Sitting at the campfire, sparks crackling between hums and murmurs, I don’t relive moments of my life. Instead, each recall of a past comes smudged with human error—to remember is to revise rather than perfectly retrieve. Each single moment feels like a letter, word, or disjointed sentences etched into a chapter of a book. It’s as if every time I trace my fingers along the corridors of text is the last time I can do so. Like any information we consume, a new trove of emotions and understandings reveal themselves on the second revisit, third revisit, and so on. 

Nothing in history is absolutely novel in itself. I believe our thoughts, societal innovations, and market products are all amalgamations of preceding artifacts and processes that led up to a destination. For example, our understanding of the fundamental atom was a process where biologists advanced theories through combining the details of previous models with novel information of the time. From John Dalton in 1803 to Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s, the atomic model was one perfected through refinement and revisiting our past. By continuing to build upon what we know, evolution and progression becomes inevitable despite.

I always believe that my hands reveal how I spend my time and what I love. My passions are silently transmitted through the calluses bitten into my fingertips after playing the cello, or the dirt clumped underneath my nails after gardening, or the charcoal smeared across my palm after drawing. Even if I were to eventually lose the momentum that drives my bow across the strings, or my shovel into the soil, or vine across paper, I will never lose the tracks of the past in the texture of my hands.

For me, palimpsest symbolizes attempting to rebuild, yet being unable to forget what was once there before. It’s erasing again and again on a piece of paper, yet still failing to wipe away the faint outlines of graphite. In reality, we are always building upon the ruins of what we toppled ourselves, from cities to the unwanted history caught between two pages of parchment. However, I hope that Issue 16: Palimpsest acknowledges what lies underneath the surface, pointing out those very lines of graphite smudged away from the light. to the unveiling of a fresh wonder. 

I don’t know about you, but I shove every midnight poem, impassioned rant, and random creative idea at the top of a single Google Doc in my drive. This 200-or-so page document is an anti-palimpsest of sorts. New entries don’t alter the substrate they lie on. Nothing gets erased, merely frozen in time—each deposit like a fine layer of snowfall forming, impossibly, a blue-tongued glacier. As I scroll through this ice core, I find older and older writing the farther down I go. Every once in a while, I’ll snag myself on an old poem or phrase. Sometimes a single word will resonate with me just as it did when I first wrote it down years ago. More often than not, I'll extract that entry and carry it to the top. Then, I’ll re-warm it until my own ancient words melt and run, babbling, into today’s necessary creation.

So I encourage you to drill through time and into your old writing. Extract the ice core of your artistry to find the frozen words and forgotten ideas that necessitate today’s attention. Let them resurface; breathe hot-bellied life back into them until they melt under your fingertips. Write over them, write them over. Alter the substrate. Let the ink bleed through until you’ve created a palimpsest to call your own.

My bedroom is an archive of everything I have ever loved—whether it’s the baby pink wall color I chose when I was five or the pushpin-hung posters of my favorite pop stars, I have witnessed how, as I grow older and progress as an individual, my bedroom does, too. It’s as if it adapts to match my current state of identity, but while doing so, mirrors the rebuilding of our society in the pursuit of ‘adaptation’ with newly acquired knowledge—like the shift from plaster to gypsum board construction for effectiveness. In times like this, it’s easy to forget that my own walls went from tan to pink, from drywall to tan, and from minerals in our ground to the drywall that forms my four-sided sanctuary.

Palimpsest, to me, is acknowledging that change is inevitable, but not completely absolute. It’s knowing we aren’t completely leaving behind what once was, but rather that we’re building upon these pre-existing approaches in life to develop our knowledge and collective identity as humans. By understanding that these changes are integral to our modern way of living, but also that this progression would not be possible without a simple, structural starting point like a blank wall, we can better grasp who we are as a community in a period of rapid advancements. 

Nothing is ever worn down completely - whether it be old childhood photos of yourself, the toys you used to play with, or perhaps even the half-forgotten notes you took in your little notebook as a kid. All these act as reminders that the memories and experiences that shaped who you are from the past, present, and perhaps even the future never fade completely but instead manage to linger within us, and still remain as a version of ourselves, and exist somewhere inside us, no matter how faintly that is to be. 

Oftentimes, there is a quiet, strange feeling of grief when you realize that you’re slowly rewriting yourself from who you once were. That feeling of nostalgia and fear that past traces of myself will be faded behind, and no longer overlays with my current self. Despite this fear, in reality, there are still layers of my childhood joys and fears that shape who I am today, no matter how certain I was that I left those parts behind. 

Perhaps the history that we write for ourselves is the definition of growing up, endlessly revising, never fully rewritten. 

Palimpsests, to me, speak of a relationship where the present is in perpetual coexistence with the past. 

An oil painter will often paint on top of a lighter, more opaque underpainting from acrylic or watercolor, whose purpose is to define the values of the future layers that will succeed it. Although the milky washes of the underpainting are eventually buried by the accumulation of earthy and jeweled-tone brushstrokes, it bleeds through as a structural undertone that colors the story of the painting. A light blue underpainting may impart a more melancholic impression upon viewers whereas a sienna hue may convey intimacy. These framings of the art cannot be divorced from the artist’s intent that is born during the underpainting. 

All of that is to say, the perspective we adopt in the present is incomplete without the presence of a past. In the 21st century, we still recall quotes from the long-gone idols of history, producers still sample melodies composed decades or even centuries ago, and even something like tattoo coverups are integrations of old ink into something new; coverups cannot exist without something to be covered. Every time we may unintentionally discover a palimpsest in our own lives, we resurrect the past, allowing ourselves to understand our place in relation to those who have lived before us. Like me, I hope that Issue 16: Palimpsest will be able to offer you the comfort that history is not truly erased, but an interpolation of the past with the present. 

I am, sometimes, terrified of revisiting the landmarks of my childhood. Last summer, I went back to Deep Cove — the idyllic backdrop to all our family’s forays with beach life from 2012 to 2019. Suddenly, in my older, sixteen year old body, I felt dizzy and displaced. I squinted at the glittering tide and I was disappointed that the comforting sepia filter, which imbued all of my childhood photos, was not present. I had been content with my idealized vision of Deep Cove, with not having to confront change, in myself and in my environment. I felt like by carrying my new perceptions into the purity of an old memory, I was committing an inexplicable violence. 

For me, palimpsest is superseding this inclination of preservation and reconciling with the impossibility of stagnancy. I have no ownership over any piece of geography or even of the warpings of my memory. The beauty of human life lies in our inability to ever fully estrange ourselves from our influences. I am a culmination of all my past selves and unknowingly, the paths of people who have built and rebuilt on this land. Palimpsest is evidenced in erosion, in indentation, and is especially visible in any return to a previously cherished destination.

If you wrinkle a piece of paper enough times—crumple it, fold it, crease it—eventually the ridges and valleys will rip their way into your clean, white space, and you won’t be able to recognise what you’re looking at anymore. Letters become paradoxical and warped with thousands of meanings stacked on top of each other, crooked and mountainous between the margins of the page. Your ‘O’s become rabbit holes and suddenly you’re crawling back into someone you were five years ago. Maybe the ‘T’s are tall, like trees, and represent the potential you failed to live up to—impossible to climb, and just out of reach. Again and again, you reread the lines, smear the graphemes, and outline your ‘O’s and your ‘T’s with the fragile grooves of your fingertip.  

The deeper you go, the more you fold, and crease, and crumple—it all amounts to where you’ll end up. I’ve heard the saying that no two books are the same, but I offer you this: you may read the same page over and over again, and the words will find you different each time. The palimpsest, in the end, is what you decide to do with it all. It’s what you find between the valleys and bevels that both acknowledges that impurities and adds meaning to the words. It's up to you to find that meaning in all these layers, and decide which path to follow through to the surface. 

Last year I lent a friend a book of mine that I adore, and I told her to write in it. I wanted to see her thought process, the paragraphs that she loved and those that she hated. I wanted to see what she had left untouched and anything that was so dense it was impossible to read. I get excited when I see writing in the margins. It is a completely different story to me, the one the author is telling and the one the reader is. Both are worth reading. 

Palimpsest is two stories told at the same time. One is what we already know. It is the artwork we frame and the script we quote. The other is a mystery filled with layers and meaning. In the attempt to discover all that a piece contains we create new stories that build on top of each other. That above all is what palimpsest signifies to me. All the stories that weave and twist next to each other or dive in different directions. The development and progress that comes from this stream of creativity. And as we continue to return to our unsolvable mystery, we will continue to change, grow, and improvise from all we are desperate to yet unable to know. 

I like to think of my face as a repository of all those whose blood runs through me. The whisker dimples from my grandmother, the ridged nose from my father–I am a palimpsest of both the physical features of lives inexplicably finding their way to each other, and the histories that weave quietly through my veins. To exist, then, is to carry evidence of these innumerable past selves. People I have never met, places I have never visited, stories I will never know, all resurfacing, manifesting through the scaffolds of my body. 

Perhaps, this, to me, is what makes the notion of palimpsest so deeply human. Nothing is ever truly effaced; it simply learns how to rest beneath the water, visible, but blurred, present and pulsing. Traditions morph into habits–a Korean bow, a stern “no shoes in the house” policy, a Hanbok-clad New Year's–and memory, whether it be a visual indication or a subtle recollection, tucks itself into a warm corner of our identities to be remembered. Issue 16: Palimpsest is an acknowledgement of these little impressionables: the pieces of characteristics that puzzle under a single countenance, the past breathing gently beneath the surface of the present. 

Poetry is a way to get to know the most intimate parts of a person without ever meeting them face to face or speaking a word to them.  Every word jotted down echoes not just one person’s truth, but the truths of so many people who have lived life thinking they are alone. 

Truth, for every one of us, is ever changing. We grow, we learn; and with that, parts of us often get erased – much like the ancient texts of a palimpsest. What one person may have held so dearly to them since birth may be altered for the rest of time because of a certain experience. 

Still, we see the marks of our past selves etched on the paper; underneath the markups we cake onto the page in hopes of concealing what we deem imperfect. 

We only get perceived as the current versions of ourselves, and only through poetry can we shed the inkmarks we blotched our past with. Our history can never be erased; in fact, it shapes the modern versions of ourselves entirely.