Tattoos

Memory transcribes one's whole life story. It is a record of all of the important actions, painful thoughts, locations and feelings that describe an individual's identity. You write memory with your life.

Writing a note gives thought a different form. A word can't necessarily carry a whif of nostalgia like memory can provide when concentrating on a years-gone scent of holiday pumpkin pie. Like how House of Danger limited the reader's options by clearly defining what such options were instead of leaving chapters open-ended, so too does a clear definition of thought on a page limit expression. A memory is about us and our relationship to our lives -- a word adds a relationship between people and language. Do synonyms always have equal emotional effect on you? Can you convey in a note all of the subtleties of a memory, both conscious and unconscious understandings and desires?

A tattoo takes this one step farther. It is thought seared into flesh. It complicates expression because it adds on yet another level of relationships to the mix -- the relationship between the body and the world. A book I read about conjoined twins (One of Us by Alice Dreger) made the point that physical presence itself constrains the possibilities of human interaction. Would you relate the same way to an old woman with glasses and a young man with a mohawk and nose piercings? Bodies mediate the relationship between individuals and society, expressing through visual cues certain things about hygiene, habits, and personality, even if such cues are misleading.

In Memento, Lennie manipulates himself through the notes that he leaves. At first, these notes seem only to constrain his choices by giving him a particular starting point for his next string of actions. Yet these notes transform Lennie's very identity, thoughts, and relationship with his personal reality, because methods of expression have many more implications than just the thought that they are supposed to express. The tattoos on his skin forever focus observers like Natalie on Lennie's self-constructed quest for revenge, and on his memory condition (because he would not need the tattoos if he didn't have it). In the case of Natalie, this leads her to be able to take advantage of him in a way that she otherwise would not have been able to.

Lennie's tattoos remind himself and everyone else of a constructed sense of identity, and transform both the way others like Natalie choose to treat him, and the way he treats himself. What he sees in the mirror is something that will follow him the rest of his life... and what he sees are words without memory, context, or nostalgia, but weighted in ways that he only catches in glimpses.