The Orchard

By Joseph Kinnebrew

"This is a profound book. and not for the faint of heart. Joseph Kinnebrew is a deep thinker and has created a masterpiece for moral debate and further consideration. Kinnebrew crafted a surreal tale using metaphors woven together as only a consummate artist can. This book and ideas of the four concepts of faith, forgiveness, redemption and resu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookside Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781778832246

Joseph Kinnebrew

Professionals who study gifted people recognize and refer to Joseph Kinnebrew as an exceptional autodidact polymath. He is known to many as a sculptor and painter whose works reside in well-known museums, private, corporate and institutional collections; however, this is far from the complete picture that include his many other successful undertakings. Kinnebrew is a writer, mentor, designer, inventor, composer and recognized futurist to name a few.Although these days he is generally reclusive, a prominent New York Times critic described him as "The 800-pound gorilla in the room whose work is impossible to ignore." A critic in Chicago wrote at length about the wide-ranging interests and deep understanding Kinnebrew has for complex and challenging subjects.Kinnebrew is well-travelled, uncommonly well-educated and eccentric in his tastes for art, ideas and cooking. Beyond 80 now he has the energy and productivity of many half his age, some claim the man never sleeps. He believes all people are creative to some degree but in the extreme (where he lives) it is both a blessing and a curse. He also believes all people need their sleep!

Book preview

Book One

The Journal

1.

My name is Cedric Childs. I am a surgeon. I am sixty-eight years old, have been divorced for two years but separated longer and was, last week, diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s Disease. I am a man who plans for the future. I spent most of this week completing admission forms and making the necessary arrangements to provide for my future care. In August I started to reduce my patient load as I have suspected for some time the diagnosis of progressive dementia would confirm symptoms I recognized early last summer. Today is Sunday, December twenty-fourth, Christmas Eve Day. Merry Christmas.

I am in my study alone this evening just as I have been on Christmas Eve for the past five years. My wife lives in a distant city near her sister who is her only living relative. When we divorced, she said she would never remarry. She is a beautiful woman whose outer persona reflects the one within. I love her very much and know she loves me as well. The end of our lives together has been a tragedy of colliding principles and intentions. Not a physical conflict between the two of us; instead, a debate within our souls, which became so corrosive it destroyed the formerly peaceful life we enjoyed. If there is any grace remaining in this, I think in many respects we are like war casualties who believe we sacrificed ourselves for a higher purpose so others might not pay a similar price. I will not tell her about last week’s confirmed diagnosis because it will bring her great pain and I have already shared in bringing a burden upon her, more than any caring human should do to another. This is a matter now of long standing and the complexities of it prompt me to at last begin chronicling the events of a small group of people with whom I have been associated for many years.

I have, for some time, contemplated what I would do if this sentence of progressive mental incapacity and blurred vision of the world were pronounced on me. I have thought of suicide by different means, which would, for the living and those who must live with the consequence of my physical death, be considered natural.

I am aware the taking of one’s own life can be a shattering experience to others and how haunting a legacy it would be. So alas, I will do what I must, I will live life to the end and die by the natural causes that are, I suspect by a slim margin, my obligation as payment for the random gift of life itself. Perhaps in vain but nevertheless I wish at the end of my illness I might be granted a moment of grace, a momentary lapse into unfettered coherent thought. Perhaps I would then again see the world with sad but clear and faintly optimistic eyes. I might remember what this life was about and gain some greater insight into preparations for what may be next. This notwithstanding, death does not frighten me, and madness might be a merciful alternative to the endless debate now raging inside my brain, my soul and my heart. I may well be either the devil incarnate or a saint; I do not know which. I have kept the company of conspirators who would challenge many things people in our society have come to regard as dear and precious. With my death in sight, I see myself reduced this final contemplation of life.

I am a well-educated man and know Earth has been damaged by numerous catastrophes. Some the fault of humans who may or may not be on the list of catastrophes, but thus far Earth has proven itself the greater and more enduring presence. Nature itself is not flawless and its errors as well as successes of process abound. Life is, after all, a serendipitous miracle which has taken many forms but few other than bacteria have survived for any great length of time. In the laboratory, under magnifying lenses, I have often seen life joined and then disappear. The miracle and uniqueness of human intelligence does not, in retrospect, seem to be of any particularly great advantage in overcoming the odds of or for enduring survival. Au contraire, we appear, like other life forms before us to be in danger of causing our own extinction. Some think this biological determinism, but I rather suspect it may be due to moral or ethical considerations that bring us to our untimely demise. In spite of this and more frequently now, I think I hear a distant song coming from a man singing far back in the comparatively short geological time of 107 billion 200,000 plus human years on Earth. A sound of thanksgiving and joy, comforting me it is a gift; a song sweeping through me and joining me to others of our kind.

For a short time, my illness will allow me time to write down descriptions of the events I have participated in over the past two and a half decades, and most particularly the more recent years. Now many notebooks, this journal is a reflection of my training, product of rational observations, and artistic interpretation. Medicine, after all, is still an art form that reveres precision and consummate skill. Through my own choice and along with the consent of our group, I will chronicle our times together and when finished give the manuscript to my old friend Edwin, a painter and one who himself dwells inordinately on such things as the destiny of human beings. I suspect he will not be surprised by what he reads and comes to know about his doctor friend, for he knows and understands we all possess secrets. But I have hidden my… our secret especially well. While he will understand, Edwin will not necessarily approve of what our group sought to demonstrate, affirm and suggest as an alternative to our present circumstances.

Other than Edwin I do not know to whom I, or more correctly speaking we, the group as a whole will address this journal with related materials. It is by unanimous agreement and consent, our hope and intention that by providing a record of our motives and results of our actions we perhaps might be better understood and forgiven if we are judged deranged criminals. I do not believe in heaven, but for reasons I am still unsure of, I fear a death of eternal damnation. I will begin at the beginning. Not my beginning but with that of our little group. It all seemed so innocent and a worthy undertaking back then.

2.

In the summer of 1969, I received a note from General Jonathan Little who years ago had been first a patient and then a friend. Initially I saw him privately because he had an obscure endocrinology problem and wanted to remain informed about his condition outside the scrutiny of military doctors, whose opinions or actions might cause him career path issues. Jonathan was a methodical man who knew well the perils of professional ascendancy and believed forewarned was forearmed. Since we first met, he had become a two-star general and was being posted back to the New York area where my wife and I have lived since I completed my residency at Johns Hopkins. That autumn he would take up his post as an instructor at the military academy north of the city and also serving as an advisor to the Pentagon be a commuter to Washington DC. He had always wanted to return and live in the heart of New York City. He wrote me in advance of his arrival and looked forward to resuming our friendship. He apparently no longer needed me as his outside medical consultant.

When he arrived in Manhattan my wife Mary and I saw him frequently at first and then as months wore on less so. When Christmas drew near that year we saw more of Jonathan. Mary and I have no children of our own and always enjoyed this holiday season, particularly when, like family, friends seemed closer. Since Jonathan was single and would be alone, we invited him for Christmas Eve dinner. It was twenty-five years ago tonight, 1969 and in recent years I mark it with a sense of irony, the eve of Christ’s birth. The man, who Christians choose to believe came to save mankind more or less from themselves. The man who brought an offer of forgiveness and redemption through revelation and in return asked us for faith.

Mary prepared a lovely dinner and the three of us talked about different things of mutual interest. Eventually the topic turned to recent books each of us had read and I was astonished to discover Jonathan was widely read and well versed in areas I would not have imagined coming from a man whose adult life had been devoted completely to his country and the military. He read with enthusiasm and insightful understanding across fields of philosophy, psychology, and geology. I knew he taught history and the evolution of military tactics, but I found it fascinating he was able to weave his other interests back and forth so effectively, incorporating them into the rich fabric of his history lectures. That’s how it started. Books. The three of us decided to read a book, have dinner again and talk about it.

In early February, this time Jonathan invited us for dinner and a discussion of the book we all agreed to read beforehand. The book was Theodore Roszak’s, The Making of a Counterculture. It was about the perils of degrading visionary experience which in turn diminished our own actual experiences. The book was new and in 1969 had been out a year. It was being discussed primarily by people in colleges and universities on the west and east coasts and not the kind of subject military people took to kindly in an era of the Vietnam War and rampant protests. After completing the book, I felt there were might some themes that could appeal to Jonathan and his peers. Roszak wrote about under management, not the reverse, and failures of technology and playboy permissiveness. The three of us were all in our early forties but on the pages of Roszak’s book we heard the songs of our youth and accompaniments of optimistic enthusiasm.

Mary worked in the New York City Department of Social Services as a case reviewer. She dealt primarily with adolescent first time criminal offenders. With Jonathan teaching young soldiers who would be our future military leaders, and me seeing young doctors whose rounds I scheduled and comments I reviewed, we each related to the young active student culture of the waning turbulent sixties. We felt a part of it and were sympathetic to many questions and challenges being posed to the country by its youthful inheritors. Jonathan was surprisingly tolerant of the anti-war demonstrations and quite liberal in his view of free speech. However, he was equally intolerant of those who would not use the precious inheritance of freedom to come to terms with racial bias, greed, and corruption. He was also easily angered by social injustice and criminals. General Little was a complicated soldier, the kind of man who if we had to have men of war, we would want behind the trigger. He was a man of conscience.

To our delight, Mary, Jonathan and I discussed the book sitting cross-legged at an exquisite Japanese restaurant in midtown Manhattan where it was obvious the General was a regular. He had reserved a private shoji screen enclosed room and arranged for an unusual ten-course dinner. Reflecting now on the delicate diminutive portions, as each course was presented in minimalist fashion it seemed the setting, the exotic food and the books subject all effectively worked in concert. I even forgot how cramped my legs felt. Mary finally turned and with her back resting against my side, stretched her legs out eating sidesaddle while we talked. The pretty kimono clad young woman who served us showed no expression of disapproval.

America, Roszak said, was waking up to find the enemy not in its factories, on the battlefield or in the office. The enemy of American society was across the breakfast table in the person of its own pampered children. With the passage of time the children would win as they usually did, their evolving maturity and serendipitous events inevitable and undeniable.

The young, miserably educated as they are, bring with them almost nothing but healthy instincts. The project of building a sophisticated framework of thought atop those instincts is rather like trying to graft an oak tree upon a wildflower. How to sustain the oak tree? More important how to avoid crushing the wildflowers.

Theodore Roszak

I reflect on Roszak’s words from time to time. I keep that first book of our discussion close at hand as a more than sentimental memento of what we were to become, together.

3.

In March we read The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, a gifted teacher but I have never thought a particularly compelling artist. I am an avowed art lover and suggested this New York author, teacher and painter of the Trashcan School. The book, written in 1923 is a contrast to the sixties and Henri’s work not withstanding there was an interesting message about creativity and how gifted people could be more adept, more insightful when benefiting from delicate and caring tutelage. It was a message to touch each of us in a different way. We were all teachers; facilitators of good we thought, and Henri set an admirable tutorial standard. After we finished talking about Henri and art, Jonathan said he’d been thinking about having others join us. We agreed it was a great idea and would set our minds to thinking of suitable candidates.

By the following October we had only read two more books but added other people to what we now humbly referred to informally as our Book Club. To facilitate or perhaps legitimize our habit, Mary introduced Brian Black, owner of a small bookshop in The Village specializing in rare and unusual books. She had long been a regular customer of Brian’s and I met him a few times, always thinking and suspecting him rather mysterious. Brian Black, possessor of dark secrets hidden away in the aged books he bought and sold. Brian was himself quite small with a swirling storm of white hair and I sometimes wondered how imposing towering bookshelves must have been to a man less than sixty inches tall. Dusty stratified layers of shelves reaching to the tall ceiling. With the records of human knowledge neatly arranged, his store was like a cave, lined and layered like exposed geological stratification.

Brian was an immensely intelligent man. A distinguished university professor I knew he had retired early from his position. His mind possessed and catalogued wondrous details contained in the volumes of his beloved books. With some knowledge of the subject, I would say he was a legitimate autodidactic.

I suggested two fine people for inclusion in our group. The first was Jessica Nota, a young and very attractive photographer I’d met a few years ago at a gallery exhibition of her photographs in Soho. Later I spoke to her frequently during intermission sorties at Lincoln Center. Mary, Jessica and I were devoted classical music buffs.

Jessica had been a war photo correspondent for the BBC but returned to the states and worked for the New York Times. She’d seen more pain and suffering in her nine years as a photographer than I had in my many years of practicing medicine. A passionate and intense person, Jessica was unusually direct and could at times be disarmingly candid. Her photographic interpretations of human agony, cruelty and waste were arresting. The images of suffering she captured back then on film were disturbing to all but the most callous of viewers. She knew exactly what she wanted from viewers and how to get it.

Mario described himself as a mongrel of questionable parentage. He was a curiosity, and I was curious. I came to know Mario when during ward rounds, I saw him reading In Search of The Miraculous by Peter Ouspensky. I’d noted from his chart he was a dockworker who’d been stabbed in the upper back. He was in a ward with indigents, and I was intrigued that he would be reading such a book. The following day when I did rounds, he was deeply engrossed in his reading and seemed to have isolated himself from the noise and hectic goings on around him. Years before I had been told by a very wise professor, curiosity is a healthy, if not revealing quality in a doctor so later I went back to his bedside for a bit of conversation.

Not a shy man, looking up from his book he peered intently at my nametag and called me Cedric right from the start. Not Doctor or Doctor Childs, just Cedric. I asked him how he was, and he said okay but paused, evaluating me I think to see if I could stand the bad news then said, Ya knows Cedric, it takes artists twice as long to know their stuff as it does a doctor, at least that’s what Peter here, somewhat painfully he waved the book over his head, says. Now let me ask you something Cedric, what’s more important, art or science?" I considered this for a long moment, hesitated and then told him I’d be back again later to chat after rounds. There was no way I was going to react to this interesting idea casually.

Jane Shapiro and my wife Mary had been friends for years and Jane worked in the same hospital I did. She was a psychiatrist and if asked, not at all reluctant to tell us she was a devoted Marxist who loved America but loathed the capitalist system. She blamed it for any number of mental maladies created and faced by her mostly affluent patients. She did not prescribe another form of government or economic order, she just vehemently felt capitalism was not the last word on the subject of organizational options. Particularly interested in Marx’s views on aesthetics, her knowledge of Marxism went well beyond the superficial understanding most of us had. I always thought she was one of the children Theodore Roszak had seen across the breakfast table. Not a particularly visually attractive woman, her intense gaze and untended bushy eyebrows with little or no makeup or jewelry suggested she was always on a mission of some sort. I’d say almost disarmingly scary at times.

Thus, within a year we were a group of three women and four men. Mary and I only saw a couple of the other five socially outside of our every month or so meetings. Mario became my patient and despite occasional inquiries into his childhood and upbringing he always managed to deftly step around any revealing answers. When the book club met, we usually enjoyed memorable wine and cheeses occasionally along with other light eating fare, but our focus remained on books and related topics. I recall with fondness and some curiosity, Mario’s hosting opportunities over the years suggested a curious past association with unexpected graciousness and cordiality. After he joined us, and to appease him I remember we dutifully read and discussed Peter Ouspensky’s, In Search Of The Miraculous. When I invited him to join our group Mario told me he’d like to come but only if we had all read Peter’s book first. Not a controlling person, he just did not suffer fools gladly and I was getting the idea prized scholarship, a trait that would present significant problems for him later in his career."

Having finished Mario’s required book we debated knowledge, who had it, where they got it, and if it is the same for everyone. The definition of knowledge was, we agreed, a contextual issue but someone needed to come up with a few definitions we could all accept. Once that agreement was part of the equation, implementation became an obvious next step. Who among us, Mario asked, considered themselves so holy?

Jonathan our esteemed army commander replied, But without a pattern of societal norms based upon mutually accepted facts and truths there can only be anarchy.

Jane added, Ah, tsk tsk, knowledge is power,

And power corrupts. Just look what priests have done, added Mario.

Ouspensky had been an unexpected and powerful revelation for us all.

And so it was, matters of social conscience flooded into our minds with far more questions than answers. It was not a comfortable feeling; I do not recall what time we stopped but it was early morning when Mary and I walked out into an emerging October dawn neither of us has ever forgotten. In the chilled gray city light our world was no longer the same. That night before we had been with Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Queen had frightened us with powerful mandates and a little hare brushed our eyelashes with revelation we still could not yet clearly see or understand.

Our discussion should have been the first clue to what we would all become a party to, but then none of us could remotely imagine what we would eventually come to contemplate more deeply, argue, and finally decide.

4.

We read into the fall of 1970. Our meeting discussions grew increasingly philosophical and unexpectedly depressing. We read books whose authors railed against societal injustice and others who saw little hope for mankind. I still cannot account for why we drifted this way more or less from the outset other than the fact that all of us shared a deep concern about the world where we lived and worked. We talked about ways to play our part and contribute to making life better for everyone.

Mary told me in November of 1970 she didn’t want to continue, but I convinced her to stay on until after the first of the year. It was bad enough she had to deal with the depressing inequities and absurdities of our fumbling governmental social assistance system, but to spend evenings discussing more of the same and evenings often running into wee morning hours was more than she could or wanted to cope with. Mary wasn’t the only one who considered leaving our group. Brian, the darkest amongst us would, with down cast eyes at times speak in disparaging whispered tones about what we could or would do to reconcile various authors’ visions of everyday life. He could be bitterly cynical, and this did not add to anyone’s comfort level. I still marvel he remained with us or we with him.

Brian had been a part of a United Nations documentation team that inspected, reexamined, and again recorded horrors of concentration camps in the Second World War. It had affected his life deeply and our shared melancholy was yet another heavy burden for him. Some wounds to our souls never heal.

At first none of us noticed it but our group was coalescing, becoming increasingly more of a single mind. Together we grew morose in our view of society, pessimistic about what anyone, or we in particular could do to change the direction. We were convinced the present course could only lead to our hastened extinction as a species. Metaphorically we looked across the table where books, the objects of our mutual passion had too often become instruments of war, flawed diplomacy and dogma. On the other side of the table, often as the enemy books were used to promote outright lies, create divisions and sedition undermining decades, even centuries of human progress. The persons and ideas represented and depicted were us whose acts of free will ignored the recorded achievements past and present. What was to become of knowledge and predictions to our time on earth? We knew well enough we were endangered but there was far more to it than that.

The spring of 1971 took all the energy we could muster to remind us winter was finished. The coming Spring a time of renewal, growth, and the beauty of Earth would outlive us, in the meantime, Earth would again embrace us in ways we could touch and feel. Curiously, it was a dose of Walt Whitman that turned the trick for us all. Mary had stayed on, I think, because she was concerned about my own state of mind over the disheartening things we discussed through those long dark winter nights.

Encouraging us to understand and accept personal responsibility using acts of individual free will Whitman urged us forward the future. I am unsure whether Whitman would have taken any pride or solace in the eventual outcome but with our conversations by summer’s end we experienced some audacious ideas.

It was the General who first suggested we consider the difficult decisions God, not a specific God just any God had to make. He related this problem to examples in military history where leaders used lives of innocent young men to achieve their ends. The dilemma of reconciling social and political goals with decisions involving giving and taking of life is what started our exercises of identifying specific issues, then, assuming one had unlimited resources, setting out to resolve matters in a radically unconventional way. All kinds of speculations, questions and answers were presented and discussed, we were by this time a close group, but not necessarily one of unanimously agreed opinions. Our concepts were sometimes unrealistic, bizarre and frankly surreal. Unimaginable.

One evening we discussed crime, the standards of justice in our country and validity of truth. None of us, other than Mario when I first met him, had been directly affected by violent crime, but the issue of criminal abuse was prevalent in our city and increasingly a very serious major issue across the country This seemed to us certainly a core issue we have to face as a society. We all agreed lawlessness and criminal behavior represented a threat to our Constitution and continuance as a civilized society. Crime in its many forms represented a weakening of the moral and ethical foundation people everywhere needed to establish and maintain in order to lead decent peaceful lives. Collective will to do good was in jeopardy, violent crime seemed to be the most dangerous of abuses, but subtler less apparent acts of corruption and victimization were even more insidious and widespread. It was a plague, corruption of the soul and theft of the spirit. For this reason we discussed alternatives.

By this time Mario was being considered a prime candidate for State Senator. He publicly took the greatest umbrage over suggestions we exile criminals to remote colonies where they could not contaminate the rest of us. Others suggested they either survive or perish out of sight and the public’s mind. Brian and Jane suggested this, after all, was what our prison system had become. Much like France’s Devil’s Island in French Guiana with its 75 percent death rate. However, was Jessica who contrasted punishment in America with that of Muslim states. In our group only she had witnessed and knew details of their practices, which usually horrifies Westerners.

A few years earlier, she actually witnessed the amputation of a thief’s arm in Saudi Arabia; and in the beginning she was the only one of us who thought it might not be a bad alternative to our system of incarceration. Her comment, that both Brian and Jane readily endorsed was, Would we rather incarcerate the person and, in the process, amputate the human soul or instead amputate their arm to perhaps preserve the soul, the life and spirit for a better outcome? A critical exchange: lightening touched the ground, a brief tap of light then darkness flooded back to obscure the artifacts of dilemma. In retrospect, I wonder what might have been, had this light touched other ground or as a natural cause… struck us dead.

In other places and other times, was this line of discussion similar to those precipitating anarchy as opposed to greater social justice? Perhaps a scourge of new Eugenics. The same delusionary thinking which obscured what had long been hidden in dark shadows. A forgotten practice used in our own country that continued into the twentieth century. Was this the same conversation heard recently in Germany? What similar revelations fell upon doctors, teachers, judges and priests in Germany of the twenties, thirties and forties? I have sat here in my study many nights debating this with Mary, and now as a mercy to her, quietly alone.

People in today’s world take little notice of art, have little use for poetry and repeatedly refer to their conquering of any number and matter of things. Things they either didn’t or don’t own and have no right to. I don’t just say this because I am a doctor for this would indeed be sanctimonious. I say it because this is what my life has taught me.

I have read of doctors who worked in German concentration camps. I think of myself. I tend others when they hurt; I try desperately to understand their pain and have devoted my life to helping patients. I wonder if I could have been a Nazi. I wonder what I don’t know about myself. What do we really know about ourselves? Have I or we made an irreparable error, committed unpardonable sin with our group’s experiment? This is what our book club did; we experimented.

Then I consider this: what is it that could have caused a nation of people calling themselves Germans, civilized by western standards to be regular folks before 1914, bad folks until 1918, good until 1938, bad until 1944 and now allegedly good again; all this in thirty years or so. What is it causing a nation called the United States, founded upon lofty principles of democratic and religious freedom with justice for all to fight for the rights of people elsewhere and deny them to its own citizens at home? Why are we so violent, so compassionate, so uneven? Is Mercy Justice? Is Justice Mercy?

I reflect over and over on the words of Ouspensky, a now largely forgotten philosopher who sparked a debate within our group so many years ago. ...there exists a knowledge distinct from our science and philosophy, even surpassing it... Were we ever touched even briefly by this knowledge, this philosophy? Has our little cabal been wrong to seek another way or was it simply tautological? These