Moving Forward Through the Flaming Doors

I never really thought that I would get a tattoo. I had never even been particularly interested in the idea of getting a tattoo before, in fact. But I had been talking with my therapist and with a few friends about the usefulness of having an external reminder that I can use to focus myself when I'm struggling with memories of my childhood. I had been using the friendship bracelet that my daughter made for me for more or less that purpose--when I felt really sad and lost, I would sit and fiddle with the bracelet and think about the people who love me and it helped. I had not connected those conversations with the idea of a tattoo, but I had connected them to a long-running interest of mine, the need for rites of passage into adulthood. When my wife got her tattoo, it clicked into place for me, this role that tattoos have long played as rites of passage and how the right image could serve as a reminder for me that I am an adult, that I can put my past behind me and choose new paths for myself, that I can get rid of the old scripts that have haunted me from my past and write new ones. Once I started thinking in those terms, I couldn't get the idea out of my head and I kept toying around with different images.

I thought about a few surrealist art pieces that I could interpret and looked at some designs based around natural, healing images that were cool, but nothing seemed quite right. I realized that what I really wanted was some sort of a phoenix image, but then a phoenix didn't seem quite right either because it was too on-the-nose. The idea of putting a supernatural creature into a tattoo seemed wrong for me, too, because what I was looking for was not something magical and supernatural but something uncanny--an image that would help me to reimagine the ordinary experiences of my life. I don't know, but it might be that I am the first person to ever sit down to reread Ludwig Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_ and essays by Stanley Cavell looking for ideas for tattoo images. Reading Cavell's "The Uncanniness of the Ordinary" in this context, I was struck by his claim that his "intuition of the ordinariness of human life, and of human life's avoidance of the ordinary" responds to "the fantastic in what human beings will accustom themselves to, call this the surrealism of the habitual--as if to be human is forever to be prey to turning your corner of the human race, hence perhaps all of it, into some new species of the genus of humanity, for the better or the worst." I don't think it's exactly what he means by those lines, but it brought before me the ways in which I had habituated myself to my abusive past and the ways in which that mentality of victimhood had infiltrated my thinking in all kinds of ways, without my even being aware of them because I had so taken it for granted. I was also struck by these lines--discussing Wittgenstein's response to his interlocutor regarding pain, that "Other people cannot be said to learn of my sensations ony from my behaviour":

"Only" here suggests some disappointment with my behavior as a route to the knowledge of what is going on in me, our route faute de mieux--not a disappointment with this or that piece of my behavior, but with behavior as such, as if my body stands in the way of your knowledge of my mind ... [It] is not merely a sign that we, say, underestimate the role of the body and its behavior, but that we falsify it, I might even say, falsify the body: in philosophizing we turn the body into as it were an impenetrable integument. It is though I, in philosophizing, want this metamorphosis, want to place the mind beyond reach, want to get the body inexpressive, and at the same time find that I cannot quite want to.

However, Cavell's essay did not help me come up with any images I was happy with. I was sitting at my desk thinking about how to find a phoenix image that was more uncanny than supernatural, when I looked at a Wilco poster I have hanging on my wall, from their show at the Firestone in Orlando on November 5 (of 2006?). I have loved this poster since I first saw it online, though I had never really thought a whole lot about it, beyond connecting it (whether it was intended as such) with these lines from "War on War":

Just watching the miles flying by
Just watching the miles flying by
You are not my typewriter
But you could be my demon
moving forward through the flaming doors

You have to lose
You have to learn how to die
if you want to want to be alive, okay?

I just thought that it was a really cool image. But I looked at it and realized that it was essentially a phoenix image, but with a typewriter substituted for the supernatural bird. And a typewriter? I mean, how perfect is that, given my love of reading and writing and my chosen profession? And, really, how cool is an image of a flaming typewriter to remind myself that I can burn the old scripts that my childhood provided me and write new ones? And then I went out for a drink with an English professor friend of mine and I told him about what I was thinking of doing and his first reply was "manuscripts don't burn," the line from Mikhail Bulgakov's novel _The Master and Margarita_, a book that is in part a satirical response to the dangers of censorship. I had never read the novel, and if I knew the line I had forgotten it, but I poked around a bit and found that the phrase has become a sort of rallying cry for resistance to book banning and for authors suffering from oppression.