It is what behavioral economists call a precommitment device,
ensuring that our present values remain in force in the future. You take
a cab to the bar when you are sober, so that you will not be tempted to
drive home when you are drunk. You wish to stop texting your
ex-girlfriend late at night, so in the clear light of morning you delete
her number from your phone.
“Asterisks
are cool,” Past Dan says. “I will tattoo an asterisk on my body, so
that people will see I am an exception to something and I will remain
cool forever.” The problem with this is that tattoos are symbols, and
their meanings change with context. “Oh, right,” Present Dan says when
he catches his asterisk in the mirror during yoga. “I used to be a
jerk.”
The
tattoo starts as an assertion of your freedom — in, say, 1998 — and
lives on as an abridgment of it. When I was 19, I could do whatever I
wanted, and the thing I wanted to do was mark my body permanently so
that I couldn’t change what I wanted in the future.
In
this light, we can read my generation’s mania for tattoos in two ways.
We might take it as an expression of ignorance. According to this
reading, I and my fellow college students got tattoos because we could
not conceive of a time when we wouldn’t want to have drawings of barbed
wire on our biceps, which is exactly the kind of hubris that
characterizes youth. That’s a plausible explanation, but it’s also
cynical. And cynicism is exactly what a tattoo denies: It asserts that
some values, be they Pink Floyd or three dolphins that represent
infinity, are eternal and unchanging. Perhaps my asterisk is not a dumb
expression of my youthful fatuousness, but a wise precaution I took
against unreliable middle age.
Surely,
my generation understands the transience of youth. We grew up watching
nostalgic television shows about our parents’ childhoods, and so we know
that the age of free love and nonmaterialism lasted approximately as
long as their adolescence. Ask any 60-year-old what defined the baby
boomers, and he’ll say their values; ask a 30-year-old what defined
them, and she’ll say the way they abandoned those values as they aged.
Seen
this way, our tattoos can read as an assertion of rebellion against
what our parents did. Unlike them, we will carry the aesthetics of our
youth into middle age, our hearts literally on our sleeves. If the
boomers have taught us anything, it’s that the trappings of youth will
embarrass you as you get older. We grasped that lesson only partly, and
we have implemented it in the most ironic way imaginable.
The
problem with thinking of our tattoos as a declaration of the permanence
of our values is that they haven’t been permanent for very long. The
women in my yoga class with koi fish on their arms may be mothers, but
they are still youngish, hip mothers. Their tattoos may look pixelated,
but they are not yet wrinkled. The indignity has not set in, but it
will.
How
will our tattoos look to the generation that cares for us? What will
the orderly think when he rolls me over to prevent bedsores and sees my
faded, asymmetrical asterisk? He probably won’t associate it with the
Chili Peppers, thank God. That music will have been supplanted by
whatever clicks and whistles enter his brain through his aural implants.
And perhaps our children will embrace some body modification stranger
than ours, making tattoos as anodyne as pierced ears.
Or
maybe that generation will be entirely too sophisticated for such
expressions of the will. Perhaps they will see the flames and skulls on
our withered forearms and remember us as the generation that couldn’t
imagine getting old, that was foolish enough to make the enthusiasms of
its youth a permanent mark.
Maybe
that will be poignant. Our untattooed newsmen often point out that mine
is the first generation of Americans who can expect to live less
comfortably than our parents. Fewer of us will own houses, and more of
us will spend middle age working off the debt we accumulated in college.
Perhaps our tattoos insist that the prime of our lives came early. The
important stuff happened when we were young, when regret seemed
impossible, and now we are working off the bill.
In
theory, I could get my asterisk removed. It’s the kind of costly
elective procedure my insurance does not cover, but the money I spent to
have it put there as a college student is roughly equivalent to the
money I might spend to have it taken off as an adult. There is something
unwholesome, though, about asserting my present self over my past in
that way. It would imply that I failed to learn the lesson of my bad
tattoo, even as I obliterated what should have taught it to me.
For
a few thousand dollars, you can erase your ill-advised Chinese
characters or the peace sign you don’t remember getting, just as you can
set the ankle you broke when you got drunk and tried to break into your
own apartment. Lasers offer us the power to enforce one self over
another in 2014, the same way tattoo needles did in 1998. Doubtless,
many of my generation will exercise their option.
The
rest of us will keep our fading, spreading tattoos, and let them remind
us that our past and present selves are not always in accord. You are
not the same person you were when you got that dolphin. Yet here you are
in the same body, dealing with the memories the other guy left behind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/magazine/the-existential-anguish-of-the-tattoo.html?_r=0&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Magazine&action=keypress®ion=FixedLeft&pgtype=article
