“The records they left”: Undiscovered writing and the lyrics of Sapokanikan
Peeling Back the Layers in Joanna Newsom’s Divers, Part 2
Let’s continue in our closer look at the layering in “Sapokanikan”.
If you haven’t read Part 1, please check that out first — this will make more sense, or at least I hope it will.
Palimpsests and Pentimenti
Back in 2015, I was willing to bet that Joanna Newsom has at least been tempted to write a song with the word “palimpsest” in it. The bet still stands!
The word “palimpsest” comes from the Greek for “rubbed smooth again”, and refers to the practice of scribes reusing papyrus, wax tablets, animal skin parchment, and so forth. The term “tabula rasa” (from the Latin “scraped tablet” — you can see the root for “erase” there) refers to this same practice of clearing your slate to write on it again. Because the writing surface was so valuable, and because the writing was seen as less valuable, people would wash or scrape away the surface to start fresh. But often, they weren’t able to clean the old text away entirely. They couldn’t clear their record.
The word “pentimento” is Italian for “repentance”. When you do something wrong, and then feel sorry for it and try to change, you might call that repenting. In the art world, the term describes how painters sometimes sketch a figure or paint an object one way, but then later cover over it or paint it differently. You can see the repentance happening, right? More specifically, pentimenti are the traces of those other layers becoming visible at the surface, or sometimes with techniques like infrared or X-ray. The three paintings we’ve looked at here aren’t quite the textbook definition of pentimenti, but they’re spiritually close.
When I think of these paintings in “Sapokanikan”, and think of the lines
and the records they left are cryptic at best,
lost in obsolescence:the text will not yield
I struggle not to then think about textual palimpsests. They’re so tantalizing and layered and cryptic. It’s a little hard for us to relate, in our current world of abundance and digital copies on copies, and old notebooks stashed away from elementary school in some attic.
Dr. Uwe Bergmann describes it well in a talk I’ll share below:
So remember, these books were incredibly, I mean, insanely expensive! For one book, you have to kill a whole flock of sheep, skin them, dry the skin, cut them, discard all the ones which didn’t go well. It took months and years to grow the sheep, and then it took probably weeks to make them. So, it is understandable that the more valuable part was not always considered the content, but really the medium — in this case, the parchment book. And that’s why this idea of palimpsesting was such a popular thing to do. There are tens of thousands of palimpsests out there right now.
On the tens of thousands out there, sometimes this erasing process would leave a dull mark — maybe decipherable to a scholar using a magnifying glass and drawing on a lot of patience. And sometimes the prior writing is so faint or obscured by layers above it (for example, drawings) that it’s nearly impossible to make out with your eyes what was there before.
The study of palimpsests dates back a long way (from what I can tell, at least back to the 1700s). Unfortunately, early attempts to bring out the underlying layers of writing often damaged the upper layer or the entire work. As described by the Vatican Library in their resource on the area:
Unfortunately, earlier — mostly chemical — methods which were applied beginning from the eighteenth century generated irreversible damages in the treated material. The texts often became legible for a short time, right after the intervention, but afterward, the treated parchment frequently used to change colour, develop rust, and undergo damage caused by being burned from the chemical reactions from various reagents.
Then, in the early 1900s, scholars discovered the use of ultraviolet lighting and photography (because the effect of the light didn’t last long) as a way to study the texts. This evolved to include other means of illuminating the manuscripts, my favorite being what’s called “multispectral imaging” and refers to a “spectral fingerprint”. The word “spectral” here refers to the use of multiple spectra of light (ultraviolet, infrared, visible, microwave, etc.), but I can’t help think of the other meaning of the word — ghostlike.
Anyway, I won’t keep you in suspense for too long. If you guessed that I was going to mention X-ray fluorescence… well, you’re right!
Scientists, historians, librarians, and others have been using XRF to uncover difficult-to-see parts of palimpsests. You can see the excitement in this description of Dr. Bergmann, whom I quoted above, while he was working on a particularly famous book, the Archimedes Palimpsest:
The experiment Bergmann showed me that day had convinced him that his technique could work on parchment — and he was practically jumping up and down in excitement.
Not to say that Joanna Newsom was reading these, but the news about the XRF work was making the science headlines back in 2005 and subsequent years.
How to Make a Palimpsest
Let’s have a look at that video I mentioned earlier. In this part (watch for about 2 minutes), Dr. Bergmann explains very helpfully how to get the job done. That is, if you were a scribe back in the day.
The Vatican Library resource bolsters this point:
the unwanted texts remained faded but visible and created some difficulties for the scribe when copying the new texts, and for future readers as well. Scribes thus sought to avoid graphical collision between the layered scripts that generally made reading difficult. Sometimes they turned the reused parchment sheet to an angle of 90 degrees from the baseline and used one folio of a larger codex folded in half as a bifolio in the new context. This operation helped to avoid the clash between overwritten and underwritten scripts because the new text was copied across the old one. This happens very frequently.
What you get is pages like this one, from the Archimedes Palimpsest.
I’m struck, in looking at the image on the left, by the criss-crossing of texts, like busy lanes of textual traffic bumping into each other and carrying forward. Or maybe like the grid of a city. Or a map of a city.
The map of Sapokanikan
is sanded and beveled,
the land lone and leveled
by some unrecorded and powerful hand
Like precious vellum, the few square miles of that small island scraped again and again, but leaving some trace of the layers below.
I’ll close the book momentarily there, but please join me again for Part 3. Thanks!
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