Back Ink

I’m in the gym, changing. Guy asks, “What’s the tattoo mean?”

“Huh?” I said. “Uh, well …”

I’ve been doodling the triangle thing all my life. Recently I learned it’s known as a tribar, or a Penrose Triangle, depending on whom you ask. One of the simpler optical illusions to sketch. An impossible object, a never-ending circle, a Strange Loop, a three-pointed Möbius strip made of angle iron. However you want to think of it.

It has no beginning or end, but it does have three corners. What’s so special about three? It’s a mystical number, a powerful number. To me, it’s the first real prime (I always thought of one and two as cheap imitations of prime numbers). A three-legged table is the most stable. And you might say Man has three natures: Mind, Body and Spirit, distinct yet interdependent. A man is most integrated with himself and the world if he has these three parts of his nature in balance.

In my opinion the early Christians used this powerful fact to inject some truth into their teaching. The Holy Trinity is a translation of the above into Christian mysticism. Patris, God, the Father, the mind, wisdom, logic, rationality; Filius, the Son, the body, the physical experience of life, passion, love, sensuality, pain, our animal nature; and Spiritus Sanctus, the Holy Ghost, the spirit, the soul, the ineffable mystery that we know is real yet is not of the other two.

It might be a worthy goal for a person to get these three into balance. How he does that, I’m not sure. I’m doing all right on the Body part but the other two, well, I don’t know. But I like to think that if I do get it all into balance, the result will be an outpouring of beauty, of love, of creativity. Something positive, anyway. I signify that belief with a cascade of musical notations. For me, music is the purest form of creation and love and beauty. For others it will be something else but for me, it’s music.

“Huh,” he says. “I only asked cuz I play bass and I have like a bass clef on my arm. OK, see ya.”

I have other comments, too. First, the tattooist pissed me off. I wanted the proportions exactly right and used CAD software to create the template the first guy used. Later on I went to a local parlor for the shading. He didn’t shade it like I sketched it. He got all creative on me and fucked it up. But what the hell. A tattoo isn’t supposed to be perfect. It’s a collaboration between the artist and the easel, the needle and the skin, the idea and the moment. It is what it is and just as there is meaning in the intent, there is also meaning in the unintended consequences.

Second, someone out on the internet says the Penrose Triangle “is used as a symbol in the religion of Empirical Universalism, asserting the need to transcend any system of belief” but I think they just made that up cause it sounded good. The usual half-meaningful gobbledygook. I’m all for transcending systems of belief, of course, but you can’t transcend them all. Each new transcendence is a new system. There’s simply no escaping the strange loops you’ll get caught up in. Like an ant on a Möbius strip, you’ll twist and turn and end up in the same place no matter how hard you try to convince yourself you’re really getting somewhere. Best thing is to accept you have beliefs and go from there. I have beliefs. I have an entire system of beliefs. It doesn’t happen to include God. But it definitely includes belief in God (i.e. belief in belief playing a real and active part in this world).

Last, I tried to work Earth, Wind and Fire into my mystical trinity thing too but I don’t know if they exactly fit. Well, they do: Wind, Earth and Fire can signify Mind, Body and Spirit once you realize my Mind is mainly spewing out a bunch of Wind on this subject anyway.