When you see it in its fullest form, there is a hint of inevitability to it. Each thing in its place and no other. Just like the quarks of the cosmos that line up in just such a way. Or the Taoist idea of the Hun-tun, if I understand it right, that refers to Chaos not as disorder but as wholeness and oneness. The world as it is and therefore as it must be. Or maybe like that foolish notion one gets that all evolution simply had to come down to us simply because it did.
It is all false of course, musings of the methodical mind. A game for sorters and resorters. As any fool knows, things can work out any whichway and they usually do.
But this family tree, as a diagram of what happened, gives you a very different sense. In a word, a sense of certainty. This is not exactly comforting, like a nice chair, but at least it is firm.
I mean, there is Hym Yuda who began it all and there is cousin Luvel who sang for his mother and over here my uncle who died of radio and then Rachel the Partisan of Vilna back there. All linked and lined up, everyone locked into their own and each other’s destinies, pinned and tagged. Some kind of natural history display of the species homo sapiens, genus Shapiro.
Like bugs on a tray, they cannot move, cannot change places, nor ever recast their lot in life. Their positions are fixed, their relationships to each other pinned, not in Styrofoam but in the denser matrix of circumstance.
Seen this way, and in spite of the tales and the trials and the triumphs, it is amazing above all how dead it all is. You can hear the echoes of the empty museum of time filling in the void. There are stories there and faces and ventures and snapshots, but no real lives. Not a single one. Nothing about breakfast on a Saturday morning waiting for the news or that kiss in the garden that meant so much or the dust that hid the lost watch. Not a single moment of the kind that spin and charm even the quarks themselves. Instead you get just the pictures and the narratives that attach to them, the jokes and jibes, the words after words and more words.
Have I have turned my quest for an oytser into some kind of vast natural collection? And what do I hope to find in there with my magnifier and keyboard? What am I hoping to discover? A rare specimen? A gorgeous genetic monstrosity? A basic principle of change? Darwin found one in the beaks of finches; could I find a similar one in the lives of these specimens?
I do not know but still the hunt goes on. Something drives me. Maybe it is the force behind those individual lives or how one careens against another. Maybe all taken together, as one great diagram of this teensy corner of the universe, a pattern will emerge, a hidden code. The treasure I seek. Meanwhile, it occurs to me that there are still more photos in the album and episodes to tell and even some blank spaces in the tree and that the work is yet to be done.
The work.
At the concentration camps there was a sign that read: Arbeit macht frei. Work makes you free. Is it too late – in history I mean – to hope that that might really mean something again?
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