spiralling

I've set up everyone in my class to create a photographic self-portrait for next Tuesday, all too well aware of the difficulties in making choices that are involved in that particular exercise.   One marker of self is surely one's choice of tattoo; one's indelible label - and the more-or-less irrevocability of one's skin signage was what stopped me for decades from being able to choose whatever emblem it might be that seemed sufficiently adequate (and meant that, at the same time, I used to fantasize about writing a still unwritten short story about someone with a name tattooed on their fingers who, after their break-up, felt obliged to go looking for possible dates with that same name).   

Spirals have always appealed to me enormously - indeed I've just reserved a room for sometime in late May in Providence, Utah, so that I can go and visit Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, curling like a fern frond into the Great Salt Lake.   I think that I had in mind a Hopi spiral, which represents the number of journeys made by a tribe to the four corners of the earth - and more abstractly, an opening up of consciousness (something that seems pretty suitable for my general wanderlust, both physical and mental).   For other cultures, spirals have symbolized the sun, the universe in constant motion, life/death/rebirth, and dizziness.      Madame de Stael cheerfully noted that "the human mind always makes progress, but is a progress in spirals."

This particular spiral was in fact drawn by Amanda Odell, teacher, former Bread Loaf student, and jewelry designer - and this spiral was on a little tag attached to some earrings that she gave me, and it was a simple matter to hand it to a tattoo artist to be turned into a transfer.   It also has the merit of not being datable (what of this current celebrity fad of having large Latin quotations inscribed on one's shoulder, or a thin stripe of Hebrew down the back of their neck? And we know someone in LA who has the first hundred numbers, I should think, of Pi [3.14159265 etc etc] tattooed, very elegantly, on his arm, which I can imagine that one might get bored of).   But to me, there's something aesthetically and symbolically very satisfactory about my own skin marking: it simultaneously manages to be both highly personal, and non-shocking if on public view.    Although I was a little puzzled yesterday, when the doctor asked me if it was my only tattoo - the puzzlement came from the fact that it was the nearest thing that I had on to clothing at the time.   Maybe she's used to people having tattoos inside their lips, like the numbers that are used to identify racehorses?