Carefully considering corporeal redecoration

I cannot resist a blank canvas. Bare rooms make me fidget. There is nothing so boring as the… I cannot resist a blank canvas. Bare rooms make me fidget. There is nothing so boring as the simplicity of a line, an unembellished black dress or a monochromatic painting.

So, at age 11, when I looked at the relative blankness of my skin, stretched before me like so much canvas, I thought what Martha Stewart assessing a bathroom or the Visigoths storming Rome must have thought: it’s time to redecorate.

And then came the piercings – beginning in a doctor’s office and ending in an impulse buy at a Claire’s – four in the left ear, six in the right and one, a 16-gauge in my left nostril, the last long since abandoned.

It’s not enough, though. I want a tattoo, and not some cutesy heart or butterfly. I want words and symbols and everything that I stand for, or hope to stand for, inked into my skin.

And, as an adult, I have every legal right to get as many as I want.

I don’t, though. What is standing in my way?

Religion. No, stop laughing at the little atheist who couldn’t. I rejected most forms of organized religion – though my dad scoffs at this and claims that Judaism was never organized – when I was around 11, around the time I began my corporeal overhaul.

But some things linger. I use guilt as a projectile, cook a mean matzo ball and identify myself as culturally Jewish. I wouldn’t shave my head, out of respect for those who suffered in the camps, and wouldn’t get any tattoo related to numbers. These are parts of history I don’t want written on me.

So it boils down to one issue – people with tattoos cannot be buried in most Jewish cemeteries. The “dust-to-dust” thing is taken quite seriously. As you came, so shall you return. Resultantly, some Jews won’t become organ donors, and, in general, body modification is frowned on.

I’ve already violated Jewish law by getting my ears pierced. “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh … nor print any marks upon you (Leviticus 19:28).” I’m pretty sure a 16-gauge nose-ring counts as a cutting in my flesh.

Why, then, not go whole hog about tattoos? Half a sin is worse than none. But piercing is reversible, and, despite all Angelina Jolie’s claims about her “Billy Bob” tats, tattooing isn’t.

Before I continue, I just want to say that I’m not hesitating because of other reasons. I’m not afraid of stretching – my shoulder blades remain unaffected by weight fluctuations. Nor am I afraid of sun – SPF 15 every day, baby. Nor am I afraid of regrets.

The words I want are lasting – two Singhalese words, one meaning an artist, activist, agitator, a prankster, a guarder of the sacred secrets, and the other “with the urgency of love,” that is, force, desire and sexual energy. I saw them in Michael Ondaatje’s book, “Anil’s Ghost,” and knew that’s what I wanted.

Why do I cling to the restrictions of a religion I renounced? Maybe it’s because, unlike the pope, I acknowledge my fallibility.

No offense to John Paul II, but I don’t want to preclude the possibility that I’m wrong. If Judaism got rid of all that pesky ritual, deleted that Levitican atavism “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination” and renounced its faith in, well, faith, I’d join up. Maybe.

At 19, am I ready to etch my lack of religious future into my skin? Nope. For now, the only mark printed on me will remain that cool Crayola marker tattoo my friend put on my, er, convictions.

E-mail Sydney Bergman and her convictions at sbergman@pittnews.com.