“How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
I have become the keeper of my family’s archives. Decades of letters, photographs, films and legal documents have found their way, unbidden, into my keeping. For years I ignored them. Shoved them into dim corners and locked trunks. A few years ago, I began exploring them.
I felt certain that explanations would be found, insights gained, wisdom earned as the innermost knowledge and experiences of my ancestors poured through silent decades into me.
Instead, the more I read, the weightier they became. Not their contents, but their presence. I had brought these people back to life, conjured them like genies from their bottles. I discovered that they could not be put back again. I became lost in the unknowable, liminal spaces between words and pages, past and present. There were few answers, and very little wisdom.
It wasn’t so much that what I learned was shocking, though there was some of that. It wasn’t that these people now felt like friends, though some became more vivid than I thought possible, but that they gradually came to dominate my ideas, to direct my thoughts, and my work. Finally, it felt like they were smothering other ideas in order to remain alive through me and my work.
I thought using this material to make art would honour them, that it would push me in new creative directions. It did, but this archive has become an albatross. How many letters, photos, diaries, scrapbooks, greeting cards, telegrams and clippings could I read, or keep?
They amassed gravity, physically and metaphorically. As Marriam Webster defines gravity, they were attaining “extreme or alarming importance”. My MFA thesis of over 100 pages, several art exhibitions, a film and several poems grew out of this archive. I thought surely that would release some ballast. But like a black hole, their gravitational weight pulled me in deeper. I began to fear that I might vanish into that unlocked trunk.
Last year I decided to escape gravity. I began to burn things. I documented the burning to make new work, a final work. It felt great!
Four seasons of methodical burning, and still, I haven’t been able to bring myself to burn it all. I burned the fringes, thinking it might be enough, but as ideas evolved, I found myself wishing that I had scanned things before burning them.