User:Trashpuppy/Palimpsest

A PALIMPSEST is a surface used for repeated writing. The writing is erased when it has outlived its usefulness. The support, the manuscript page itself, has not outlived its usefulness as it is laboursome to create. While you can certainly clean the palimpsest, the old writing is never fully erased. While the current writing is legible, over time different earlier writings compete to come back to the surface of the palimpsest . The past writings still inform the makeup of the palimpsest.

The City is a palimpsest - The city stretches beyond the visible. The city covers up the past both in literal and figurative ways As the city scape is the result of a constant process of writing, erasing and rewriting. The erasure has historically speaking often taken place in rather violent ways; the example that Ground Zero was not the first erasure on the site. The construction of the twin towers actually caused the forced displacement of Middle Eastern communities and the destruction of their former neighbourhoods - What would we see when we see through and past the city? And see the fundaments it is built on?

“I was saddled with strange mental transpositions: that the plane was a coffin, that the city below was a vast graveyard with white marble and stone blocks of various heights and sizes” (Cole 2011, p. 150). In this passage of the book, Julius flies back home from his trip to Brussels. I thought the passage was relevant since it fits extremely well with the tagline of the first half of the book: Death is a perfection of the eye. To see the history on which society is built, is to see the atrocities that have taken place in the process of constructing it.