Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Essays

“No matter how much you think that you do it, no one really gets all the loose ends of their life tied up. We can get the major ones but there is always some small thread of action or idea or wish or favor that has not been done. So it is with peace, so it is with our lives. What we can do is try and this is an attempt to examine some of the paths that we have taken on our journey toward personal peace and to recognize that we cannot take all the paths that are in the wilderness of our decision making. Some of us take ‘the road less traveled by’ and some don’t!”

If you had multiple lives, what paths would you follow?

      I knew Kimon Frair in both of his lives, one as a University of Chicago professor, the other as a Greek transplant, poet and translator of The Odys­sey: A Modern Sequel, by Nikos Kazantzakis.

     One day while we drank licorice-tasting uzo in a Greek tavern below the Acropolis, he told how his second life began.

     Vacationing in a northern Greek province, he was on a motor bike that plunged off a narrow road. In the hospital he was pronounced dead. He said he awoke in the morgue, a new man. He came back to the states, quit his teaching job, and moved permanently to Greece.

     "I am starting a new life," he said at that moment. "I died in my last one."

     How many of us wish to start over completely and fill in multiple lives so that we can travel all the paths which the choosing of one road in life forces us to miss? Some byways linger in the mind. The road not taken holds a certain allure for all of us.

    These thoughts of my old friend come to me in the early morning — a time to travel some of those by­ways. Also it is the time to think of tying up loose ends in the path which we have chosen to take.

Beginning new path

     Short of "dying" as my friend did, what strange things could one do to step away and begin a new path? I have many ideas, but a few spring forth:

§          Since coming to The Art Center of Waco, I've wanted to increase membership so that others can find the joy that I feel when seeing and experiencing all these marvelous images and ideas.

I have said that I want to create a T-shirt which reads: "I have upped my contribution to the arts" on the front side and then said, "Up yours!" on the back. Every year I let myself be talked out of it but I still like the idea. Maybe next year.

§         The other day at a meeting for the city of Waco, when asked what I would do for a tourism conference, I said: "Since The Art Center has a number of male and female nude figures on its new­ly completed sculpture path, we wish to do a pre-fabric pageant where visitors to our city can get their photographs taken as Adam and Eve with our staff as unclothed angels."

     There was a pause. One lady beside me, who does not know my sense of humor, allowed her mouth to drop open. In some circles, the unclothed figure is the root of sin. Not my circles but some circles. I paused before continuing: "Or we can do . ."

     The second idea was snapped up immediately. Today, thinking of Kimon in Greece, the birthplace of Western culture, I wish that I had figured a way to do the pre-fabric idea. Maybe next year! There must be a place where innocence is still alive and well.

§         In my 10th year in Waco I look around and see the arts as a secondary concern for too many peo­ple. Our day-by-day labors force some of us to sur­render the wonder of dreaming.

     I know that only through creativity can anyone transcend his or her physical concerns. Therefore, I wish for a piece of an added life so that I could give the many needed years to raise $6 million for the arts programs at Baylor University and McLennan Community College, Waco Symphony Orchestra, Waco Civic Theatre, Waco Hippodrome, and of course The Art Center of Waco.

     Each of these major arts organizations would re­ceive $1 million which would have to be matched with an additional million to establish an endow­ment. The standard management by crisis would be supplanted by long-range planning and program­ming for children.

     What I find is that fund-raising is thought of as a one-year-at-a-time pursuit. Well, maybe next year. There must be a place where raising money is not such a drain on your time and energy.

     And these are my little loose ends. We all have big ones which need tied into a bow and presented to ourselves.

    What are your loose ends, profane and profound, satirical or serious? What lives would you live if you had multiple lives to live?

“A few years after this essay for the newspaper was written and I got no replies to my suggestions, a major museum in New York and another in Paris took up my idea of having works of art with their nude models beside each work, and  five organizations in Cleveland got together (ones who had never cooperated in any enterprise), asked the National Endowment for the Arts for multiple-year  funds so that they could each improve their services and they got it. Maybe we don’t have to tie up loose ends. All we have to do is put the ideas into the wind and sometimes they find a home to grow and blossom. Just maybe, the journey toward peace is like that; we send the ideas over the web network and it blooms”