Day 104

I went for a little run in the forest and meadow and came home quicker than I had intended to because there were too many ticks crawling up my turquoise pants!

BUT, the bees are doing beautifully, they all looked very happy in the lovely warm sunshiny day that was today.

You come across words every now and then that are so beautiful, and ever since I came across the word "Palimpsest" in a Lawrence Durrell book, I think, it has fascinated me.  The actual meaning of palimpsest is a parchment (which was of course made of animal skin) which has been scraped clean of words so that another set of words could be written on it.  And this could happen a number of times, depending on the need for new parchment, or on the need for Christian documents to overwrite pagan ones.

The Archimedes palimpsest:  several of Archimedes important works of the 10th century, such as "On Floating Bodies", and "The Method of Mechanical Theorems", were overwritten in the 13th century by Byzantine Christian monks.

With the technology of today much of what could not be read before of the lower levels, can now be deciphered.  It is called the scriptio inferior, which sounds like an insult, but just means the writing
beneath.

The word palimpsest is also used in archaeology as a way to describe the different layers of buildings in a place, and also how different generations alter the landscape.

It is such a perfect word that it can be used for many different things, layers of writing in a book, one experience laminating those under it, strata and substrata of melody.

We are all palimpsests, in a way.  A few generations back is all we sometimes know about our ancestors, and there are traits passed down that are recognised and commented on, so that for example Nick knows that he has his English great-grandpa Arthur's twinkling blue eyes and also his long long legs and arms. His passionate nature probably comes from both sides.

And Matthew has his grandpa's strong bull-neck, has always had it, so that one of our friends, meeting the baby Matthew for the first time, commented that he looked like a miniature Kobus Wiese, the rugby player. And he has a calm demeanour and thinks outside the box like his dad.

Emma is very like my own mother, her granny Joan, who also thought so.  She inherited the worry-gene from her, perhaps also because she is the eldest of four.  Granny Joan said once, "You are so like me Emma, I was once young and gorgeous, and I also had lots of boyfriends, from when I was quite young.  Mind you, I didn't sleep with all of them like you young people seem to!"  And now there is Luna, who seems to be a carbon copy of her mother, strong-willed and stubborn.

And Jess is a perfect mixture of her parents.  When she is with Gavin people say she looks just like him, and when she is with me they say she is the spitting image of her mother.  She inherited her great-grandmother Gracie's artistic talent, and her daughter has Grace as her second name.

My four palimpsests, two and a half years ago!

So the new face is composed over the old, the tender body is transcribed from the progenitor, there is a thin veneer over a mannerism handed down, the young take their genes and overwrite all who came before.  A little wood-nymph of a girl echoes her great-great-grandmother across the ocean, who perhaps stood in almost the same way, with those self-same bony knees, that s-curl of a spine, the slight lift of the jaw, the greeny-blue eyes like the sea, looking forward, as we are wont to do, never knowing that some day there would be all this looking back, through layers of time, generation upon generation.