Kenneth

Kenneth travelled to India and Pondicherry with his wife, Myrtle, in 1966. He would describe his meetings with the Mother, for whom he had a ferocious sense of devotion and love, and about whom he would talk with tears in his eyes. There were the early years of Auroville: the beginning of the digging for the foundations of Matrimandir, in which he participated along with a handful of other early Aurovilians.

Kenneth had been with us living and working in Mother's Auroville, from the early years onwards. In the later years we know him from his poetry inspired by his experience here.

Please hold this longtime friend and brother up to Mother in your awareness for some time. Our love and sympathies go out to his Auroville -born daughters, Durgaura and Aurienne.

His body was buried on August 23rd, in Adventure.

A silent gathering 'Remembering Kenneth' took place under the Banyon tree on Friday evening, August 30th, 2002.

Poetry by Kenneth ..

HER ALMOST FLEDGLINGS

On a halcyon day I found the blue

one-inch egg, pale afloat on the lily

pond - not on a leaf, on the water still.

And I thought of the kingfisher gone so

many days past; I wondered at the egg:

no tree stood near except the mango,

its branches clear of the water or nest.

So I took the orphan for hatching;

-don't laugh, it happened, astounding me too.

There is a bronze of Kali seated in my house,

of benevolent mien, the mudra allows

approach, annihilation deferred; behind bent leg

I cached within Her cosmic wrap the egg.

For half-a-month it lay lapped getting

ready to hatch for its second's reprieve;

its minute of mystery to live cleaving

time; I found it dead, dank, half-out of its shell

and Kali brooding on Her almost fledglings.

Remembering Kenneth

A metaphysical realist, his poems, sustained by a playful word-craft, capture a wide variety of moods that range from the nostalgic to the surreal. His spirit, at times celebratory, frequently ironic, reflected a mind at work on many different levels.

On any given day I’d find him in several different worlds simultaneously, which are like different facets of a gemstone – different angles of light and darkness; he once told me. But perhaps it is the whimsical humor that is the richest vein in his work. Drawing the reader in, with the equivalent of an accomplice’s wink, it ranges from the iconoclastic to the self-mocking, from the bitterly ironic to the ribald and folksy.

In one of our lengthier sessions he had mentioned that he had been thinking of going back to the States and down to Mexico. He took me to the door, muttering, “Willon and Bierce, they’re me,” before wandering off into the undergrowth, chuckling to himself. I think I can still hear him chuckling.

Roger, AV Today

From Jack Alexander jackaviusa@aol.com via the Compat forum

From an Old Timer

My period in AV qualifies me for the title. My work with Abn qualified me to go to Ken & Mertle's there in Certitude to repair pumps. We would get word from a tambi that his pump Was out of order and if we didn't arrive there within a few hours, we got a visitor on a bright blue bicycle; shades, shirt unbuttoned, bedhi dangling from the lips -- a regular tough guy, wanting to know WHEN he could expect to see us and our tools.

If you hadn't ever seen him before you might wonder where you were or at least what prison he had escaped from. His outer being was about as much like a pirate as any I have seen on TV. I remember Tattoos also but perhaps that was in the subtle physical. I think Ken had about the toughest outer persona of any of the 200 or so AV folks populating the barren red earth in the early days. Of the pirates du jour, Francis, Mali, Krishna, Jean, Vincenso, Bernard, Big Piete, etc,. etc., Ken would be first on my "Soft-as-a-Lamb" list. (they all made it onto this list)

If we had come "on time" to Ken's we would have see him doing his "Water-Sadhana." This easily could also have been misconstrued as him working out in the exercise yard in some American Prison. Rather than large free weights, Ken chose to use the two fisted watering system. No wimpy hose pipe for Ken. He would collect the water from his Myers Jet Pump into a small tank on the ground and dip two large buckets, one in each hand, and walk across the yard in the blazing sun to dispatch his load onto the deserving recipients. Back and forth for hours, building a beautiful garden and a superb upper body. If Ken were the only part of the elephant you were touching, you would have said that Auroville must be a chain gang.

But just get the least bit past the sneer, and there was willingness to laugh that was just waiting to get out. Give him the least chance and you would hear about the time and invariably it would end in something akin to Sri Aurobindo's aphorisms.

Good bye to one of the original AV Pirates of Peace

Jack