Art can’t save us; Or, pimped by the Palimpsest
“Palimpsest” is a five-dollar word for the effect that occurs when you write over something, and yet traces remain of the previous inscription, even if you attempt to erase what came before. A literal version would be that you got to your math class in high-school and got seated for a history course, which just happened to take place in a room where last period an English teacher had control of the blackboard. Your instructor, wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt and tie, angrily wiped the eraser across the board, trying to efface all traces left by his predecessor, who perhaps he thought should have done him the courtesy of doing this before he came in to teach.
Short Shirtsleeves did a fairly good job, but when he started writing about George Washington’s crossing of Valley Forge, if you squinted you could faintly detect some writing about the significance of those Nasty Ewell kids in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
That’s your palimpsest.
Psychiatry is littered with invocations of the palimpsest as a useful concept to explain the residues of certain traumas. Sigmund Freud wrote a famous piece about this, which is called something like the Wunderblock.
I’m thinking about the idea now, only because it also seems to have some relevance to literature, and an age-old struggle in the arts more broadly. Artistic movements are usually split between those whose intent is to establish a break with the past, and those trying to establish a link with a past that may be receding, gone, or may have never truly existed.
Read enough about classicism (in either architecture or in poetry) and what you’ll repeatedly encounter is people who felt that they were hidebound, constrained, almost imprisoned by previous forms, or an antiquity whose significance and superiority had been beaten into their heads in high-school (or, among the very well-educated, at an even younger age).
Art Noveau/Jugendstil was a conscious effort to break away from the grab bag pastiches and ideas modern Europeans borrowed from the Romans and the Greeks. The inheritance was great, but also burdensome. Considering that the Prussian State was basically an Army with a nation attached to it, and that it plunged the continent into a conflict that bled the peoples of Europe white, it’s little wonder after the Great War that artists (already usually left-leaning) would start to distrust or even be disgusted with all of that imposing and unctuous statuary bossing them around from behind inscrutable concrete eyes on the Siegesallee (Victory Lane), in Berlin. Why not go back to the taproot, was the thinking, why not listen to what flowers or the curvature of tree branches can tell us about composition, as opposed to these secondhand relics of empires whose path along this Appian Way ultimately led to an aesthetic dead end and a whole lot of literal death?
The problem with this thinking, though, as well-intentioned as it is, is that a lot of these marble and stone palimpsests have survived for a reason. They not only resurface from time to time in cultural or artistic currents after long periods of dormancy (or even outright disparagement) but sometimes crop up in the later works of people who previously disavowed the stuff, or found themselves exhausted with this old inherited history shortly after being introduced to it.
Robert Graves once said words to the effect that the remarkable thing about Shakespeare was that he was great, in spite of all the people prattling on about how great he was. F. Scott Fitzgerald once talked about how works of literature went from being ignored, to having an illicit allure, to being taught to kids who were having to read these books under duress. It’s hard to really appreciate something, or even evaluate it fairly, when it comes not as a gift but as an assignment with a letter grade and a due date attached.
To pick up a tangent, though, the question should be asked: Say that one wants to make a total break with the past, create something de novo, ex nihilo, sui generis, from scratch (choose your poison and your idiom as well as your language, from the selections on offer above). Is that even possible? Certain artifacts, of both high culture and pop culture, seem so deeply imbedded in our minds and spirits that even if you wanted to create something genuinely primal or new, there would be traces of the past in there. Certain movies, like The Godfather or Star Wars, seem to be embedded in our collective DNA. That they are only retellings of older foundational myths only speaks to the Ur-power of the inescapable refrain in art. Our first cry (no matter how loud or where it is pitched in timbre) is a refrain, or an echo of something that came before. It doesn’t matter whether or not a bookmaker talking about his “pound of flesh” has ever heard of Shakespeare, since Shakespeare is in the air, like pollen. We’re all breathing the past every moment, whether or not we want to accept it or reject it.
In any event, the trend in the arts (from resistance to the past, to acquiescence and then to finally praise) seems be one that is as much a part of nature as it is of the aesthetic realm (and naturally you don’t need me to tell you the borders between nature and art are not only porous, but may not exist). One is young and rebellious, then settles down, and then dies. A twenty-something year-old is more likely to want to “shake up the world” with his or her writing than someone who is in their fifties or sixties, who, after having gone through this phase, realizes that we don’t shake shit. The world shakes us and that’s all there is to it. How you cope with it with your creations is your business, but the force against which you rail or write or sculpt is implacable and will eventually beat you. You will not only die someday, but you also just have to endure and accept the fact that the dead also claim some of your life, living through you and obscuring some of your own perceptions and creative drives. This is not to say that their sole purpose is to drag you down or piggyback on your lifeforce. They’re there to help, as well. The old Nietzschean saw about “gazing into the abyss” and it gazing back into you is true, but it might also be worth remembering that when you gaze out at the world, your grandfather (and Plato and Shakespeare) are also with you, checking the sideview mirrors and scanning the frozen food cases at the local grocery store as you pass the hours of your day.
You can rail against this process of course, be “angry at the Sun” as the longform poet laureate of Big Sur, Robinson Jeffers, once put it. And Philip Dick quite nobly used to rail against death, saying that there was something intrinsically wrong about it, and that he would rebel against the evil of death claiming his friends until his own dying day. But one can find such lamentations in antiquity as well. Even our baggage carries its own baggage, and faded palimpsest overlays layer upon layer, strata upon strata, of other formulations written to questions without answers.
In this way creativity is like physical exercise. It can stave off the inevitable, and mitigate the various poisons assaulting us, but it cannot alter the fundamental reality that not even art can really save us. It can provide distraction from damnation, though, which is something.
Short Shirtsleeves did a fairly good job, but when he started writing about George Washington’s crossing of Valley Forge, if you squinted you could faintly detect some writing about the significance of those Nasty Ewell kids in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
That’s your palimpsest.
Psychiatry is littered with invocations of the palimpsest as a useful concept to explain the residues of certain traumas. Sigmund Freud wrote a famous piece about this, which is called something like the Wunderblock.
I’m thinking about the idea now, only because it also seems to have some relevance to literature, and an age-old struggle in the arts more broadly. Artistic movements are usually split between those whose intent is to establish a break with the past, and those trying to establish a link with a past that may be receding, gone, or may have never truly existed.
Read enough about classicism (in either architecture or in poetry) and what you’ll repeatedly encounter is people who felt that they were hidebound, constrained, almost imprisoned by previous forms, or an antiquity whose significance and superiority had been beaten into their heads in high-school (or, among the very well-educated, at an even younger age).
Art Noveau/Jugendstil was a conscious effort to break away from the grab bag pastiches and ideas modern Europeans borrowed from the Romans and the Greeks. The inheritance was great, but also burdensome. Considering that the Prussian State was basically an Army with a nation attached to it, and that it plunged the continent into a conflict that bled the peoples of Europe white, it’s little wonder after the Great War that artists (already usually left-leaning) would start to distrust or even be disgusted with all of that imposing and unctuous statuary bossing them around from behind inscrutable concrete eyes on the Siegesallee (Victory Lane), in Berlin. Why not go back to the taproot, was the thinking, why not listen to what flowers or the curvature of tree branches can tell us about composition, as opposed to these secondhand relics of empires whose path along this Appian Way ultimately led to an aesthetic dead end and a whole lot of literal death?
The problem with this thinking, though, as well-intentioned as it is, is that a lot of these marble and stone palimpsests have survived for a reason. They not only resurface from time to time in cultural or artistic currents after long periods of dormancy (or even outright disparagement) but sometimes crop up in the later works of people who previously disavowed the stuff, or found themselves exhausted with this old inherited history shortly after being introduced to it.
Robert Graves once said words to the effect that the remarkable thing about Shakespeare was that he was great, in spite of all the people prattling on about how great he was. F. Scott Fitzgerald once talked about how works of literature went from being ignored, to having an illicit allure, to being taught to kids who were having to read these books under duress. It’s hard to really appreciate something, or even evaluate it fairly, when it comes not as a gift but as an assignment with a letter grade and a due date attached.
To pick up a tangent, though, the question should be asked: Say that one wants to make a total break with the past, create something de novo, ex nihilo, sui generis, from scratch (choose your poison and your idiom as well as your language, from the selections on offer above). Is that even possible? Certain artifacts, of both high culture and pop culture, seem so deeply imbedded in our minds and spirits that even if you wanted to create something genuinely primal or new, there would be traces of the past in there. Certain movies, like The Godfather or Star Wars, seem to be embedded in our collective DNA. That they are only retellings of older foundational myths only speaks to the Ur-power of the inescapable refrain in art. Our first cry (no matter how loud or where it is pitched in timbre) is a refrain, or an echo of something that came before. It doesn’t matter whether or not a bookmaker talking about his “pound of flesh” has ever heard of Shakespeare, since Shakespeare is in the air, like pollen. We’re all breathing the past every moment, whether or not we want to accept it or reject it.
In any event, the trend in the arts (from resistance to the past, to acquiescence and then to finally praise) seems be one that is as much a part of nature as it is of the aesthetic realm (and naturally you don’t need me to tell you the borders between nature and art are not only porous, but may not exist). One is young and rebellious, then settles down, and then dies. A twenty-something year-old is more likely to want to “shake up the world” with his or her writing than someone who is in their fifties or sixties, who, after having gone through this phase, realizes that we don’t shake shit. The world shakes us and that’s all there is to it. How you cope with it with your creations is your business, but the force against which you rail or write or sculpt is implacable and will eventually beat you. You will not only die someday, but you also just have to endure and accept the fact that the dead also claim some of your life, living through you and obscuring some of your own perceptions and creative drives. This is not to say that their sole purpose is to drag you down or piggyback on your lifeforce. They’re there to help, as well. The old Nietzschean saw about “gazing into the abyss” and it gazing back into you is true, but it might also be worth remembering that when you gaze out at the world, your grandfather (and Plato and Shakespeare) are also with you, checking the sideview mirrors and scanning the frozen food cases at the local grocery store as you pass the hours of your day.
You can rail against this process of course, be “angry at the Sun” as the longform poet laureate of Big Sur, Robinson Jeffers, once put it. And Philip Dick quite nobly used to rail against death, saying that there was something intrinsically wrong about it, and that he would rebel against the evil of death claiming his friends until his own dying day. But one can find such lamentations in antiquity as well. Even our baggage carries its own baggage, and faded palimpsest overlays layer upon layer, strata upon strata, of other formulations written to questions without answers.
In this way creativity is like physical exercise. It can stave off the inevitable, and mitigate the various poisons assaulting us, but it cannot alter the fundamental reality that not even art can really save us. It can provide distraction from damnation, though, which is something.
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