The Collector

I am a collector. Doesn't that sound more elegant than a pack rat, connoting white gloves rather than beady eyes? I collect information, especially markers of my history, preserving the traces of where I have been, to fortify myself for the future. I know people who keep very little, curating their lives to only the precious items they deem worthy.  I envy them their lack of clutter, the clarity with which they go through life unbound by their past. Perhaps they are more prescient than I am and know what will matter to them in the future, or perhaps it just doesn't matter to them.  I will never be one of them. 

I come by this collecting trait naturally.  If there is a gene for it, I got it from my father. When I look at my growing piles of papers, I have visions of my father’s study. There I sorted through piles of paper after his death, unable to move beyond his rocker, where I nested, in a room filled with books and music and history, layered with unopened mail he could no longer manage and New York Times clippings that he clung to. My mother urged him to get rid of the clippings, stacked in piles reaching upward.   “I need them to help me remember,”  he snapped. I was struck by his response.  I understood his desire to capture what spoke to him, an accumulation of readings that captured his window on the world and documented his essence.  It is not too unlike my old books still populating my shelves. They remind me of the path I took to becoming me.


My father papered his existence, a box of his history, carefully organized, awaited me amidst the chaos. He tried in vain to make order out of chaos with inventories of records and videotapes, a carryover from his days of collecting stamps, meticulously recording them in his tiny script. He cherished his history, where he came from on his path to becoming who he was.

I am made of the same cloth, a historian in my soul.  I  read his New York Times clippings looking for a way into his being, now non-being, in a silent conversation post-death.  I looked at these manifestations of what he was drawn to, trying to find the person I never really knew. There is something about history that fascinates me, the residue of a person’s life, like a trail of breadcrumbs into their being.  It is an effort to make sense of the world, to find an understanding and mastery of it, to understand another being and perhaps even oneself.

It occurs to me that this tendency perhaps explains my email box.  It has an embarrassing number of emails. Every so often I decide to tackle it and delete large swaths of emails, but it is so out of control that it makes only the slightest dent. Instead it functions as a storage dump, a filing cabinet through which I search as necessary.  Recently I had a brainstorm.  I would go back to 2010 and work forward, Then I should be able to quickly delete virtually everything as it would all be out of date. Instead, I discovered a treasure trove of history.

Turns out 2010 was an important year in my life.  There I found an email that reported on the interview project which led to the book I will publish this month. I wrote the email on the day I first voiced the idea of interviewing elders and even proposed the idea of a book linking artwork and story.  Seven and a half years later, I have done everything I envisioned so long ago.

In 2010, I met my friend Dora, a Holocaust survivor from my ancestral town. In another email, I wrote of my first five-hour visit with her, saying I thought that we would be great friends. Now in her nineties, she has become a pivotal person in my life.

The year 2010 laid the groundwork for two international shows also well documented in emails. Upon my return the prior year from Lithuania, I had done a series of artwork on how Lithuania dealt with the Holocaust. I had been invited to show the work in London. And in 2010 I was invited to show my work in Poland where I collaborated with my new friend Dora, showing her photographs with my paintings, traveling through time, a hole in time, as I named the series on the Jewish community of my ancestral town.

I realized that I was looking at the early part of a seven-year span, the beginning of many of the efforts that unfolded within that period. Seven years is a period that is often viewed as significant in religion and in spirituality.  I began to read about seven-year cycles, suddenly realizing that I am now at the beginning of a new one. Some posit that we live our life in such cycles, each with its distinct characteristics, reflective of our personal growth and the demands of each period of our life. If that is the case, 2009 began such a cycle and by 2010 a great deal had begun to happen.  It is a cycle described as a turning point guided by intuition and a desire to apply one's talents to something beyond one's personal self-interest, a greater sense of purpose. The psychiatrist Carl Jung viewed it through the lens of individuation,  a time when we realize that who we are grows out of the collective experience of our family and culture.   We begin to explore these questions freeing us to redefine ourselves and create something new.  That was eerily accurate, my book explores the collective experience of the Jewish community as I explored how I fit within it.   

As I leave that stage, the future is about harvesting, teaching and sharing the results of those efforts.  Now that is something to which I look forward.