For the Love of Palimpsest

I am most guilty of one thing: erasing. I put something down, only to erase the majority, which is also erased eventually. Why I have such committal issues to blank pages, will I ever really know? Probably not. I do however find these scraps of paper lying about my archives with layer upon layer upon layer of erased lines and words. I find so many in fact that my latest psychoanalysis is that I may simply love the ghost image of ideas layered in discord on top of one another. It may just be as simple as that. In which case, the ideas were never really meant to be read but solely for the act of writing and erasing.

"A palimpsest is a manuscript page, whether from scroll or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again." However, it can also be architectural, artistic, geological, astrological, even forensic. In my freshman year art history course at UT I had the joy of being taken down to the basement vaults of the art history departments and placed in front of an illuminated manuscript from the 5th century. You could see lines, indentations, and marks that didn't make it to the final inking. Ghost marks of his frustration, penance, exactness, viewable only by tilting your head just right to catch the light. As an artist I look for those marks. I look for the slightly misshapen eye brow, toe, corner of a building that shows me the spot where said artist just couldn't get it right, until finally they did. Almost, good enough for the final print. While that is not a physically evident palimpsest, it implies that one lies just below the paint itself.