When I was fifteen, at about nine on Christmas night, my mom heard a gargly noise. My dad had gone to work early that day, got off a couple hours to watch us open presents and eat too much, gone back to work, come home and turned in. What my mom heard was him dying.
The next school year, my junior year, had just begun when I came to find my mom on the floor of her bedroom. She acted drunk, but I'd never known her to get the least tipsy. I called our doctor, who felt sure she had taken too many of the sleeping pills he prescribed following my dad's death. I went in and counted the pills in the bottle. Only one was missing. The doctor summoned an ambulance.
She had spinal meningitis. The doctors expected her to die. But she was tough. She got transferred to an isolation ward at County Hospital. She stayed there for months, leaving me alone in a three bedroom house.
My best friend, Eric Curtis, moved in. Eric was also fatherless. His mom (a ringer for Cynthia Moon of The Venus Deal and The Angel Gang, by pure coincidence), was nuts, often acting paranoid, and volitile to the degree that nobody could live in peace in her home, or maybe in her neighborhood.
Yet Eric was saner than anyone I knew. He was handsome, athletic and lightly freckled, with a ready smile and a bouncy step. And he was wise. We spent lots of evenings reading and discussing books such as Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian, and Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. We frequented the downtown San Diego library, checking out new books and sampling jazz records in the listening room. We often spent days at the beach and weekends driving hundreds of miles to San Francisco or Las Vegas and back.
Then my mom came home. Eric went back to Sylvia, his mother. Soon Christmas season arrived, and Eric and I hung out at our friend Sunday's house. Her parents had a record of Handel's Messiah. Eric listened spellbound. At school, he might fly down a hallway, arms out like wings, crooning "For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth, hallelujah . . ."
On a night that might've been New Year's Eve (and would be if this were fiction), Eric and I were on a seacliff outside the gate of the Fort Rosecrans military cemetary where his dad lay. He looked and sounded solemn and heavy. He said, "Ken, I see a big change coming for me. I don't know what, but it'll be huge."
In January, our friend Kenny's parents got divorced. Kenny decided we (Kenny, Eric, our friend Billy, and I) should celebrate with champagne. We decided to go to a basketball game at a neighboring high school and watch a girl I adored performing her songleader routine. But the game was sold out. Kenny got mad (at his parents, I guess), and socked the gym door window, shattered it.
Security people came running. Kenny bolted. They all chased him.
Eric, Billy and I could've gotten away. But Eric said to me, "Get Billy out of here."
I said, "Sure, and you're coming too."
He shook his head and planted his feet. "I need to take my punishment. You're Billy's big brother now. Get going."
So Billy and I ran.
Kenny and Eric got charged with being under the influence on a school ground. The school board expelled them. The whole school, including our vice-principal Mrs. Bole, knew Billy and I were with them. She could've expelled us, but she believed in people, not policy.
Eric thought his expulsion was the big change. He was called to grow up. And he applied himself to the calling. He took a fulltime job as a flunky at a car dealership. He enrolled in night school. And he started giving stuff away, mostly to friends. He gave me some of his prize jazz records, his favorite sweater, and his beach blanket. Later Sylvia would tell me he even gave away his treasured popcorn pan.
On the evening of Friday, February 15, Eric and I were again on the seacliffs near Fort Rosecrans when he said, "Ken, getting expelled wasn't the big change. It was nothing compared to what's coming."
We made plans for Sunday. Eric, Kenny, Billy and I would drive to Laguna Beach where a sidewalk art show was happening.
I didn't see Eric on Saturday. That night, Billy stayed at my house. Sunday morning, I phoned Kenny, who was going to drive to Laguna Beach in his mom's VW. Kenny said two other guys, Mike and Eddie, wanted to go on a trip, but were lobbying to go to the Indio Date Festival, in the desert not far from Palm Springs.
I enjoy the desert in winter, but riding in a VW carrying six of us didn't appeal to me, especially since Mike was a giant. After consulting Billy, I asked Kenny to phone when they were ready to leave. By then, Billy and I would decide.
But Kenny didn't call. Later, he told me Eric said, "Don't call them. I don't want them on this trip."
If I'd ever known Eric to act mean to anyone, or talk behind anyone's back, I wouldn't suspect he was worried for us. But Eric never acted mean.
On the way home, with Mike driving, as they descended the two lane Viejas grade in the vicinity of today's casino, a car veered into their lane. Kenny's mom's VW careened off the road and down a bank onto a plateau.
Neither Kenny, Mike, nor Eddie got injured. Only Eric. He was riding shotgun. In those days we didn't use seat belts. He flew from the car. His head smashed into the only boulder on the plateau.
Ever since, I've been on a quest to discover why Eric knew what was to come. About a year after Eric's death, the quest led to Christ. And I turned onto the road I've been on ever since.
I've lived with and hung out with dozens of people who attempted to piece together beliefs from myriad sources, different religions and philosophies and scientific theories. I too, have tried to create some conglomerate faith of my own. But along the way, I've become convinced that only a deluded or arrogant human would imagine his small mind capable of rummaging through the stacks of sources and objectively fashioning out of his favorites anything that approaches cosmic truth.
Accepting that Biblical faith has tenets I misunderstand and others I find baffling, mysterious, or troubling, makes me at least feel a bit more humble than I would otherwise be. And I'd bet humility is the beginning of wisdom. At least it assures me that what my senses can perceive isn't all that's going on in the world. And that assurance gives me plenty to write about.
In Midheaven, Jodi, a high school senior chooses God over the drugs and parties but soon learns that faith doesn't keep her from making tragic choices.
The Venus Deal revolves around the crimes and punishment of a of spiritualist cult leader.
In The Loud Adios, Tom Hickey discovers Nazis attempting to empower their imperialist desires with black magic.
Wendy Rose, in The Angel Gang, wouldn't survive if not for her guardian angels.
The Bible helps Tom and Clifford Hickey squeeze a pastor for the truth about a murder, in The Do-Re-Mi.
In The Vagabond Virgins, Alvaro Hickey's romantic and mystical nature sends him on a search for the Virgin Mary or a convincing fake who appears in Baja California lobbying for the overthrow of the Mexican government.
Reflections on writing, reading and inspiration.
Ken Kuhlken has won a bunch of awards for his dozens of stories and seven novels, the latest of which is THE BIGGEST LIAR IN LOS ANGELES. He is president of Perelandra College.
Zoe and Spider
5 comments:
Ken, these sorts of beliefs cannot be discussed in a rational manner because they have no rational basis; they are beliefs, often resulting from our amiability toward superstitious feelings and supernatural hopes. So to say that maybe making much of one premonition that coincidentally occurred, while overlooking or neglecting the dozens if not hundreds of premonitions we all experience from time to time without coincidental result, would be dismissed because it would undermine the necessity for one's superstitions. To take common, natural, even ordinary events and project them into an infinite cause is not one of my inclinations. It would be impossible for me to take the "if this, then that" leap that you have; my brain is not wired for easy acceptance of the unbelievable. I can only say that if you need this to get through the day, then have at it. I probably use wine in pretty much the same way. We all have a crutch of one sort or another. Always your old friend, D.
Don,
When I started college, I was a philosophy major. The second survey course, we led off with a Greek, whom we refuted using the arguments of another Greek, whom we refuted with the arguments of a Roman, whom we refuted with the arguments of a Catholic, and so on until we reached I believe it was Kant, whose arguments we refuted using the arguments of the first Greek
I wanted answers. I didn't want to spend my life arguing. So I changed my major to literature.
I believe in logic and objectivity, but I also believe in subjectivity and inspiration.
The "if this, then that" leap you mention probably is impossible to make or even fathom from a strictly rational, logical, objective position.
Thanks for the comments.
Happy day, Ken
Well,Ken, that is sure an interesting summation of the history of philosophy. It does appear that you gave up long before the good stuff.
The value of literature as an object of study is another interesting question. I came to the opposite conclusion from yours, having started out majoring in literature but changing to philosophy after the first year because, first, it seemed that studying literature degraded from what I wanted books to be -- just writers telling stories, and second, I wanted to become aware of what the finest thinkers throughout history came up with vis-a-vis the questions that did and still do haunt me. I am still on that quest. I don't mind trying to see the view from the shoulders of giants.
Understanding and using logic and objectivity in critical thinking does not preclude subjectivity and inspiration. In the first place, subjectivity is on the face of it unavoidable. Inspiration? I'm not sure what that means, particularly since it is here tied with the subjective, making it relative to the defining notions of a thinking subject. Inspiration might just be one of those throwaway words that means just about whatever one decides it means, and therefore, useless outside one's own frame of knowing.
But none of the preceding is what I intended to say in the original comment. It was not about subjectivity and objectivity, but about rational and irrational. The first set of terms implies point of view, the second set implies a mode of thinking. I was making the point (trying, at least) that "beliefs" are not accessible through rational processes, that is, through a process of logical thinking. If I say I believe that god is in fact a piece of green cheese living 5 miles below the surface of Venus, where can we go with that? It's what I believe. That is the problem with "I believe" statements that are not reconcilable with any approach to rational thinking, to sense experience, or verifiability. Prove my god does not exist as I believe. That is all that I meant by the statment "these sorts of beliefs cannot be discussed in a rational manner ... ."
The "if this, then that" comment was related to the result of believing in premonitions, predestiny, and the like. Something like this: If one has a premonition that, for example, one should not get into a car in some particular instance, and then the car at some reasonably later point is wrecked, "then," one extrapolates from that the actual existence of a knowing entity that "put" that premonition into one's mind.
But what about the variety of "premonitions" we all report having where nothing happened? A little trick from the knowing entity? Like phantom limb pain, maybe we can call those phantom premonitions.
I do not think it rational or reasonable to conclude that the one time out of maybe dozens or hundreds that a premonition concludes with a tragedy that that one is evidence of a knowing entity while all the others are irrelevant.
I am supposing that we dismiss the uneventful premonitions and "weird feelings" that come to nothing in favor of the one that comes to something as a result of the notorious human susceptibility toward ingrained superstitions and, more simply, the desire for it to be true; we need it to be true. So it is. As we gloss over the flagrant irrationality of such beliefs.
All in all, I think I'll stick with wine.
And you're welcome.
Don,
So far, you've accused me either directly or by implication of being absurd as well as of grievously limited education, of making decisions based on minimal evidence, of turning to faith as a crutch, and of easily believing the unbelievable.
No big deal. I just want you to be aware of some lines of argument that might get you kicked off the debate team.
That indicates to me that you might have less assurance of your position than you concede, or that some deep emotion is driving you.
Someday, I'll write the story of Eric Curtis in more detail. Until then, you can either keep considering me a dupe or take my word that the circumstances surrounding our friendship and his death were far more complex than any of those hundreds of premonitions that come true or don't and that I can take or leave as coincidental or providential, because as you note, they prove nothing. Your call.
Abrazos, Ken
I don't see the excesses you describe in your first paragraph, so it is probably a subjective vision from both our subjects. I thought I was maintaining something of an academic distance.
I have always known that it is just not possible to have any kind of critical discussion about beliefs, any beliefs of any sort, because they involve separate languages and distinct ways of thinking. I would rather you responded directly and reasonably to the points I raise, but I don't think we share a common language on these matters, and that inevitably produces misunderstanding.
I'd just as soon drop it.
Although I am sorry you found offense in my arguments.
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