Posted by Mark C. Kennedy on April 25, 2001 at 20:29:37 from 64.41.25.49 :
Mark Kennedy's celebration of Ed Powell–friend, spiritual brother and fellow Pilgrim. So long for now dear Ed. "The future ain't what it used to be". I think your dying is just one more horrible absurdity in this crazy convulsive world we shared tried so hard to fathom. In friendship. Mark
My friendship with Ed Powell began with debate and dialogue in 1948, and on April 21st 2001 all dialogue ceased; the latest issues we debated are still unresolved, and so they must remain. My friend, my brother in spirit, just quietly slipped away. I cannot clearly recall the object of our first dispute. What I do remember is his sharp retort. We had met as strangers at the University of Texas, Austin, in Professor Walter Firey's seminar on social institutions - there in Garrison Hall in the Department of Sociology. Ed had argued that conceptions rather than material needs are the foundations of all social institutions. I partially agreed, but I thought to take a different tack and said something like, most scholars would dispute you. Ed's retort, somewhat icy with a wee bit of sarcasm, "So, if you want the truth, just take a vote on it, eh?" My reaction was an unspoken, "Well who the hell is this guy anyhow?" We left the seminar walking aimlessly and talking enthusiastically about our interests and concerns. Delighted we were to discover we had been reading the history of philosophy and were into many of the same worldly writers–London, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, Goethe, Locke, Kant - so many others. We sat on the fender of someone's car and discussed the divisive issues of mediaeval realism vs. nominalism in the writings of Roscelenus, Anselm and Abelard, Augustine, John Duns Scotus, John Scotus Erigena on the ontological status of concepts versus material objects of sense. And so began our friendship. The veterans of world war two literally took over undergraduate and graduate classes in free and open debate. I doubt if I ever met a veteran as a student who was not some kind of radical thirsting for knowledge, seeking reformation of society, hoping to find answers to crucial questions about our convulsive world. Schultz Garten, our local beer hall, became the venue for both students and professors as equals to dialogue freely over pitchers of dark beer. There were some professors at the end of this era who spoke of the period [the mid-40's and 50's] as "the golden era".
It was the period 1948-1952 that Ed and I encountered our mentor, Professor Stanley Taylor, whose brilliant lectures and his book, Conceptions of Institutions and the Theory of Knowledge contained the germinal thoughts which, like flowers, opened so profoundly in our searching minds. This was how Ed and I met and from that time forward our friendship grew as our dialogues unfolded.
My aim here, however, is not to write about how our thoughts developed, for that would surely be presumptuous on my part, because Ed can no longer speak to you for himself. I wish but to confess what endears me to him, and in this narrative I am sure I do not speak for me alone. My wish is appreciate "out loud" that which all who knew him already know. I do it to celebrate my dear friend. I can do this best by focusing on what Ed has done for me over all these years. Once having gotten my master's degree in sociology, and the G.I. Bill had expired there seemed no place to for me to go. Unlike other professions, neophyte sociologists just don't "hang out their shingle" and collect fees from clients. Upon graduation, I had taken a job as a probation officer for juvenile delinquents. The experience was far more valuable than the pay.
Ed at that time was a grad student at Tulane University, New Orleans writing his dissertation under Bill Kolb. At Ed's urging, Kolb got me a TA, a tuition waiver, and housing for self and family. I was to have obtained my doctorate there. It did no happen. I need not explain this here. I had to leave Tulane for a teaching position at Memphis State University. It was a time when sociologists with but a master's degree were in a sellers' market. That too had about run its course. To make a long story shorter, Ed, then teaching at the University of Buffalo urged me to leave Memphis. He had talked Lew Gross, then Chairman of the Sociology Department, into offering me a full time instructorship, replete with tuition waiver, and this was the greatest, most unexpected blessing of my career. I accepted with no hesitation whatever. It was there that I completed the requisite courses and language exams. Had it not been for Ed's assistance, I have no idea where I would have ended up. Ed has always been there for me, and on several occasions, when the going became rocky for him, I was there for him as well.
The story does not end just here. I had finished all requirements for my Ph.D. except writing my dissertation. This, I wrote while teaching at the University of Vermont, Burlington. My problem was that I did not know how to stop writing the damned thing. I had written a critique of all major theories of the division of labor in society, and had written a detailed account of how the petroleum industry had developed, and I just could not let go of it. Dr. Richard Colvard at SUNY Buffalo was my advisor. One day Ed showed up at my farmhouse in Waterbury, Vermont and announced that he wanted to edit my thesis. It was well over 600 pages long at that time and still growing. I think I was going on into the difference art and labor, or some such rambling of my brains. Anyhow, Ed got me out of my study and began stripping out page after page after page. He renumbered the remaining pages, called me in and taking what was left of it in both hands announced, "There is your dissertation. It's finished. Mail it to Dick Colvard. I was highly dubious because there were about 200 pages just stacked there -- orphans on my writing table. Even so, the dissertation, The Division of Labor and the Culture of Capitalism, came to some 450 page. Yet I still could not let go of it, and I said so.
Ed stayed the night and next morning after breakfast he said his goodbyes and drove back to Buffalo. I went in to work on my dissertation and it was gone. Yes, Ed had taken it with him. A week later Dick Colvard phoned me and said the work was a lot better than good, but it had a few abrupt transitions to deal with. I spent a week with Dick and smoothed over these literary bumps in the road. In 1969 I moved my family to Cairo where I was to remain as a teacher and research person for the next 20 years.
Ed and I have continued our debates, seriously, over all this time. Just last Sunday, while my wife, Mitzi and I were with Karen and her daughters, giving and seeking consolation over the passing of Ed Powell, my spiritual brother, I picked up a copy of Hermann Hesse's Demian. I found in it an introduction by Thomas Mann. I began reading it through my tears. It applies.
"...Our paths in general take clearly separate courses through
the land of the spirit, at a formal distance one from the other. And yet
in some sense the course is the same, in some sense we are indeed
fellow pilgrims and brothers . . . . "