144. Greater than the Sum of Parts – Maura Kate Costello
Anne Frances, Untitled, 2021
A palimpsest is something, usually a written material, reused or altered that still bears visible traces of its earlier form.
Palimpsests have fascinated me for years, since I first learned of them in a college English class. A palimpsest is something, usually a written material, reused or altered that still bears visible traces of its earlier form. The word comes to us from Greek via Latin. It means "scraped clean and ready to be used again," which describes the ancient Greek practice of writing on wax-coated tablets with a stylus, then smoothing the wax surface and writing again.
So many questions arise when I think about palimpsests. I wonder, What was written there before? How much remains of the first text? How far back do the layers go? Why was it erased—to hide the old, to make room for the new, or both? How do the two texts live together on that one page? Do they create something greater than the sum of their parts?
Adding a metaphoric lens, I think of our lives as palimpsests. We are constantly revising our own narratives to integrate new experiences, knowledge, and identities. I think of cities, too, with their ever-changing structures and people.
I lived in New York most of my life, and I see it as the greatest palimpsest of all. My neighborhood in Brooklyn used to be mostly Irish and Norwegian, but over the last 100 years, it has become Latinx and Chinese. I think about the old voices fading away and the new ones arriving. I think about what is lost and what is gained when the tablet is scraped clean, the story written again.
– Maura Kate Costello
