Desires of the Flesh
I love tattoos. I have not always loved my body, but I always love my tattoos.
I got my first tattoo at age twenty at a parlor on the main drag in Huntsville, Texas. Huntsville is a a town perhaps best known as the home of the “Walls Unit,” which houses the execution chamber for the State of Texas. It’s also where I went to college.
I spent four years in Huntsville. No matter where you were in town, you could always hear the mid-afternoon horn signaling the changing of the guards at the Walls Unit. I’ve never had much of an affinity for Huntsville, and while that horn was only one of many reasons, it’s always the first to come to mind when I think about the town.
By the time I graduated, I had three small, simple tattoos:
HST’s sketch of the dagger representing gonzo journalism (in memoriam)
Vonnegut’s abstract depiction of his recurring Tralfamadorians (likewise in memoriam)
My own simple drawing of Ninkasi, ancient Sumerian goddess of beer
Today, the first and second still stand alone on my calf and shoulder, respectively, in mourning for two writers who were formative in my teenage development. The third has since been incorporated into a sleeve that covers my left arm. That sleeve tells an apocryphal story of the creation of beer and looks pretty badass, if I do say so myself. The capstone in that sleeve is my most recent tattoo. I got it in the summer of 2020—the artist was in my bubble, back when we still maintained bubbles—and it is a momento mori, a reminder that we all have to die.
This may sound a bit fatalistic, given that many did not have to die in this ongoing pandemic. It is not my intention to imply that. I chose a momento mori as it was originally intended—as a reminder that life is finite and should be enjoyed while one can—and as a memorial to those we’ve lost.
Between my oldest and my newest tattoos, I got three other standalone pieces and a sleeve on my right arm as well which likewise incorporated an older tattoo.
I’m past due getting to the point. I’ve struggled with body dysmorphia since before I went through puberty. I was a very lanky kid, then a chubby-skinny young adult, and for the past ten years I have been slim and muscular. None of those changes much mattered; for the past twenty years, I’ve consistently at least some of these symptoms most of the time. (from the Mayo Clinic link above):
Being extremely preoccupied with a perceived flaw in appearance that to others can't be seen or appears minor
Belief that others take special notice of your appearance in a negative way or mock you
Engaging in behaviors aimed at fixing or hiding the perceived flaw that are difficult to resist or control, such as frequently checking the mirror, grooming or skin picking
Attempting to hide perceived flaws with styling, makeup or clothes
Constantly comparing your appearance with others
Frequently seeking reassurance about your appearance from others
Having perfectionist tendencies
Fortunately, during those same years, I came out of my shell and into my own. I don’t think I’m any more or less anxious, shy, or introverted than the average, and I truly see that as a blessing. Nevertheless, the voice has been relentless and exhausting.
And then, in recent years, it started getting quieter.
Therapy can be really helpful. It had some part in helping me. So too is finding a balance between maintaining a healthy regime and enjoying life. That sweet spot is all about understanding that perfection is like utopia—you can shoot for it, but you can’t reach it. Your best bet is understanding what you need and what is possible.
Tattoos were also a big part of helping me deal with body dysmorphia. I grew up under the guidance that one’s body is one’s temple, and that one should not defile the temple God gave you. I don’t truck with that any more. Quite the opposite. My temple is to be adorned, and adored, as I see fit, and for me that has generally meant keeping a bit of muscle and a lot of ink on display.
I don’t imagine the voice will ever go away entirely. I could be totally wrong. Maybe this is the beginning of the end, and I really have learned to love my body without reservation. However, just as I no longer truck with the idea that I shouldn’t change my body, I no longer allow myself to believe that my current mental state is the new normal.
What I know for certain is that seeing my body as an evolving tapestry has felt a lot more healthy than anything that came before. Nearly 2 years out from my last tattoo, I’m feeling very ready for another.
Judge These Covers
An artist trained an AI to create these fake pulp sci-fi book covers. I find them captivating.
I’ve always the covers from the “Golden Age of Science Fiction” (~late 1930s-1950s) were more interesting than the stories themselves. During the New Wave (~1960s/70s), the fiction within caught up with the incredible art used to draw readers. Something I didn’t specifically mention in the section above on tattoos is that my right arm sleeve was designed using pulp covers and other sci-fi art from the New Wave, with a few newer images stemming from NASA satellites and artist renderings (in particular, Hubble images and renderings of planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1).
Had I not known from the beginning, I suspect I might have initially thought these AI-generated covers were real, if a bit uncanny. Unrealistic faces, the blurring of the built world with nature, and bizarre otherworldly architecture were all commonplace in the real stuff.
On closer inspection, there are a number of oddities without much historical basis. Drastically incorrect human proportions, faces that are just a bit too far from real, and clearly misplaced cover creases ultimately give these fakes away.
More than anything, spending time with these covers points to the fundamental shortcoming of specific AI, or what is today increasingly referred to as machine learning. While algorithms trained on massive datasets can come shockingly close to producing something that looks authentic, the inability of these algorithms to properly contextualize the fed-in data is always apparent. The human on Green Glass is the Color of the Wind is not distended for any discernible reason. The frequent generation of faces in places where they don’t quite fit shows some computational equivalent of an understanding that faces often appear in human art without an understanding of why that is.
And my favorite bit. These books titles are in English. What the heck are spine creases doing on the right side of the cover?
One of the most interesting things I take away from AI-generated art is the myriad questions it begs about human-made art. Crunching the numbers on thousands of works of art only take you so far. In the end, the quantitative fails and only the qualitative can hope to dive any deeper.
Alquds / Jerusalem, 125 Years Ago
This video was recorded in 1897. I’m at a loss to say much of anything, except that the video was colorized by an AI.
So there’s another interesting, unexaggerated use for AI art.
The Dawn of Something New
Back in December, I predicted that The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow would likely be my favorite book of 2021. It is a dense, rich book, albeit a very accessible one, that invites slow digestion and interrogation. That is, it’s long and complex so I took my time and only finished it in early February.
I was right though. Favorite book of 2021 by a country mile.
In Dawn, the Davids start with a now common question: what is the root of inequality? They begin the book by presenting, and thoroughly refuting, the Hobbesian & Rousseauian views of man’s supposed natural state by way of a thought-provoking analysis of European and Indigenous philosophy through the first couple of centuries of colonization of the western hemisphere.
At the risk of being overly reductive, Hobbes claimed in Leviathan that life in a state of nature was “nasty, brutish, and short,” and that this could only be avoided by strong government. He is one of the earliest proponents of social contract theory.
Rousseau took the opposite tact. A student of Hobbes and in reaction to Locke, he also sought an answer to the question ‘what is the root of inequality?’. He put forward a thought experiment that supposed the state of nature was innocence and ignorance of evil, and that inequality was born of civil society. Once again being reductive, he said that man fell from an original paradise to create all modern ills.
Both of these men were philosophers whose work should be read with an eye out for justifications of the social order into which they were borne, a social order shaken by the Enlightenment and subsequent colonization and exploitation. (Sounds a bit like Locke, no?) Their inciting questions, at root, come down to “are people good or bad?” Interesting for debate, but hardly questions with verifiable answers.
There is some absolutely essential context that has to be considered in understanding these philosophies. Both men were looking at how indigenous Americans lived—or rather, how their lives were represented by returning colonizers and explorers—and making bold and bigoted assumptions that indigenous peoples existed in a state of nature rather than along their own social evolution.
This is one among many reasons why Dawn quickly abandons the rather uninspired question of “where does inequality come from” in favor of more interesting and less presumptive questions like “what leads to the creation of systems of inequality?” and “how do we get stuck in them?”.
To begin to answer these questions, Dawn dispenses with the ascendency of myth to science in our conception of social evolution. It abandons the linear idea of social evolution (Band, Tribe, Chiefdom, State) in favor of an understanding that societies do not exist to evolve to a predetermined state. This is supported by heaps of evidence as the authors present numerous examples of societies or peoples adopting “play agriculture” and then abandoning it, becoming hierarchical and then abandoning that. They point to societies all over the world that completely shift their social organization throughout the year, spending part of the year under clear, direct, concentrated authority and the rest of the year under no authority at all.
One of the most interesting contributions of the authors’ analysis is the new language they present as a way to conceive of historic and prehistoric societies. So much of how we talk about society is born out of, and thus significantly limited by, western theorists like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. To enable a new conversation, they attempt to define the state by three distinct methods of control:
Sovereignty, or a monopoly on violence
Bureaucracy, or the tight control of secret knowledge
Democracy, or competitive/heroic politics
These three principles of the modern state might have come together only partially in earlier societies, but all restricted one or more primordial freedoms:
The freedom to move about
The freedom to disobey
The freedom to create/transform social relationships.
I really cannot recommend this book highly enough. I can hardly recall being so affected by a work of non-fiction since I read Bullshit Jobs (also Graeber), an attempted taxonomy of modern work that acts like something of a balm for those who work, hard or not, in roles that seem to have little or no intrinsic value. Prior to that, the most Earth shattering new ideas I’d encounter also came from Graeber in his Debt: The First 5000 Years, in which he shook our understanding of the evolution of value exchange, currency, debt, and credit in human history.
Graeber passed in late 2020 from pancreatitis (though his wife believes it was connected to COVID-19 due to month’s long symptoms they both experienced before his death). Whatever the circumstances of his death, we lost an incredible thinker and writer in late 2020. I’m deeply grateful that the Davids were able to finish this book ahead of Graeber’s passing and I expect that it may have an incredible impact on a number of disciplines in the years to come.
Fascinating as usual and particularly personal with the describing of your penchant for body adornment. Also, as usual, I need to digest everything for awhile to respond with intelligence. However, I noticed in Jerusalem of the late 19th century there were no women visible anywhere..