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A slate is a sheet of metamorphic rock, used for writing. It is often set in a wooden frame.
Slates were used extensively in schools in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as they were reusable and could be wiped clean over and over and over again, as children learnt to write–as children made mistakes.
To clean a slate, one would often use their own saliva and sleeve. How clean can a slate be, if it is cleaned with an extracellular body fluid. How clean can a slate be if it is covered in a biohazard.
Saliva is an essential part of the digestive process. It contains 99.5% water, but it also contains electrolytes, mucus and enzymes. Can we ever truly digest our pasts? Can we ever truly be done with them? Be clean of them?
Some animals have venomous saliva. Could you ever clean your slate if the very substance you use to blur and smudge the words is toxic? Only good for killing and erasing.
The saying “a clean slate” is often used to describe a new beginning, or to describe forgetting the past.
Can a slate ever be cleaned? Can a person?
Can an entire history, rich with experience and emotion, ever truly be forgotten?
When you get a new slate it is untouched, unmarred. A slate is only ever new, only ever clean once.
No matter how hard you try to clean it there will always be something. A smudge. A word too blurred to read but still there, still affecting future words. Future experiences.
Even the saliva used to clean it leaves a residue. The mucus and the electrolytes and the enzymes.
That slate is marred.
And what of the scratches? Have you ever seen an unscratched slate?
Every scratch, big or small, impacts the future use of that slate. They cause the pencil to skid or cause unbroken lines to appear broken.
We write on slates with shale pencils. Shale is a soft rock–a sedimentary rock–much softer than slate.
Do our experiences only ever have a soft impact on our lives? Are they so easily wiped away with saliva and cloth?
We do not exist separately from our experiences. They impact us in uncountable different ways.
We learn from every experience we have. Learning changes the very structure of our brains. The synaptic structures that determine our behaviours and reactions. We are changed by our experiences.
How could you ever be cleaned of that?
Shale is a sedimentary rock. Sedimentary rocks are formed from the accumulation of sediment, which settle and harden.
The sediment that shale is made from is part of other rocks that have fallen to dust over time.
Is this not a better metaphor for a person? People are comprised of our experiences, each one a piece of sediment that makes up the whole. Each piece of sediment sourced from somewhere else. Someone else.
Shale is the most common sedimentary rock.
Slate is a metamorphic rock.
Metamorphic rocks are formed from existing rocks, which experience heat and pressure at levels which change them.
Metamorphic rocks are harder than sedimentary rocks.
Slate is formed from shale.
Can we only ever get harder in life? Or can we learn to be softer?
Are we the slate? Or are we the shale?
Could we be both?
Being both the slate, on which we record our lives and experiences, and also the shale, which marks the slates of the people around us.
We do not exist in isolation. Your past can never be erased. Your actions will marr the slates of others.
Even then, is a slate ever truly unmarred?
Are we ever truly clean?
In production and transportation, before they are ever used, slates are often unintentionally scratched. They have not ever been touched with shale, yet they are still changed in irreversible ways.
Even the slate of a baby has been marked.
Marred by nature and marred by nurture.
So much of who we are is determined before we are old enough to even understand the cause and effect occuring. The attachment an infant forms with their caregiver can affect their behaviours and relationships for the rest of their life.
Earlier, our parents are the shale to our slates before we are ever born. Foetal Alcohol Syndrome can cause lifelong developmental issues.
Even before we are fetuses our slates are not truly clean. At conception your genetics are determined . The combination of your parent’s DNA that begun your story.
The first markings on your slate.
They will never be wiped clean.
You can never go back.
You can never get a clean slate.
You don’t get to go back and stop yourself from getting on that plane. You can’t stop your parents from dying.
You can’t go back and stop yourself–your younger, cleaner self–from doing what you have done.
You will never clean your slate of blood.
The people you killed will always be dead because of you. The people you have hurt will always bear those scars.
There is no going back. Your slate is marred, it will never be clean.
There is no forgetting the past. Not in any way that truly matters.
Complete retrograde amnesia, from that plane crash all those years ago, will never erase the family that mourned you. The home that waited for you. The synapses in your brain that remember your home tongue.
A change of heart or a shifting of morals can never erase the people you found. Leaving does not clean you. The life you leave behind does not vanish just because you do.
Your body is covered in scars. Your slate is well and truly scratched.
Do not expect the world to forget what you have done.
This does not mean you cannot change.
Your past will always be there, one day it will catch up to you, but you don’t have to stay there. You don’t have to stay in that place, in that time, in that mindset.
Just because the past is always tied to the future, does not mean that the future does not exist.
Your slate is scratched and smudged, but you can still write on it.
You can change.
Spit on your slate if you must. Use the sleeve of your shirt to scrub at the words you dislike. They will never be completely erased but you can fill the spaces they used to reside with words you do like.
Become the person you want to be. It’s worth trying at the very least.
And don’t you have an entire lifetime to try? You can always try again.
Pressure and time hardened you but you are learning to be soft.
You are the slate, and you are the shale.