Thursday 12 January 2017

One Thing Leads To Another


One Thing Leads To Another- Thoughts on an Embodied Alphabet

For a time, our eleven year old daughter was coming home from school with the surface of her arms fairly covered with notes that she had written using pen and marker. In terms of body modifications, we didn’t really have concerns but wondered what was going on and she explained that she “didn’t have a notebook”. While she was purposefully nonchalant, I sensed at the time there was more to it and saw the textual decoration as a sort of performance art. Upon reflection, it coincided with a period of deepening commitment and enthusiasm for writing, as though my daughter and language were fusing.

I’ll use the metaphor of “grip” to help describe my own enduring fascination with language; it’s a literary device that can function on a number of various, immediate levels. I use language to reach for, apprehend, and to hang onto ideas. After nearly a decade and a half of friendship with Grant Collins, I resolve to use writing to investigate the meaning(s) of a tattoo embedded in his skin. It is the entire alphabet A to N on his right arm and O to Z on the left. The recording of our cafe conversation about the tattoo unfolds, beginning with an agreement that any attempt to pin language down is a conundrum, and a sort of feedback loop that never closes or ends. Nevertheless, we start with an origins story of his tattoo (an idea that never went away); then consider the particularities of font (somewhat regrettable) and placement (noting ass cheeks or ankles would have made it a different tattoo entirely). Eventually we allow ourselves to venture further into conceptual and existential territories that only a person with the alphabet tattooed on his body can guide us toward.

While the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet are a convention that is shared around the world, the tale of Grant’s tattoo is personal. He commissioned it when he was in his early twenties; in Bernhard Modern (a serif font he feels has not aged well and may not have chosen if given a second chance). The notion of this tattoo had come to him while walking and talking casually with friends, mentioning it almost as a joke. Grant kept it to himself after that though, knowing it was interesting but not fully understanding why. The impulse remained and he was fixated with the idea. A year or so later he carefully planned it out on paper and allowed it to happen, as a way of creating a sort of “constellation” with his father who had recently died.

This was to be a sort of universal tattoo. Rather than any one specific image, with those twenty-six letters “you’ve got every tattoo under the sun”...a kind of do-it-yourself, synecdochical tattoo in which the parts provide immediate access to the greater whole. The alphabet is after all, uniquely human. It is a primary matrix of abstract symbols that we use to generate codes of meaning…and all the while, our language is inextricably rooted in our bodily existence. Everything written or spoken is predicated in some way on an experience that your have had in your body. The letters on Grant’s arms extend ever so slightly below a short sleeve on each upper arm, “You’ve got your body, you’ve got your words, and that’s you”, Grant tells me as the cafe sounds surround us. Grant has literally (letter-really) composed himself within the alphabet and he explains that between each half is his “lifeblood...separated in the middle by me, by my heart”. We are enmeshed in the alphabet.


We perceive and think about the world instantaneously but for some of us, language is not in fact our best way of being. It is not our comfort zone, we might say. Grant explains that his father for instance, was a “man of feeling”, and that “you could tell there was a lot of thought going on in his head”, but eloquence was not his forte. His father didn’t exist “...in words...it was definitely in experience”. Yet we must all reside in language to some degree, however uncomfortably it inhabits us. We use language to organize and express our thoughts and feelings meaningfully, each with slight, or pronounced differences; it is what simply makes us human.   

Our discussion wanders, as cafe conversations do, skipping along through inter-species communication, (how to describe the intelligence of a chicken?), and the limits of our knowledge. I wonder, if, when a bear looks at Grant’s alphabet, will his only reading be to want to eat his arms? But then we return to the very puzzle of language; that it is a thing that both in, and of the human body. “I’m a very corporeal person and I live in my body”, says Grant “... but the mind is this thing that we’ve got that’s always working as well...I don’t understand that relationship with my body”. I’m projecting my own concerns with language now, embodied and evolutionary, and my interest in how humans have evolved, creating tools and language concurrently. Grant’s tattoo is like a tool, one that functions as fulcrum upon which hinges our recursive curiosity. His body bears the weight of this metaphor well; arms cantilevering toward hands that allow him to reach outward and apprehend the world. We finish up, and emerge from time spent deep in talk. My friend speaks happily of an upcoming rock climbing trip he will take. I think of him using his alphabet arms, clinging with both precision and power to the vertical face of the cliff. Language is both physical and mental; in Grant’s case, and for all of us, it is best kept within arms length.

Aaron Senitt, Guelph, January 2017

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