La Disputa

This morning, I was cleaning my bookshelves.  This is usually an ineffective activity for me; I pick up a book to dust it and two hours later I find myself having reread it, still in its dusty condition.  I haven’t yet found an efficient strategy to combat this.

Today I fell upon my teeny, tiny Book of Urizen by the poet and artist William Blake.  And the first thing that I thought as I opened the pages was, “Ohh!  It’s actually a graphic novel!”  How did I not make the connection before?  See for yourself:

This book was written in 1794.

I know I’m desperately late to write about this project, but someone just told me about it and I wondered if you guys heard of it already.

It’s called the Shelley Jackson Skin Project.  Shelley Jackson invites participants to tattoo one word on themselves- one she chooses.  All those words together are a story.  Nobody knows the story except for the participants. 

I can see the art behind the concept.  What makes me uncomfortable with the idea is that she calls particpants “words”, as though the word on their skin is now their whole of identity.  A word they haven’t chosen themselves.  Her last three lines in her “Call for Participants” epitomizes that to me. 

“Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.”

I would not disvalue this project, I think it’s fascinating.  But I would not participate.  Would you?