Palimpsests

Until quite recently, I did not know what I was, exactly. I knew I was something, and I was assured that that something was special. The culture told me, insistently, relentlessly, that I was unique, an irreducible genre of one. Advertising proclaimed that it is Me O’Clock or Me Time, that I deserved or was worth whatever product or service was being promoted, that I could customize my credit card to suit my personality, that I could demand a hamburger made just for me, that a taco was my taco, that I could buy a car that adjusts to me, that I could an app for my every heart’s desire.. Self-help gurus admonished me to cultivate myself, reach in and touch myself into being, and that now, now, now is my time. Popularized history endlessly recounted to me the storied story of rugged individualism, of the westering impulse, the restless journeying of men and women to possess the bright flame of self-actualization, each embarked on their individual manifest destiny. I was bludgeoned with the discourse of self-esteem, told I was a majority of one, an autonomous, self-referential being of unequaled exceptionality. Reality TV showed me makeovers of every sort, where I saw a genuine self can break free into the golden summer splendor of its exclusive July. I was assured from every cultural corner that I was unprecedented, one-of-a-kind. And yet, I did not know what that means. I certainly did not feel unique. I didn’t even know what feeling unique would feel like.

I suppose I could have said I am a human being, a Homo Sapiens, though, I confess, most days I felt more like Homer Simpson. I could have said I am a teacher, a husband, a father and a grandfather. I could have said I was organized, disciplined, sometimes obsessive, always driven. I could have said I am empathetic, caring, sometimes skeptical, and easily exasperated. I could have said I am a vegetarian, have a jones for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and mainline coffee. But those are all qualities shared by millions of others. They are not essences; at least, I do not experience them as such. They merely qualify “I am,” the fact that I exist; they merely domesticate my existence by circumscribing it with an adjective or a noun. They describe me, but do not seem to name the substance, the radical, fundamental something that I was told makes me unique.

I have my father’s toolbox. It is a slapdash affair, really, banged together from a couple of boards and painted beige. Yet, if I were offered the priciest Craftsman toolbox in exchange for it, if I were offered an exact duplicate of it, right down to the rusted heads of the tenpenny nails holding it together, I would refuse the offer. The toolbox has an essence, it is unique. It is sui generis. I know that with a knowing deeper than a dream, even though, struggle as I might, I cannot find the language to name, in a propositional way, what it is, cannot find the words to literalize what that essence is. In such cases, when words fail to provide a perch upon which to land, it is best to rely on metaphor. Perhaps that is the way to make sayable this uniqueness I supposedly possess.

Not too long ago, I ran across an article about the Archimedes Palimpsest, a volume consisting of 714 parchment pages from which the original writing had been scraped away and reused to create a Byzantine prayer book. The palimpsest is so named because among other texts contained in the original, were seven treatises written by the Greek mathematician Archimedes. It sometimes happens that, due to the simple passage of time, the “underwriting” reappears beneath the “overwriting” superimposed upon it, resulting in a text with a discernable layer beneath the surface. The trace has left a trace for the fullness of time to birth.

The article swept me back to a time when, in the middle of a conversation with my brother, I suddenly realized that he used the same hand gestures as our father, used the same grimace before responding to a question, had the same manner of speaking from the side of his mouth when intending irony, laughed the same wheezy laugh. And I realized I did those things, too. And I remembered my mother telling me my handwriting was exactly like my father’s, and that, on the telephone, my voice was indistinguishable from his. In my brother and I are the underwritten trace of our paternity appearing in the selves we have written and are still in the process of writing. We are palimpsests.

The problem with most assertions of individual uniqueness, at least as that quality is commonly conceived, is the assumption that human beings exists in a gated enclave of the self, walled off from circumstances and influences, imbued with an unrepeated, unreplicable core that, like some fairy-tale gift, like some wave of a Hogwarts wand, simply appears out of thin air. It seems to me, though, that we are anticipated, prepared for, mediated, but not determined, not passively absorbent. My brother and I are not copies of my father, not duplicates or facsimiles. The three of us are layered texts, separate in time, each telling its own story while sharing the same page, the overwriting and underwriting overlapping at some points, indistinguishable, the same perhaps, but, finally, different. We are palimpsests.

We are carried forward, like an integer in a math problem, by our legacy, but into the ethos of our own historical moment, the habitus of our own time and place. We are actively courted by our moment, and we actively collaborate in that courtship. We affiliate ourselves with others; we gain information, knowledge, perspectives, attitudes, and values; we form perceptual boundaries; we pursue enterprises; we use our natural gifts and acquire others. We are what we already have, what we find, and what we do. We are legacies, but the song of that legacy arrives in the present and is overwritten in a different key. A new song, but not quite, for under its emergence is the trace, the unerasable residue with which it started out.

That, I think, is how we are unique, the intrinsic character of what we are. Palimpsests. The gesture of the self to and beyond itself. Anything less makes the self less complete, smaller, limited. Anything less is to invoke the oven bird’s question at the end of Robert Frost’s sonnet: “What to make of a diminished thing.”