'Our Own Heaven-Created Palimpsest'

I first encountered the word palimpsest more than half a century ago in Flann O’Brien’s 1939 novel At Swim-Two-Birds and found it immediately useful. Here’s the OED’s strict, non-figurative definition: 

“A parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing.”

 

In other words, a much-edited text with revisions superimposed on earlier versions – a text layered like an archaeological dig. I think of Marcel Proust’s manuscripts. More central to my thinking is the figurative use of palimpsest as a metaphor for memory. In a literal sense, I carry around mental maps of every place in five states where I have lived. The earliest date from my childhood in suburban Cleveland. In that immediate turf I can get around just fine but in subsequent decades, freeways have been constructed and buildings and other landmarks have been torn down. Trees have sprouted and others cut down. I know from previous visits that Cleveland is half-charted territory, and I can’t always trust my memory of the geography.  When I visit next week for my fifty-fifth high-school reunion, I’ll rely on my niece and nephew as navigators.

 

I haven’t lived in Cleveland and environs since 1977 and not in Ohio since 1983. I'm flying there Wednesday. It’s prudent to recall that memory is a function of the imagination. Cops know this when they interview witnesses to crimes. The mind fills in the blanks, consciously or otherwise. It pays to be skeptical of our memories, no matter how fond we are of them. Also, the unconscious is timeless. It’s still 1961 in there, and 1998. Thomas De Quincey understood. He first published in Blackwood’s Magazine an essay that became part of Suspiria de Profundis, a collection left unfinished at the time of his death in 1859 but intended as a sequel to his Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

 

“What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader, is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying among the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies.”