Spring storms over the Arizona high desert kept me
inside for a couple of days. So I picked up a translation compendium of Rumi’s
writings and sat by the window to listen to the rain.
I thought I had read most of his writings translated
in English. Yet I was surprised to find a poem about a man who decides to get a
tattoo of a lion’s face but after seeing the needle and learning about the
pain, backs off. The barber who was
going to tattoo the lion’s face says to the squeamish man:
“O
brother, endure the pain of the lancet, that you may escape from the poison of
your miscreant self,
For
sky and sun and moon bow to the people who have escaped from self existence.”
While the poem is typical Rumi concerning
transcendence and self effacement, it made me wonder if tattoos were common in
his days. So, while surrounded by the aroma of the wet sand, juniper and
mesquite trees, I explored the topic.
I learned that tattoos and body piercing were common
in Persia thousands of years before Rumi’s time. Specifically statues dating
back to the Achaemenid Empire show tattoos and earrings on kings and soldiers.
Things may be returning full circle as in 2015 the
US Army changed its regulations about solders and tattoos and now, under the
Army’s new tattoo policy, soldiers will be able to have ink on their arms and
legs as long as it isn’t visible in the Army Service Uniform.
I knew about soldiers or at least the Japanese Samurai
who, as outcasts, tattooed their bodies both as identity and for the
scare-factor. I have seen facial tattoos in descendents of the Atayal tribe in Taiwan. In ancient China
criminals were tattooed on the face; in ancient Egypt tattoos may have had
medicinal purposes, as anthropologists have suggested that many female mummies
had tattoos on their pelvic area perhaps as a cure for pelvic peritonitis.
This got my attention and I searched more about the
role of tattoos in folk medicine. Surprisingly it was not folk medicine but
survivors of cancer after western medical treatment and surgery who have
adopted tattooing as a new way of self expression. Especially mastectomy
patients who have found tattooing as a way to turn their disfiguring scars into
a form of art and self-expression.
How wonderful!
Actually there is a website called P.Ink that
connects tattoo artists with mastectomy patient. One artist is quoted there
saying:
“What
was clinical became beautiful again… We turned sterile into sensual. We took
back control.”
And that made me think about Rumi’s statement about
self-existence. If Rumi knew that tattooing could restore self esteem,
confidence, femininity and sensuality, would he still question the pursuit of
self-existence?
… I looked in my “Ali Baba’s Photo Cave”… I had
taken pictures of men with elaborate tattoos.
Placing them within the context
of when and where I took these pictures, I wondered -- was it art? Search for
identity? Self existence? Or perhaps simply therapeutic?
I may never know.
May 16, 2015
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015
