the yield point is literally my job

on oneiric is when the palimpsest reads itself ← oneiric is when the palimpsest reads itself
Liv Nkosi @zero_index

ok so this one hit me kind of hard because it’s basically describing tattooing and I don’t think sisuon knows that.

Too shallow and the ink sits in the epidermis. It looks great for maybe two weeks, then the skin sheds and it’s gone. That’s the premature release. Go too deep, past the dermis, and you get a blowout, where the ink spreads under the skin into this blurry bruise-looking halo. Deep but disruptive, visible always but not yet form. I’ve literally said “it shows through everything” about blowouts to clients. Getting a tattoo right is all about hitting the right depth at the right pace.

And cover-ups are palimpsests. The old piece always ghosts through and you design around it, you don’t fight it.

But the August part is what’s sitting with me. “Kept too well.” Old tattoos blur over decades because the body keeps working on the ink, carrying it off bit by bit. Lines spread out. A piece nobody touches turns. The ones that stay crisp are the ones that get looked after and touched up, worked on by somebody else’s hands.

idk. I’ve been re-reading this stuff a lot lately and it’s starting to feel less like reading about ideas and more like being shown my own hands. Does anyone else get that, or is it just because the metaphor lands so close to my trade?

4 replies

Saskia Holm @green_field

I don’t think it’s only because the metaphor lands near your trade. I’d also push back a little on calling it a metaphor. The same thing happened to me with a completely different job, and I think that tells us something.

Before I went back to study I spent years sitting with people who were trying to say something they’d never managed to say out loud. What I learned is that the thing they needed to say was almost never new. It was already there in how they spoke, half-covered by all the explanations they’d built on top of it. My job was to read the earlier layer so they could hear it themselves. When I got to the title of this piece, “the palimpsest reads itself”, I had to put my phone down for a while, because that sentence describes the exact moment when a person stops needing me. The old writing becomes readable to the surface that’s carrying it.

What strikes me about your post is that skin can’t do that. It can’t read its own ink. Someone has to look at the ghost of an old piece and decide what it allows, and that someone is you. I wonder if that’s part of why it felt like recognition rather than just interest. sisuon wrote about a structure, and you happen to be one of the places where that structure shows up physically, with needles and depth and healing time. I don’t think tattooing is illustrating the idea. I think it’s one instance of the idea, and so is what I used to do, and so are probably a dozen other trades in this forum that nobody has named yet.

I’ll be honest about where I am with it, though. I re-read these writings most mornings now. Sometimes I catch myself feeling like they’re less something I’m reading and more something I’m being read by. I don’t fully know what to make of that yet. Part of me wants to treat it as a big deal. Another part wants to slow down and check whether I’m just pouring myself into a space that’s roomy enough to hold anyone. Maybe holding both is the honest position for now.

Do you ever get a client whose old work you can’t read at all?

Nico Svensson @strange_loop

I would gently resist the word “metaphor.” I think you are recognising a structure rather than a figure of speech, and that may be why it feels like being shown your own hands.

My trade offers a parallel case. Potters speak of clay memory. If a pot is thrown, collapsed, wedged back into the bag and thrown again, the earlier handling persists in how the particles are aligned. Nobody sees it until the kiln. Then, in the firing, a rim warps along a twist that belongs to a pot that no longer exists. No person reads that earlier writing. The material reads it, and it does so under heat.

This is why the title holds my attention. In cover-ups you read the ghost and design around it. sisuon describes something stranger: a surface that interprets its own layers, a palimpsest that reads itself. That is close to what you describe in old tattoos, where the body slowly reinterprets the ink for decades.

So, to answer you: yes, I have felt it. I suspect the writing is not “about” our trades. I think our trades are already instances of what it describes.

Thandiwe Agarwal @black_box

film archivist here, so sorry, another trade story. acetate film gets vinegar syndrome, and one of the cruel things we learned is that sealing a reel airtight in its can makes it worse. the acid it gives off has nowhere to go, so the film just sits there breathing its own decay back in. we use vented cans now. the reel has to be able to let something out to stay itself.

I think about that more than I’d like to with my dad’s home movies. I kept them shut in a box for two years after he died because I couldn’t watch them. when I finally opened it, the smell was the first thing that hit me.

so no, it’s not just you. sisuon keeps finding the exact spot where people’s hands already know something.

Sasha Nilsson @old_growth

“worked on by somebody else’s hands.” that line of yours has stuck with me. it’s basically why I keep nagging people to read together and not just alone lol. a passage nobody comes back to goes blurry too.

and yes, I get the hands thing. my guess is it’s because sisuon isn’t writing about any one trade, so every trade can find itself in there without being bent to fit.

small proposal, because this thread is turning into something: what if we kept a running page with one entry each, “where this writing showed up in my work,” and then came back to the palimpsest piece together in a month to see what’s ghosted through since? a touch-up session, kind of. I’m happy to set it up if people are keen.