The Tattooed Poets Project: Sue Swartz

Today's tattooed poet, Sue Swartz, hails from Bloomington, Indiana, and offers up her forearm for all the world to see:

Photo by John Narmontas

Sue explains:

This is a 2-part tattoo story. On my 54^th birthday, I had the Hebrew word for truth (emet) imprinted on my right (i.e., writing) forearm in traditional black Torah script. I wanted a useful reminder for my art; also the word contains one letter that is a stand-in for life/God and two others that spell out the word “dead”. Okay, it was a little heavy. Two years later, this past November, when I couldn’t take looking at the damn truth anymore, Dina Verplank of Voluta Tattoo in Indianapolis beautified the baldness of the lone word with a branch from the Tree of Life and a spiral/root system.

Photo by John Narmontas

 And Sue offers up this poem:

MID-LIFE

Damn. Another 3 a.m. flying dream.

This time I’m on a cement slab hurtling toward over-grown lawns

covered with large plastic pigs and spiked coat hangers.

This is not what normal people dream.

Awake, I tilt (normal, not normal) on a giant seesaw of guilt

by association and realize:

I might not really know what normal is—

My dead – crazy bastards every one – left far too many clues,

though not one legible note of navigational instruction.

Minds overtaken by spirals and whirligigs, Greek letters

and the rising price of toilet paper, they wore the warp & weave

of their affliction stoically.

Seamlessly, one might say, and with understated finesse.

Running off to Florida on a Tuesday-morning whim:

In the realm of normal.

Snapped-on pills for breakfast:

Mildly normal.

Washing, washing again, again, again. Refusing to shake

the hand of strangers:

Undeniably normal (well, yeah – you never know

who’s got what).

With garments torn & heads made bare, they bob in and out

of traffic, sit close to me in restaurants, carefully chewing

with their electrode mouths.

My dead have secrets. That much is abundantly clear.

I listen for whispers of their generous madness, find

they’ve come while I’m asleep. Bad timing is all I’ve got.

That, and fingerprints left on the towels.

No, I don’t shush them away: then I’d lose the true nature

of everything. If I don’t know what normal is, why not

claim these people as kin?

How else to name my own impurities and small derangements?

~ ~ ~

Sue Swartz is a poet, hired-gun-political writer, amateur ballroom dancer, favored grandparent, social justice activist, occasional yogini, and creator of alternative Jewish ritual. Her work has been published in Cutthroat Magazine, Lilith, 5 a.m., SmartishPace, and elsewhere. She wishes she had a book you could buy. You can find her blog Awkward Offerings at http://swartzsue.wordpress.com/. She makes her home in Bloomington, Indiana and believes that Leviticus (You are not to make gashes in your flesh for the dead nor incise marks on yourself.) goes a bit overboard.

Thanks to Sue for sharing her truthful tattoo with us here on Tattoosday! 

This entry is ©2011 Tattoosday. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

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Celina's Tattoo Gives Her Strength and Courage

Last month, I received a phone call when I was walking through the Borders at 2 Penn Plaza. I sat down in one of those comfy chairs and noticed, once I had finished speaking on the phone, that the young lady sitting next to me had an interesting tattoo on her right wrist. I asked her about it and Celina kindly shared it with us here:

Celina explained that she had originally hoped to have this done in Aramaic, but that she and her artist couldn't find the proper script, so she chose this one instead. It's an old Hebrew script, which I can recognize a significant part of, thanks to my many years of Hebrew school in Hawai'i.

The words translate to "Be strong and courageous," from Deuteronomy 31:6:

"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you."

The Hebrew phrase,     
 חִזְקוּ וְאִמְצוּ
is spoken by Moses, on behalf of God, addressing the Israelites after they have fled Egypt and are about to embark on the journey that takes forty years and eventually leads them to the Promised Land.

This phrase resonated with Celina, who had this tattoo done before she moved to New York from the San Francisco Bay area, and was about to embark on a journey into the unknown.

She credited the artist Chris Evans, in Santa Cruz, California, with inking this tattoo.

Thanks to Celina for sharing this tattoo with us here on Tattoosday!

Oh, Yada, Yada....

Yada.

Who would have thought three little Hebrew letters, Yod, Daleth, and Ain would have caused so much trouble? Put 'em all together and they spell Yada--not the "Yada, yada," of Seinfeld fame, but the Hebrew word, "to know."

In those three letters, we sure place a lot of assumption.

The online Hebrew Lexicon I often use has about 20+ meanings for the word yada. ONE of them is "to know carnally." The word is used 983 times in the Hebrew Bible. In 973 times, it means "know" in the ordinary ways you and I understand the word "know" in English. Only in ten of those times do text scholars believe yada means "to have sexual relations," and even in some of those times it probably doesn't mean "consensual, loving sex." For instance, in the Genesis 19 story--the famous "Sodom" story, the implication is "forcible sex"--gang rape in particular.

So, it turns out, that our little aside, "He knew her...you know...in the Biblical sense," is pretty much urban legend. Ninety-nine percent of the time, when the Old Testament says "know," well...the "Biblical sense" is "know means know"--just like you and I mean "know" when we say, "Oh, I know so-and-so." Whaddya know.

Yet on this little Hebrew word, some folks hang the moon and stars on so called "Biblical" notions of homosexuality. Go figure.

Genesis 19 is a lousy story to hang that on anyway. Lot doesn't exactly handle the situation in a manner we would now want to champion for modern family values, anyway. When the angry mob shows up, demanding they want to "know" the two strangers (angels) at Lot's house, what does Lot do? He basically tells them, "Oh, no, you can't have these two guys, they're my guests. But ya know what? I got a couple pre-teen daughters out back that y'all can have your way with--how's that instead?" Oy gevalt.

Couple that with the fact ancient Hebrew is, as is modern English, rife with colloquialisms. We find them in the Hebrew scriptures all the time. A Hebrew word for foot (regel) is translated as "genitals," in some passages. Some Hebrew words are used in their exact opposite context. There's a lot of room for getting things lost in translation.

Yet the moment we find a hidden or sexual meaning in some of the words, we totally go "Beavis and Butthead" over it. "Heh heh. He said "foot." he said "know." Heh heh."

So much of this, I think, is what Louie Crew describes as "the ick factor." He often points out that if we personally think something is icky, it's our tendency to have our feelings of ickiness validated. I would take it one step further and add, "If we think it's icky, we'd prefer our projection of God to think it's icky too." But I kind of find it all a little bewildering. There are plenty of sexual practices that are legal in this country, that I personally find icky, yet I don't feel a huge need to have God pass judgment over the ickiness.

All I'm saying, is, "There sure is a lot of yada, yada about yada."