What do you talk about, meeting cousins again for the first time in fifty years? How do you relate the real family history from which these unsuspecting relations have been insulated, by so much time and space? When is it bad manners, to tell the truth?
So I mention, as is inevitable when skimming over my childhood history, that after my parents’ divorce, my brothers and I were sent to live in an orphanage. And that I spent 18 months there, starting the January after I’d turned nine.
“Eighteen months?”, a young relative commented casually, as we all moved to the dining room for supper. “That’s not so long…”
At the time, I said nothing, but in retrospect, it was as though a huge boulder had been unceremoniously tipped into my personal emotional reservoir, splashing my past into my own face, reminding me of its taste and smell — the peculiar dark viscocity of memory.
Eighteen months? Not that long? Is it possible that I’ve been unduly self-pitying — wrong, all this time, in feeling displaced, devalued, wounded and ashamed?
In ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, Dr. Viktor Frankl cites one major source of anguish for those interned in the Nazi death camps — uncertainty of duration. The flat fact of not knowing how long one might be expected to endure the mindless cruelty and dehumanizing routines, invented to eradicate light and hope, made the impersonal cruelty even more unbearable.
Odd as it may seem, no one explained, to my brothers and me, just where we were going that January morning, in the snow of Western Pennsylvania. No one told us the nature of the building where we were left. No one bothered to mention whether or not we would ever live anywhere else, or whether or not, one day, someone else might think that one of us should go and live with a completely different family. And it was inconceivable that one should ask. Every day was merely a new puzzle to solve, a notch in one’s tight belt of animal survival.
So I decided, two year ago, and more for myself than for that cousin twice or three times removed, to create an archive — a physicalized diary of just what eighteen months of an institutional experience might look like, for a nine-year-old boy whose parents had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared without the bother of actually dying.
Should I succeed in this goal, there will be 542 panels, unified only in their dimensions. As every day is 24 hours long, but otherwise irreproducible, I expect quite a range of visual experiences to accrue, as I go through the mechanics of piling up surfaces, and then tying countless bits of material on top, striving to hold everything in place as simply and directly and honestly as possible.
The way one might live, in a building not one’s home, among other children similarly discarded, trying to appraise what one’s own life might mean, one long day after another…