P is for Pentimento :: Palimpsest :: Paint :: Pen

“Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter ‘repented,’ changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”    -Introduction to Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento

There are layers to us, “scriptio inferior,” underwriting, shown clear like the Grand Canyon reveals its strata when laid bare, like a 7-layer dip or a tiramisu or, in some cases, like a mine that has caved in deep inside us: send down a camera, are we still alive?, save us. Some of the layers emerge over time as a function of becoming translucent like a pentimento—we become the aggregate of our pigment over many years—and some reveal themselves only with intense searching, like a palimpsest, the provenance of which may not be evident to the naked eye. Look, look.

Pentimento:
n.pl. pentimenti
An underlying image in a painting, as an earlier painting, part of a painting or original draft that is revealed usually when the top layer of paint becomes transparent with age. From the Italian correction,
pentimento, from pentire, to repent.

If we live as if on a painter’s canvas, the movement of our feet or crutches or wheels in paint creates our portrait. Ours is a canvas bordered only by time and not some massive imposing frame; paint layers show through only over the passing of the ages, ours.

Only at the very end do our layers become fully apparent, the paint having become transparent. At old age, or at some age (I imagine the rapidity of transparency varies from person to person), we are finally laid bare, the trees showing through our dress, the child making way for a dog, as Lillian Hellman has written. The “what might have been” is overpainted by “what was.”

I walked down a long hall in a nursing home today, and as I traversed those halls with Tess by my side, there are women—always women—sitting in doorways staring at me or not, or calling to Tess like some wheeled siren, smiling a smile of remembering or of envy or of delight, their skin transparent like onion vellum, so thin I can see the workings of their veins, those roadways to living.

I wonder what they might repent or regret, seeing life from that chair now; what original sketches are showing through in preparation for the bright blaze and conflagration that will mark the end (or the beginning?). Old, translucent skin, like oils that have grown thin over time, letting the past emerge, those original intentions like veins, some big like aorta, some miniscule, each contributing its small part to the vital network that carries life. 

There, there, just in the doorway of Room 119, I can almost see what would have been, what almost was, what might have been if she had said “yes” instead of “no” to life. In Room 141, I can only yet see what was; the downturn of our mouths at that age tells much about how we have worn our faces through time. We cover and cover and cover regrets with thicker paint, until we can paint no more, our hands too arthritic to hold the brush; it all falls away.

As poet JL Williams has written,

“I realise I threw something away that was of importance to me. I want it back, I can remember the existence of it but

the image has been painted over. The thing itself is gone, the specificity of it, the texture of its construction, the

markings which made it individual, the inscription of its name upon its tongue. Because it was I who disposed of it,

and I, singularly, who possess this exact memory of its existence, I am responsible for finding it or for creating it again

out of the impression it made in me.”

A pentimento, that under-image, shadow of an earlier painting, a part, a draft, a fragment that shows through, from the Latin paenitere, to repent.

Or let’s say, instead of oils on fabric, our lives are made of earth, pressed down under immense heat and colored with the pressure of events done and not done: we are the Grand Canyon, deep oranges indicating heat, brilliant pink telling of decisions made or not made, perhaps.

Such a cross-section was the image drawn by a most wonderful Belgian man this summer in a class I taught on storytelling. “Draw the map of your life,” we said to the class, and were gifted with fantastic images – circles and paths and remarkable renderings, some literal, some not – and this one of his life’s orange and green and pink and black strata from Bob. I was struck by the simple extravagant beauty of it, the way he had translated living into strata.

“What is that black dot?” I asked, completely enamored with his image, hardly able to contain my excitement at it, my clear and certain recognition of it. “That first black dot,” he said quietly, “that is when my father died.” I recognized the rightness of it, knew it immediately, yes. The lines create a whole, there is rightness in that green off to the edge, truth in those sketchy lines, exposition of a life, that placement, the metaphors implicit in those colors, that leap to meaning from event.

Our Grand Canyons tell us what has gone before—we can clearly see history there as we stand dwarfed by it, surrounded both by what has gone before and by what is missing: erosion has done its job. Shiprock gives us the opposite: There, we are in the middle of everything that is not left—by absence, we are to infer what was here before. And so too, with our lives, those internal canyons.

Or perhaps instead of paint or sand, we are brick, front loaded on an old truck and placed, rectangle by rectangle, to build a majestic department store, the first of its kind, the kind with a sign painted on the side to display its glory, then only a shadow, then faded more, then overpainted, the traces of things left behind. I wonder what my signs say, those ones that have been painted over. Perhaps their reading emerges in my writing, now. Perhaps they will only be discovered hundreds of years hence, and look merely quaint, like ads for pinking shears and Dr Tucker’s pain pills.

Or perhaps we are like those plastinated bodies laid bare in Body Worlds, except instead of veins and organs, we are sliced to reveal heartaches and joys and regrets, each a different color, some pastel and some vivid blues and reds. Or perhaps we are rings of a big petrified tree:

“You rescue me once more:
Say, wait till you see what Rose
and I found. Two whole forests
of petrified wood, untouched.
Come see what I’ve got in the back of the truck.

A box of pieces, once tree limbs or trunks.
You hand them to me one by one
until I can hardly heft the weight,
begin to hand them back
for fear I’ll drop something precious.

A limb catches my eye.
You’ve sliced this piece across the grain,
exposed its history,
the wet years, the droughts,
growth choked off here, but here abundant,
light earlywood darkening to latewood,
again and again, ring upon ring,
and the heartwood, so prized
by carpenters, tight and true and straight.

The weight of time has calcified
this wood to stone, set fluid resins hard.
The corky bark, marked by knots and scars,
is covered with a gray–white patina.
But it is clearly wood.”

Intention :: It is clearly wood. Our pentimenti reveal our original intentions: be wood, be veins, be geological detritus, be serious, be playful, be a writer or don’t, be happy or be unhappy, burn brightly.

Perhaps our life’s composition originally had a head or a hand in a slightly different place, or a figure that was originally planned is no longer found in the final painting, dead or displaced or ignored or rebuked or misunderstood. What we do with that change in composition is what matters, not what we intended to do.

What we see as we stand behind that red velvet rope, peering into our life’s retrospective—trying to find the narrative thread in the catalog (“How does this show fit together?” “My toddler could paint that,” “What on earth is the title of that monstrosity?”, “I love the interplay of teal and ochre”)—is not what we intended to paint, but what, in fact, we painted.

Palimpsest :: A palimpsest is also a “was,” a manuscript page that has been written on, scraped off, and used again. With the passing of time the faint remains of the former writing that had been washed from parchment or vellum, using milk and oat bran, reappears enough to allow scholars to discern the text, the scriptio inferior or "underwriting.” One of the most famous, the Archimedes Palimpsest, is the work of the great Syracusan mathematician copied onto parchment in the tenth century and overwritten by a liturgical text in the twelfth century. Shadows emerge when looked for—sometimes, as in this case, they are more important than the primary text, the public one.

I imagine our lives as a text, written into the margins, the “o’s” of past writing forming “e’s” of today’s verse, the old writing never disappearing, not fully.

Architects imply palimpsest as a ghost —- an image of what once was, those tarred rooflines that remain after a neighboring structure has been demolished, removed stairs that still show as an amputated arm still tingles, dust lines from a relocated refrigerator, all informing us of the built past. We each have a built past—what signs remain from it?

". . . A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions. [. . .] What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished….The fleeting accidents of a man’s life, and tis external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the organising principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous elements life may have accumulated from without, will not permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubles, in the retrospect from dying moments, or from other great convulsions.[ . . .]

In each case—pentimento and palimpsest—what is necessary for them to finally appear is the passage of moment after moment after moment, and the accumulated iterations that time brings with it. Read them, draw them, plumb them. They have served well as your canvas, shoring up today’s painting.

Paint :: Pen :: Whether from absence or from erosion or massive volcanic upheaval or the simple rings of aging forests, our maps are both there and they are not there, not yet. Look, look. See and then see again. They will rise to the surface at some point—be ready to read them. And perhaps, after all this looking, it is not what we have painted—or written—but that we have painted, that we have written.

[first painting from here, building sign pentimenti from here]