Tree of Life
2024. Acrylic, charcoal, paper on canvas. 14 x 11 in.

Last summer, between the time I put away the gel press and the time I started up the collages again, I spent a month or so organizing family records. Photos, old letters, military discharges, house plans, school reports, union cards, seaman’s papers, court orders, wedding announcements, funeral announcements, more photos – like that. Going back a few generations – maybe five at the most. Like many Americans, our history mostly started when we hit these shores. What went before is little more than rumors.

Much of this material I’d never seen before. Some of it was quite revealing, or at least provided enough hints for rampant speculation. These folks whom I’d known only as names, or as figures I just vaguely remembered, began to take on quite a bit more dimension. I couldn’t shake the feeling of their connection with me. The web of antecedent and descendent vibrated strongly.

Every year my grandmother visited her brothers “back East”. I never knew these people, and she never really told us stories about them, but she spoke their names with intimacy and fondness. But my mother spoke of these same men, her uncles, more dispassionately, and, in the irritability of her final years, with anger. I am connected to these strangers through these tones of voice.

And now, with these old photos, I have a few visuals to go with those tones of voice. Lowell with his wife Leona. Irving as a co-pilot in World War II. Bruce on the farm, an unsmiling child in gold-rimmed glasses.

Each of them as attached to their lives as I am to mine.

And so I started to feel them.

But it is not only ancestors in these collections. People I have known intimately, my contemporaries, have begun to appear there now as lives also concluded.

Materially, these beloved persons are only records now, the pale ephemera remaining from lives of action and accident. But in my body they are so much more than that. They are sounds and movements, light and color. Sensations under the skin.

How gone are they really, these distant great-uncles, these beloved friends, these shadows five generations and a hundred generations out? How can we say they are fully gone, when what they were and did is still influencing what is now? They are dead only to our limited consciousness and our impoverished sense of time.

It was under the spell of all this feeling that I commenced this collage. Not what one expects from a tree of life, I suppose. It certainly does not appear a very sensible structure, spreading up with sturdy trunk and steady branches or down like a tidy genealogical chart.

No, this tree of life is more an untidy cluster. The jumbled dreamy clot that is our passage on this planet. That doesn’t end with us or begin with us. Expanding and contracting, in sweeps and fractures, fading and focusing, reverberating still.