On the Attractions of Ink and Heritage, for Lauren.

So, ma cherie, this is pour toi.

To be honest, I am not sure what motivates women like Isobel Varley. I can't see myself ever going to that extent, but what I can say is that it is certainly a rush to have something inked permanently onto your flesh. It becomes a part of you, in a way. I look at my ankle and I remember deciding to get it on a whim and meeting the insanely amorous Arab who tattooed me and charged me half-rate because he liked my red hair, and offered to marry me so that I could live in London with him and attract customers to his shop. It was an adventure! I think this association with certain memories may be a driving force behind the growth of the obsession; also, the tattoo becomes linked with adrenaline-charged experiences, and therefore you seek to recapture that feeling through another tattoo.

That's mostly speculation, however; it's not quite that addictive in my case, although I really do want another. I think another attraction of them is that they are colorful and as permanent an accessory as one can have, and if you're a woman as into her accessories as I am, you're always eager to get another bit of bling, so to speak. I think in this way tattoos are much like piercings; you incorporate your style into your very flesh, which can be misguided (e.g. clit studs, which sound like primitive torture devices, or "I Love Jesus" tattoos, which assume you won't have a midlife religious crisis) or expressive of your essential self. I like to think mine is the latter.

Lauren also says, "I don't get the whole being proud of your heritage thing, which is another issue entirely, I suppose. I mean, we could've been born anyone, anywhere, at any time... and frankly, nationalism is responsible some of the worst wars ever...so I don't get how something so arbitrary is something to be revered."

While I think she has a point, I disagree. As a military brat, I never learned to form deep connections with one particular place, and in fact that's damaged my ability to write strong fiction, in which the sense of belonging somewhere is so terribly important. Like Jean Rhys and Gertrude Stein and all those emigrants to Paris in the 1920s, I'm still searching for somewhere to be. I've found homes away from home in London and Edinburgh, both cities to which I feel a deep, emotional connection, but I've yet to find a place in which I think I could belong wholeheartedly. And perhaps I won't. Some people are forever wanderers.

Yet I connect very strongly with my heritage, although I separate that from nationalism. I am not particularly nationalistic; like Gertrude Stein, America may be my country, but London's my hometown. (All right, Gertie claimed Paris, but to each her own. I like my cities historical and damp.) I think nationalism is the idea of one's country being superior to anywhere else, and it is indeed very closed-minded and responsible for violence...as any other system in which one is made superior to another is. And that is the crucial difference I see between heritage and nationalism. As the descendant of fairly recent immigrants (my maternal grandparents were both immigrants from Europe) I connect quite strongly with heritage, which I see as a sense of history and belonging to people that I have never developed with a particular place (although London is certainly close). It's not the sense of feeling superior to others, as nationalism is, but of feeling connected to them. And while I respect my Irish and Scottish ancestors for the hardships they endured and the strength with which they faced them, I also realize - due to the fact that I'm also English, Spanish, and German - that I really am a citizen of the world, and that all of those cultures are part of who I am.

This next part will undoubtedly meet with skepticism from a few, but I also believe we likely have lived many lives before, and that our experiences in the past colour who we are now. For example, I have a deep, visceral aversion to zombies: I sleep with a nightlight because I am terrified they will materialize out of the dark, and I cannot watch films with them. This fear I attribute to having a bad experience with them in the past, which makes my survival instincts now much keener in that area. (Don't laugh; prove me wrong.) I have also experienced deep déjà vu in several places in England and Scotland connected to the Howards, to whom I'm distantly related. I've found my way through places without maps, and gotten chillbumps in warm rooms. So in a way I connect deeply with my heritage, because I believe it is quite literally part of me in both a genetic and a more deep, memorial sense. I carry forward both the memories and the genes of those who preceded me. And because of that I have strong connections to my history, and am proud to wear its symbols on my skin. Not because I feel it is superior to anyone else's, but because it is mine.

But, on the other hand, having so many different countries in my blood and lives behind mine has served to fracture me in other ways; I suffer from acute wanderlust, largely because I don't feel connected to any one place, but to all places. And I don't feel that any one country is the best in the world, because so many different nations course through me. I don't know whether this has enlightened you any, my dear friend, but it's the best I have for now.