Palimpsest –
n: a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing.
The palimpsest, both as image and concept, is a map-key for both the physical environment and the psyche, demonstrating how the new is formed upon the remnants of the old. The layers of the palimpsest question the nature of truth: what once was taken as fundamental becomes broken into a mosaic of fragments composed of trans-historical elements. Truth, we may say, is palimpsest: an ongoing evolution of understanding that echoes both the old and the new in a metamorphosing state of comprehension. From this point of view, dogma, fundamentalism and essentialism are errors born out of a misunderstanding of truth as something fixed, mistaken for the dynamic of a reality that is in perpetual flux. This inadequately short and piece considers palimpsest first in the context of the environment, and secondly in the context of the psyche.
The text of a palimpsest lays itself down over the physical world in many ways. It is apparent in the layers of geology where bedrock is eroded and undergoes further sedimentation or metamorphosis, erosion, and so on. As one crosses the landscape she discovers the unique physical environments of different geological ages juxtaposed within yards of each other. Consider the Peak District, where the limestone plateau lies sandwiched between gritstone moorlands. The gritstone is the upper level, the newer rock, and was laid down upon the limestone, the older rock, when a river delta dumped its coarse grit onto a shallow tropical seabed millions of years ago. Since then, the land has risen and eroded, revealing at ground level the older rock in juxtaposition to the newer rock.
Another physically palimpsestic environment acts as home to most of us – the city. In reflecting upon the process of writing his poem Dore Moor to the Marples Hotel, Rob Hindle describes walking into the city along the approach route of the blitz bombers:
It also took me through a variety of terrains – residential, commercial, manufacturing, as well as those interzonal regions of allotments, subways and derelict sites which, having little attraction for planners and heritage-mongers, tend to persist and therefore provide authentic glimpses down the cracks into some past or other.[1]
This mapping out of our internal historical associations onto the external world can be described as psychogeography. When a writer describes a journey through a palimpsestic environment, he also reveals the psychological state provoked by such an environment. This psychological state, according to the nature of palimpsest, is in a state of change and composed of many cultural elements.
The late German writer, W.G. Sebald, can, simplistically, be described as a psychogeographer. The Rings of Saturn takes a barren walk through East Anglia as its narrative framework, and palimpsest may be observed in the landscape, but also in the text itself. The physical words of Sebald’s novel traverse literally across layers of history and territory, as the narrator intersperses seemingly tangential and associative trains of thought within with the description of the walk. The genius of his dis-unified clarity can also be seen in Vertigo, where each chapter presents a discrete discordant juxtaposition, the alternate layers of the palimpsest of the mind.
Eliot’s The Wasteland displays palimpsest in more than one way, though it is particularly evident at the close of the poem, where the contemporary register decays into distinct heteroglossia:
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon –O swallow swallow
Le prince d’Aquitane à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
This passage can be read as an exposure of psychological palimpsest, where the multiple languages that make up a single person’s coherent consciousness become jumbled and juxtaposed. As well as European languages, an older form of English appears alongside contemporary English and Sanskrit. If our rational understanding of the world is formed through language, then the influences and voices that are written atop each other are many, from which dispersion we collate and unify. This passage presents a regression away from unity and towards dispersion, revealing the bones of the palimpsest from which a mind is formed.
[1] Rob Hindle, Longbarrow Press, prefacing the forthcoming anthology The Footing.
East Peak Poetry 