Tattoo You?

I Corinthians "Love is.."

Chronicles of Atlantis directs us to R.R.Reno’s fine essay at First Things. Chronicles supplemental insights are not his own, he rather “defers to the words of René Girard on originality.” Girard, as you know, is the literary scholar who developed anthropology in the service of theology.

Reno’s essay is short, moving and sad.  He sympathizes with the desire of many youth, especially the successful meritocrats, to stand out a tad in their heavily standardized and mobile lives.  See what you (th)ink.

As the tide of impermanence rises, I’m fairly sure that the tattoo fashion will expand. The human heart hungers for permanence. We don’t want to be dispersed into endless possibilities; we want to be held responsible for being a particular person. Thus, absent strong cultural forces that encourage and enforce limitations on the will, in the coming decade we will see all sorts of strange self-mutilations and radical commitments of the body. Self-mutilation will provide a powerful symbolic compensation for our inability to commit and bind the soul.

And it will become socially acceptable, perhaps even fashionable…Tasteful self-mutilation is perfectly consistent with any life-trajectory (and in our tolerant society, even the tasteless gets a free pass). In contrast, the most individual man or woman is the one who cannot do or be otherwise—and that comes from a heart circumcised by convictions that we allow to command our lives.

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Tags: girard, R.R. Reno, tattoo