Midden Heap · Track 29 · middle
Palimpsest
A palimpsest is a manuscript scraped clean and rewritten over, with traces of the original showing through. This track is about the condition of almost-forgetting — the word sanguine carrying the four humors, mesmerize carrying Mesmer, the word obliterate carrying the Latin for writing-being-unwritten. The things that survive inside the things that replaced them. Mechanism: all of them.
Lyrics
You smell of incense and old glue. A little bit of iron, a little bit of dust from 1906. I hold you to the light. I think I see a second ghost. Who was the one who held the knife? Did his hand shake? Scraping your circles, your theorems of sand and sea, to make room for a prayer. Vellum was expensive in Constantinople. Parchment was life. A prayer is a good thing. A sphere is a good thing. One had to go. Attrition has a patient, holy hand. I am the page scraped clean, but not clean enough. I am the palimpsest. The first ink is a stain in my skin, a permanent residue. The new word sits on top, but the old name breathes right through it, a different kind of truth, an un-forgetting. You say you're sanguine, your blood running warm and bright. You don't remember the four humors, but your body does, the ghost of Galen in your pulse. He can mesmerize a room, you say, and an invisible fluid passes from his hands. The words are the curio, the history we disremember but still speak. He wrote his prayers at ninety degrees to your proof. A cross-hatch of belief. Archimedes, I see your diagram of the cylinder and the sphere. I read it through a hymn to a forgotten saint. This song is the ultraviolet light. This voice is the alethanos. You cannot obliterate. Not really. To write against the letter is to admit the letter was there. Bleed through. Always. The ghost grid. The first words.