11: Organically Adorned and Tired
The original plastered ceiling and newer library in the Branch Museum of Architecture and Design, Richmond, VA.
A Short Story / Meditation
A cowboy captured in a photo at the top of a castle casts a glance at twisting chimneys, ponders a view, and speaks on the act of noticing as worship. He populates an otherwise human-less photo of building and mortar taken before the ceremony. The ceremony is tattooing my skin in long, drawing, artistic lines and stippling in the shape of a fawn. I am fauna craving the sweet redundancy of a fawn’s likeness on my skin. Skin, derma, so close to the word dream. Flora are not here unless one can extract them from brick like long forgotten fossils, or from the wallpapered walls of old money construction we re-enter together through a Tudor-style wooden door.
But it is not the seventeenth century and we are not royalty. We are instead contemporary visitors, artists, and friends with a common desire to create experiences that admire into a beautiful void. The tattoo studio is a room rented, the rest of the castle now a museum I had the opportunity to tour. The man living outside the photo is also arguably not a cowboy, though he is dressed like one. Modern cowboys go West into a fading Americana riding motorcycles from back East. Think Hopper--Dennis--or even Edward works if we ponder alienation.
Nighthawks, Edward Hopper, 1942
Many people lost their outward identifiers long ago, shedding recognition for evocation. We now look in mirrors adorning and hoping to evoke a time, a place, an association of some kind. In the long organic line of evolution, we have somehow begun to turn back, confused by our separation, hoping for reconnection in a community of ever-deviating subsects of human types. We want to look around and be able to find each other by a glance if we can, and that is trying. Tattoos are a way of doing so regardless of clothes, knowing that our often flimsy and nondescript coverings are no longer signifiers in any real way as they once may have been, but instead only by perception. And perception is more and more often still wrong, vacant, or misled.
At least now that the cowboy, in proper bucking fashion, has coolly portioned art onto my arm in the shape of a deer, someone can assume l like animals or nature no matter what I’m wearing (granted that portion of skin be visible, and I a willing gallery). That is itself a hilarious oddity in the stroke of weird luck that led us to the modernity of ever-deviating human expression. Maslow’s hierarchy be damned, the triangle upended. I pay its amorphous value and leave. I leave with tattooed hope and rejoice in the beauty of art, though my jacket covers it in the cold November air, and the thrill has dulled to a puffy, beautiful wound. I, as a body, depart permanently enriched, organically adorned, and tired.
