A Tribute to
Ken Dill
(1945 - 1989)
Tarantella Without Music
"At the end of every day I taught, I thanked God I hadn't been found
out."
(Wayne Carver, Class of '67 Dinner,
1992)
I came to our twenty-fifth reunion with
a manila folder full of the writings of our classmate Ken Dill, who
died of AIDS in 1989. Because of how Ken had enriched my life
during the last few months of his, I felt an obligation to commemorate
him, but had no idea of how to do it. At Carleton, hardly anyone
had known Ken. Perhaps calling attention to him at this time was
not "appropriate.”
So I put aside my thoughts about Ken and
immersed myself in the reunion bardo. I hadn't seen Carleton or
most of my classmates for twenty-five years, and I did the usual
things: met up with old friends, wondered at the middle-aged faces
superimposed over my memories of their younger versions, entered and
left conversations that mostly never quite jelled, but which I told
myself I'd take up again before I left. I had lunch with my
ex-husband and remarked on how reunions seemed both more and less
significant than one expected them to be. Then on Saturday night
Wayne Carver made his speech, with his remark about not being found
out, and I remembered Ken.
At Carleton, Ken
hadn't wanted to be found out. Like many of us--like me--Ken
spent much of his time at Carleton in hiding. That's why so few people
knew him. We had plenty of hiding places in those days: the
libe, the dorms, the student union, and even the tunnels. We also
had other, less tangible, hideouts. We could take shelter behind our
GPAs, youthful ideals, personal dramas, god-given talents, religious
and political dogmas and opinions. And, as students of an elite
college, we also had access to that old standby, the fortress of
intellectual contempt.
Ken, gay at a time
when homosexuality did not officially exist at Carleton, had more to
conceal than most of us. He also suffered, in his words, a "lifetime domination by [a] masochistic
rape fantasy with compulsive masturbation"—not exactly the sort
of thing you want to bring up in a bull session about open door
policy. So he kept a low profile at Carleton, after transferring
here his sophomore year. He hid out in the dorms, making friends
with his roommates and a few people on his floor. He got solid
grades, edited a student scholarly magazine his senior year, graduated,
and left for good.
New York City in the
1970s seemed the answer to all Ken's hopes. In the outline to a
long autobiographical poem he never finished, he writes of his "early romantic view of male sex as a
revolutionary act of joy, healing and political/cultural creativity
providing me and others with a strong sense of personal
significance." He soon replaced this optimism with "the jaded habit of using promiscuity as
an avoidance of intimacy." Ken had exchanged one hiding place
for another.
On the surface,
though, his life had improved: after studying film at Yale, he moved to
L.A., where he worked in an art gallery, cultivated friendships with
artists and writers, and hoped one day to become a private art
dealer. Then came AIDS. Ken discovered the identity of the rapist
in his fantasy:
After
subtracting whatever degree of personal responsibilities for these
problems, and also admitting that most of the world's people endure
much more hardship, I am left with an irreducible amount of personal
pain and suffering, which I must now attribute to God as the ground of
all being...And this God is disclosed as the Master Rapist of all of
us, as well as the ultimate innermost identity of the unnamed aggressor
in my rape fantasy. Almost needless to add, God is the creator and
prime mover of the AIDS epidemic.
But ultimately AIDS brought Ken out of hiding. In 1989 he wrote:
I
was the kind of individual who had to be pushed by the force of
circumstance to the very bottom of the abyss before beginning to
blossom as a loving and creative individual who is alive to the
rapturous pulse and imaginative possibilities of life.
Ironically, AIDS may be killing me, but it is also giving me my life.
At about that time, Ken called me up out of the
blue, after I hadn't seen him for fifteen years. He was visiting
friends in the Bay Area and wanted to know if we could get
together. He told me right off about his illness: by this time he
had stripped himself of masks and defenses. As Ken later put it,
suffering from AIDS and entering into and "completely identifying" with the
pain and terror of others with the disease allowed him to "see the divine presence in
everyone." He had learned that there was nothing to hide.
And when I was with
Ken, I saw this too. I didn't have to be a mystic or even a
believer to savor the rare joy of not having to judge, impress, or make
excuses. Simply that. But how could I pass Ken's gift
along? I could talk about Ken: I could perhaps mention that Ken
was the kind of person whose colleagues at the art gallery had taken up
a collection so he could travel all over the USA to say goodbye to his
friends. Or I could tell about the time we were about to go out
to dinner and Ken came down with retinitis, threatening him with
immediate and total blindness. When my husband and I took Ken to
the emergency room instead of a restaurant, his response was to
apologize for spoiling our evening. He pulled out his wallet and
began peeling out twenty dollar bills. Because he had
inconvenienced us and because he had planned to earlier, he wanted to
treat us to dinner.
And yet such an anecdote can be
misinterpreted; people could misconstrue Ken's kindness as a compulsion
to be liked, or even a result of muddle-headedness from
AIDS. Perhaps the better option was to present excerpts
from Ken's writing, but the one long poem that Ken had begun as a way
of making sense of his life and impending death remained largely in
outline form, and his other writing, although powerful, was too
intimate to offer to the public. Also, Ken feared the effect of
his poetry:
I
am constantly in danger of exploiting my illness, deserving the
epitaph, "He was only good at dying, not living. The wisdom of
mortality became his greatest glory." Spiritual wisdom, even this very
sentence, is easily corrupted by the power trip of self-knowledge and
its arrogant, self-righteous expansion to the lives of others.
The task of commemorating Ken, I
concluded, was beyond me. Long before I even got to Northfield, I'd
given up trying to do anything more than xerox some copies of Ken's
poem for Ken's former roommates. I hadn't even contacted the
person in charge of the memorial service. After all, I told
myself, I had no real responsibility in the matter-- I didn't even know
all that many people attending the reunion: most of my best friends had
left before graduation. And then Mr. Carver gave his talk, which
made me remember not only Ken's fears of being found out but also my
own. Over the weekend I'd met some wonderful people I hadn't even
known as a student here: I'd missed out on them because I'd spent much
of my time at Carleton in a self-protective fog, my hiding place of
choice.
Of course, all that
self-concealment had ended long ago for everyone, I told myself.
As middle-aged grown-ups, most of us had faced the kind of
life-and-death issues that make adolescent insecurities seem
trivial. Besides, we knew all about what underlay our fear, and
our various disciplines supplied us with any number of words to
describe it: death anxiety, loveless childhoods, spiritual barrenness,
dysfunctional memories, chemical imbalances, the groundlessness of
being. So I really didn't need to worry about the ghost of my
nineteen-year-old self, who was making me increasingly foggy as the
weekend wore on. I kept missing important lectures and meetings,
and at times I caught myself either failing to listen to people or
saying things that closed me off from them—nothing blatant, you
understand, just the wrong tone or implication. Oh well, I
probably just had jet lag.
Except then I missed
the memorial service altogether—the concert for all my classmates who
had died, including Ken. Of course I had excuses (I hurt my eye
and so got a late start, I didn't want to interrupt my husband, who had
patiently endured my reunion and who now was engrossed in a
conversation about his particular field). But in actuality I had
just spaced the concert out. I had failed to support my
classmates in the most basic way, because of my fogginess. And
behind the fog was the fear.
I had done nothing
about Ken because I was afraid of getting found out—exposed as a
California flake, suburban bourgeois, outmoded hippie, generic
nerd. I could rationalize all I wanted about inexpressible
verities or the need to avoid spiritual self-aggrandizement, but the
truth was that I was afraid of what people might think. Ironic,
considering what I supposedly learned from Ken.
I had one hiding place left:
self-condemnation. If I reproached myself loudly enough, I
could drown out the disapproval of others. I went to the chapel
memorial as an act of ostentatious penance, but by now eye was getting
so painful it was all I could do to remain in my seat. After the
service, I staggered out the door, mumbled some apologies and got ready
to leave for home. I needed to get back to my real life, to the
safety to all my adult roles and titles, where I could forget all this.
But then something interesting
happened. Somebody hugged me, reminding me that I wasn't quite
the pariah I imagined. At the airport, another Carl gave me a
homeopathic remedy for my eye. And finally, by sheer chance I sat
next to a classmate's husband on the plane, who engaged me in a
conversation about modern literature for three hours, distracting me
from my the pain in my eye, teaching me one hell of a lot, and
expecting nothing at all from me beyond a few literate murmurs.
And I remembered
something wonderful about Carleton, then and now. In the dorms
and the tunnels and the classrooms and all the other hiding places, I
always encountered other people, fellow hiders who, in imperfect and
miraculous ways, let me know that I was not alone. Even more
amazing, the empty barren place in myself, that dull void I was always
trying to hide, was precisely what provided a place for the light from
other people to shine. And then I finally truly understood what
Ken had given me: in his openness, Ken had allowed my light to
shine. I had mistaken it for his alone. But perhaps, after
all, the light belonged to both of us, or perhaps to what I can only
identify as God.
But I don't want to get metaphysical here; I
want, finally, to commemorate Ken. Ken had hoped to end his big
poem, entitled "Tarantella with
Music and Song," with a dance "as
a maddening affirmation of unknowable mysteries." A
tarantella is a dance performed by Medieval Italian peasants to remedy
the tarantula's bite, which, interestingly enough, they believed caused
compulsive dancing. Well, this commemoration is neither poem nor
dance, but I consider it a tarantella of sorts, a thank-you note to
remedy my compulsive over-achieving, self-concealing performances of
the past (and no doubt the future). So let me end simply by
thanking Ken—as well as Theo, Aline, Lorin, Carl, Marc, Leigh, Roger,
Harry, Phyllis, Mary Claire, Barbaras Miller and Liston, Mr. Carver,
and all the other Carleton beings of ^* light, who shine through
all my days.
Barbara McHugh (Class of '67)
Written in 1992
Go to the "Carleton'67" homepage
Page created:
2007 April 18