welcome, double agent

The image above hails from an 18th century Philadelphia sailor’s tattoo, recorded in his application for US identity papers. Some of the soldiers applying for identity papers were US born but many were born in Great Britain and had served on British ships in the past. At the time, sailors were anxious to provide proof of US citizenship, as British ships often commandeered sailors from other ships on the high seas, claiming they were British citizens and subjecting them to corporal punishment that included harsh crack-downs on homosexual behavior. Sometimes, the dates and initials (SEE ABOVE) tattooed on sailor’s arms, were a coded tribute to a dead male sweetheart or another sailor/lover.

These papers required a description of scars and tattoos that proved identity but also attested to years at sea in American service. Some sailors had their “birthplace” tattooed to their bodies; others chose images from the spread eagle ‘genre’; curiously, most chose to forgo a description of scars on their backside. For former slaves, a description of raised whelts (from whiplashes) would easily identify them as runaways. For British sailors, these scars from the whip indicated that they had served on a British ship, where this punishment had become institutionalized.

Welcome, double agent.

Loyalty is Complicated.
(Loyalty to country and lovers, family and self, mysterious ethics- you name it.)

My feeling is that intellectually we begin to close down as soon as we give in to generalized notions of loyalty (often a loyalty to cause that has already begun to lose its way). To embrace this notion of the double agent is an attempt to hopefully reroute blind loyalty, to instigate a continual rethinking of hunger, allegiance, ability, and kindness.

The title of this blog is heir apparent to this line of questioning, this conversation about loyalty and its subcategories of belief, fear, and desire.