Palimpsests

One of the sub-hobbies of this blog is applying literary nonsense to my liiiiiife, and this is no exception. A little reflection on layering memories after the jump.

Szimpla, a ruin pub in Budapest, its own kind of palimpsest.

When I had first started coming to terms with my impending divorce, my friend Casey asked an incredibly smart question: “Did you lose any music in the breakup?” Not in the sense of physical albums, but were there songs, artists, albums that I couldn’t listen to any more.

There was really only one song that I could definitively point to as a lost song at that time – S. Carey’s “In the Dirt.” Kate had sent it to me on a mix early in our dating, and it became something of an anthem for our long-distance relationship. It was my ringtone for her, and something about the song’s drive and longing for a lifelong bond, a shared journey all the way to the finish, felt intimately connected to that period of distance and anticipation. With the shift from a shared longing to be together to her desire to be done with the relationship and with me, the song felt emotionally barbed. I don’t know that I listened to it once between January and the trip. Something and hopeful had transformed somehow into a cold reminder of what I had lost.

One morning in June, on a train from Budapest to Krakow, I woke up to see the Polish countryside rolling across my window at dawn, like a canvas unrolling some impossibly idyllic landscape scene, the sky a splay of pastels. My brain somehow leapt up and connected with something – tying the rhythm of the train and the smooth ripple of the fields going by to “In the Dirt.” Something about that moment felt instantly right for the song. I grabbed my headphones and gave it a whirl. And it was good. It was perfectly married to that moment - the air, the light, the motion, the rhythms and textures of the music all sang together.

There was a little miracle in that moment – the song didn’t suddenly become something new, a pure and unadulterated memory of Poland. But where before its meaning seemed to have completely flipped, to be destroyed and rewritten, now it felt layered. It was connected to this transcendent memory of awaking to movement in an unfamiliar new world and to the loss and destruction of the past six months. And if it could connect to those two things, it could also connect back to its initial meaning: love, longing, certainty. It became a palimpsest (one of my favorite literary concepts) -  a piece of writing atop another piece of writing, faint traces of the past visible beneath each iteration.

I think that's what this year is about for me. It's about seeking out that layering - the complicated commingling of tragedy, sadness, anger, frustration, and peace, hope, excitement, and newness. About allowing cities, memories, tokens and relationships to retain all their meanings, rather than blocking out that complexity and simplifying things down to the easiest-to-digest best-or-worst iterations of themselves. And along the way I'm reclaiming my sense of joy, my sense of discovery, my sense of potential and of hope above all.

The video I cut for Krakow was scored to "In the Dirt," and you can find that on the blog if you want. But here's the official video, which feels perfect in its own way. Let's keep refracting until these things are as rich as the world itself???