After many years of living, loving, and learning, I feel ready to share what I know. Evolutionary time is long, and eternity even longer. I think that one can effectively recognize the properly attenuated place set for an individual human being in the scheme of things if one lives long enough. I believe this recognition will help me in my choice of words to share in this blog.
And so I start with Esme Kenney.
Saturday afternoon, March 7, 2009, Esme Louise Kenney was beaten, abducted, molested, strangled, and then partially burned by a convicted murderer and sex offender. The tragedy occurred while I watched a Saturday matinee performance of The Pillow Man. The performance included a scene written by the pillow man character during which the character played by freshman Cora Swise is flogged, crucified, and then buried alive.
The passion that 14-year-old Cora was acting on stage in our Chicago Academy for the Arts where I teach was actually happening to 13-year-old Esme at that very moment near her Cincinnati School for the Creative and Performing Arts where she was enrolled as a middle school student.
This juxtaposition of passions conjured up memories of a film I saw in 1978, A Dream of Passion starring Melina Mercouri and Ellen Burstyn. Mercouri's character is a Greek diva who returns to her native country after many years to perform in Euripides’s play Medea on the actual stage in Dionysia where it was first performed in 431 B. C. Medea killed her own children to revenge her husband Jason's betrayal. Mercouri learns that an American in a nearby Greek prison actually did kill her own children to revenge her Greek husband's philandering. She interviews the woman in prison, played by Burstyn, initially for publicity, but finds herself assimilating into her rehearsals the passion the woman suffers as she tells her story.
I am horrified knowing now how poor Esme groped and writhed in terrified agony at the very moment of Cora's acting, now reminiscent of the final scene in Dream. Burstyn's character is shown in flash asides gripped in pain on the jail cell floor, tormented by the memory of her actions, while Mercouri's character passionately enacts the reality of them during opening night on Euripides’s stage.
A Dream of Passion had been the most riveting fictional act of passion I had ever seen. It too had been a Saturday matinee. It was offered to unwitting passersby on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, NC where I had gone for badly needed time off from counseling emotionally disturbed boys in a residential therapeutic wilderness camping program. The marque indicated that it was a foreign film, and initially had not made much of an impression on me. But when it was over, I was stunned, transfixed in my chair, unable to move. Everyone slowly got up to leave except me. There I sat through the next showing and the next.
Now there is the passion of Esme Kenney. God inscrutably allowed the all but crucifixion of an unblemished innocent at the hands of a man manipulated by malevolent evil who was inexplicably lurking in the woods across the street from her home where she had gone jogging.
Esme's fate is now the most riveting act of passion I know. Uninvited, unscripted, unrehearsed, this passion really happened. I remain stunned, transfixed, immobilized.
So life sometimes imitates fiction, making the story so much harder to bear, especially given the kind and gentle nature of its victim in this case. Like the antagonist pillow man who is shot for writing such stories, even though the stories are collected and preserved, Esme's antagonist will surely be put on death row for his crimes and the story preserved so that Esme will never be forgotten.
From Rebelle Rouser July 7:
ReplyDeleteI'm intrigued by your fascination with this girl. I was reading the blog and just wanted to say a few things, not to be argumentative at all but just to ask and find out where you are coming from. forgive me if i am not quite articulate at this point in the evening, it's almost 2 a.m. and I'm very tired (can't sleep).
I wonder what drew you to this particular event, was it the uncanny parallel between real life and what was happening in the play?
Also, you stated something about the killer and "pure evil". I'm really not sure that there is such a thing, in fact I don't believe that at all. Who is to say that this individual is comprised of nothing but sheer malice and terror and evil and all that? Perhaps (unlikely, but it's not impossible) this man was a loving husband or doting father with severe psychological issues, whatever. I'm just saying, every human is capable of doing utterly despicable things and to label someone as pure evil just isn't fair. Even Hitler wasn't pure evil no matter how much people would try and argue that. I am by no means saying that the murder of Esme wasn't a completely disgusting event, that is not arguable.
As for the parts about "god allowed..." that just kind of shatters one of the four O's that your God is supposed to be all about. what are they, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omnipresent, and i forget the other one, but if he was so omnibenevolent then why does he allow humans to have the capacity to do this sort of thing. If I were not sleepy and if you were here I would like to engage you in this particular discussion further.
Thank you for reading my blog, Miss Rebelle Rouser. I am new at the venture of sharing with you and anybody in the world my thoughts about matters pertinent to me. Your response is the first. And I appreciate your thoughtful interest.
ReplyDeleteThe case of Esme Kenney has touched me for many reasons. Parallels with fictional tragedy provided me with a vehicle with which to explore my visceral response to her horribly tragic end.
There is the similarity between her school and the one I teach in. She could have been one of my students. Her potential as a young artist was the same as theirs, and the thought of this happening to one of them alarmed me.
But most of all her loving family and the community in which she lived shared her life in memorial on the web in such a thorough and effective way that I began to feel that I knew this girl personally, given that I work with adolescents and would know.
Esme was extraordinary. I felt horrible that this had to happen to her.
The "O's" are omnipresent (everywhere), omnipotent (all powerful), and omniscient (all knowing). I do believe that such a God exists.
I also believe that freedom of choice is part of human nature. We are free to choose as we like.
You ask an important question: why do we have the capacity to choose evil? I really don't know the answer, Miss Rebelle. But I'll give it a try.
I believe God loves us, and if we were to obey the invitation to accept this love and return it by obedience to his precepts then he would enable us to love as he does. The benefits of such a life are so compelling that the loss of our freedom through obedience to love is rather a small matter.
If we become accustomed to living in the absence of God, we grow rather matter of fact about our independence, even stubbornly entitled.
Before you can move "beyond good and evil" you first have to pass through them, come to terms with them, recognize and acknowledge them. We know the difference between right and wrong.
However, without outside help through love and goodness, then hate and evil overpower love and goodness. You read Nietzsche. Human nature includes resentment and the will to power.
Esme was surrounded and nurtured by a truly loving and involved family. She shown the love she was shown. She mirrored what is good in a world quite fallen in disarray due, in large part, to the progressive weakening of the concrete and cohesive communities in which humans have found solidarity and meaning throughout history.
Esme died at the hands of one who I believe sadly and horribly exemplifies those who come from weakened communities no longer able to provide solidarity and meaning.
So my reference to her perpetrator was generic. What is evil is not him personally; rather what he chose to do and a background that nurtured that choice. And he knew it was wrong because he attempted to burn her body in order to cover up the evidence.
None of this, however, explains the tragic collision between Esme's goodness and the random, evil act of violence Esme suffered. I have no easy answer for that. It is why I have been struggling. It humbles me.
As I wrote at the outset, one can effectively recognize the properly attenuated place set for an individual human being in the scheme of things if one lives long enough.
Last July, 2009, Rebelle Rouser reported above, "...I'm just saying, every human is capable of doing utterly despicable things and to label someone as pure evil just isn't fair..."
ReplyDeleteEight months later, on March 12, 2010, Hamilton County Chief Prosecutor Joe Deters told the jury in his closing arguments, "Sometimes pure evil just exists. Most people can’t get their arms around that. People say he must be insane. He must be stupid. They want to explain this away. Kirkland’s not insane. He’s not stupid. People want to believe that some hideous murderer like this, if you saw them on the street, you’d be able to tell. People, like this guy, …they do exist. There are people, unfortunately, like Kirkland out there.”
Whether or not "pure evil" exists in this man, the jury convicted Kirkland on all ten counts, and found that aggravating circumstances outweighed mitigating factors, such as being a "doting father with severe psychological issues," and therefore has unanimously recommended the death penalty on all four counts that include aggravated circumstances.