A few years ago I'd toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo. I was looking for something that would be meaningful. I wanted to go with meaningful because it seemed that something as permanent as death and taxes should have some sort of depth beyond a heart with "Baby Doll" scrawled across the top of it. I finally hit on the Latin phrase "Esse quam Videri" on a sash across a Celtic cross. The translation is usually given as "To be rather than to appear." (I favor my personal translation, "essence trumps appearance" but I suppose 10,000 translators can only be partly wrong.)
As I was working through the decision process of what tattoo I'd get, it occurred to me at some point that I should have a value of some kind informing my decision. I decided that the value would be that anything that I would be willing to make a permanent part of my body should be something that I'd be happy to have on my tombstone.
A few years ago, I went back to Kansas on a journey to become acquainted with my father's family. In the tiny town of Morrill, my last surviving uncle introduced me to a great many McKims. Sadly, most of these were dead by the time I got around to making their acquaintance. My great grandfather had had 14 children and my grandfather had had 9. They both lived in the same town. McKim's own a lot of real estate in Kansas. Most of it is owned six feet at a time.
The poet Kenneth Rexroth has this epitaph on his tombstone: "As the full moon rises / The swan sings in sleep / On the lake of the mind." What's interesting here is that a statement marking the finality of death could be so open ended. There's probably enough images there to turn the whole thing into a drawing...and then a tattoo.
A good epitaph makes you curious about the life that produced it and makes you just a bit sorry you can't ask that person what those few words mean. I had the chance to meet Rexroth a couple years before he died. I turned it down because I'm not good at being a fan. I am one but I'm no good at it.
I never got a tattoo. I never came up with an objection to getting one. At some point I just stopped considering it at all.
Thinking about the similarities between tombstones and tattoos, I realized at some point that there are differences as well. The big one is that life goes on after a tattoo. Why permanently mark something that's designed to change?
Our lives are meant for something. In almost no matter what state we find ourselves, a huge component of any human state isn't state at all. It's change. Imagining that things will stay the same or even go on in the same way they always have is as inaccurate as it is inappropriate.
I don't know what if anything will eventually mark my final resting place...which is an odd choice of words because I don't think it's really final and I don't believe I'll be resting, at least in the sense of being inactive. No, life goes on and passes anything that could ever be written on a tombstone.
In the end, I think there isn't an end at all, either to our current state or to our presumed final one. In the end, tombstones and tattoos are memorials to an illusionary permanence that never existed in any form. At core, they are at one level anyway, monuments to a faulty perspective on the nature of life. In the end, there is no end.
I still might get a tombstone. I think I'd say something like, "This is my Hallmark card to you. I've gone on and you will too." Nah, don't worry. I won't really do that. My tombstone might just wind up having exactly the same kind of permanence as my tattoo...You never know though, in the end I might go for something like "Love you. See you soon." Why not? I always have.
No comments:
Post a Comment