P. Kenneth Komoski

Ode for Ken Komoski “… be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one ….” (George Fox, Journal). Big ideas flowed across the room like being in the midst of hitchhiking through the Universe, something cosmic at work to create learning communities, open to Life Magazine and the young leaders` Big Breakthroughs, automated teaching and field testing with users and learners in Ramallah, Jordan and the Ford Foundation knocked at the door as the McArthur Foundation sang with him oh higher learning skills and computers for the poor and dispossessed Quaker of outsized visions, talking and talking as if the Lord himself spoke right through this body. He remembered Buckminster Fuller, mentor and guide who crossed multiple time zones, traveling in, experimenting with polyphasic sleep, tireless, sleeping as if with the animals to work until tired to allow twenty-two thinking hours a day, leaving at least 270 feet of papers in his Dymaxion Chronofile, what a record, inspired as he did more with less, recycling his life, insisting there’s no energy crisis but a crisis of ignorance. This Quaker singer, jazz bassist, creator of multiple non-profits testified to the Select Committee on Education and the White House Conference on Children how worlds collided, creating new sounds, now improvised, playing in the dark together as the bass strummed in his hands crooning, open to a listening silence then an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University, pushing and afoot with his vision how teaching and learning could lift-up 16,000 school districts, nation-wide dreaming data-banks, evaluations, computer products by the millions. Guided by Dewey himself, unable to stop the pounding, thudding in the heart, he reached into yet another mystery, listening to the bass-strings and their bodily resonance, humming an inward, meditative tune, enthralled by a silent waiting as well, open to reflection, driven by a morning mist out over the Great Peconic Bay, an osprey cried out hunting amid higher order thinking, unbar the doors and let in the Light, teaching and learning and computers unified, a vision of atonement and oneness with all creation. Polymath thinker, remembering Louis Mumford and Bucky Fuller, singing the whole world in his hands, squeezing out juices as he testified at Senate Committees to urge evaluation, focus on users and allow computers to play and sing, such music originating out of sources of Justice and Equality as he placed those Quaker testimonies into action to write songs of joy and loss and sorrow insistent how students and learners carry the answers in their own souls writing out of chaos theory and random numbers atop a vision of direction and hope in the midst of failure and cutting-edge ideas, all mixed-up together in these original songs and dreams. - Stanford Searl from The Cider-Press Man and other North Fork Poems