On Ken Park (1993-1996)

I met Ken Park when I transferred in, as a Junior, to Bard College in the Fall of 1993. He was the nicest guy I have ever met; I had never before met someone who reminded me so much of myself. He wore English tweed sports-coats and always carried around a wire or metal contraption of some sort for dunking teabags in hot water. He frequently carried with him a volume of Nietzsche's Zarathustra or, in the second year that I knew him, he was often seen carrying Jurgen Habermas' book Legitimation Crisis. Ben Armento used to see him outside of the DeKline coffee shop and he's say, "Ken, how about a little Nietzsche?" and Ken would say, in semi-prophetic intonations, "Man is a tightrope stretched between animal and superman...." and we'd all laugh. Ken was a year below me, and the only one of my classes I can recall him being in was a course in Semiotics taught by a Professor Grab, who used to have Ken read his essays before the class to inspire us. However, Ken spoke in such a mumbled voice that it was hard to understand much of what he recited; his writing was mostly concerned with the critique of the theory of production, which I now suppose was partly the reason why he was reading those Habermas books. ==================== I never had too many interactions with Ken, aside from the one class, but I would frequently see him outside of Kline Commons, sitting on a low brick wall with his girlfriend, a Senior whose name I do not recall. (It would be easy to look her up someday, she won the prize that year for her Senior Thesis, which was (I believe) on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.) I once met him in his room, which was similarly bare-bones as mine, with just a computer, a desk and a bed - I asked him if he enjoyed a good love-life here at Bard. He looked up at me and said, beneath a shy brow, "There isn't too much of that here for me." During this period of time I was having sex with Debra Mandlebaum every weekend, either on her campus or on mine. Ken's girlfriend and he seemed to have more of an 'intellectual' camaraderie to them than the relationship between Debra and myself, which was intensely sexual. Someday, I yearned, I will have a purely intellectual girlfriend, too - I said to myself (I felt as much at least, Debra was very intelligent herself, as she wrote her senior thesis on the work of Phillip Roth, Bob Dylan and Woody Allen in her final year at Vassar.) =============== Even when I went to North Carolina to attend Wake Forest University, where I had received a full scholarship to attend their Master's Program in Literature, I remember I contacted Ken Park in Quincy Massachusetts, which is where he lived, as I remembered him telling me when we were at Bard. I do not recall what time of year I called him, how I got his number (I must have used directory assistance - this is still before the dawn of the internet or, rather, in its early days) or why I expected him to be at home, as it surely was during the school year, for I went back to New York during the summer months, when classes at Wake were not in session. Ken was very different on the phone, I can recall him not making much sense and when I asked him what he was reading, he muttered that he was spending his time playing basketball, "I shoot baskets," I recall him saying vacantly. Were I to have the knowledge then that I do now, I would have encouraged him to go see a psychiatrist at once. Unfortunately, I did not. =============== What I did not know was that Ken had been removed from Bard College the year after I left in 1995 or '96. Apparently he had been receiving messages from the CIA giving his instructions of some sort, a classic and textbook example of paranoia and the apotheosis of dementia praecox. Why did no-one intervene in this case? Ken Park was sent back to Quincy, Mass. to live with his family and apparently no psychiatrist was consulted and, when his schizophrenia reached a critical mass, he killed his father with a hammer and slaughtered his two sisters with shotgun blasts. After spending the day at Harvard Yard, chatting with the students he found there, he made his way to a police station and confessed his crimes. You can look him up yourself and discover what I may have left out of my relation of the incidents: just open another window and search for the terms: Kenneth, Park, Quincy. =============== O woe ! As Thomas Wolfe says in his many works, you can't go home again. Nevertheless, I plead with God to give me a second chance and let me return to the days when I viewed Ken and his tea-brewing equipment on Bard's campus commons and let me be able to offer him the advice I have only gained through my own painful experiences. O lost ! Come back and return to me, most unsolaced joy of my youth, how I wanted to be your friend, how I wanted to explore the Wake Forest library with you, how I wanted to write books with you, how I wanted to have a truly intellectual friendship with you! For years I blamed Leon Botstein, Bard's President, for not informing Ken Park's father of the state of his son's health and the urgent necessity to seek psychiatric care in this regard and saw in the failure to do so an indictment of a system that makes all medical information a private concern and a matter subject to HIPPA laws, but I don't feel that way any longer. =============== From my researches on the internet I learned that Ken Park's schizophrenic breakdown was precipitated by the death of his mother, from cancer, a few years prior to his coming to Bard College. Perhaps that's what gave him the death-hollow look in his eyes and perhaps that's why he refused to make eye contact with Ivar, when he visited me during my first year at Bard in the Spring of 1994. I don't know. I do know that I had my own sort of psychotic breakdown on the day of my sister's wedding to Bruce McBrien in 1991. Apparently I got stinking drunk, and had to be placed on the dais between the groom and the bride, in a half-mad state, alternating between fits of laughter and weeping. =============== Earlier this year, I came across something in my reading of Les Miserables which gave me more insight into this event. History tells us that a similar event occurred in Paris over one hundred years ago when, on the day of his wedding, the brother of the poet and novelist Victor Hugo had a psychotic breakdown in reaction to seeing the woman he loved become his brother's bride, which leads me to believe that perhaps I was in love with my sister, Christine? Again, I do not know, but I can only tell you that a similar mental condition of Ken Park's psychology and mine stemmed from a breakup in the structure of our families. Someday when this life is over, I hope to walk among the Elysian fields of heaven with Ken Park, arm in arms, hand in hand. friends forever, swinging our way forward with a straight gait, and seclusive no more.