Exit: Ken Campbell

I learned just this morning that the British actor/writer/comedian Ken Campbell passed away on August 31. His death didn’t make the news here; he wasn’t well known in Canada. In England, however, he was a bit of an icon. You can read his obit here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/sep/01/obituary.ken.campbell

To say he was “one of the strangest people in Britain” is to damn Ken with faint praise. The man was…well, he was far and away the most original, fantastical person you could ever meet. I know, because many years ago I was lucky enough to spend some time in his endlessly entertaining and bizarre company.

It would have been in1997, back in Halifax, when I was living in a two-bedroom flat on South Street. One July evening I got a phone call from my friend Frances Knickle, who lives in St. John’s. She and husband Ed Riche had these three Brits staying with them during the Sound Symposium. They were wanting to visit Halifax afterwards. Could I put them up for a couple of days? She assured me I’d find them good company, and added that they probably wouldn’t be around much since their primary intention in visiting Nova Scotia was to pop down to Oak Island to see about the Holy Grail.

Well, who wouldn’t bite at that curious bait? I said yes, and they showed up a couple of days later.

My guests turned out to be Ken, his friend the writer Jeff Merrifield, and a young composer whose name I am sorry to have forgotten. They were three animated, friendly oddballs, and I quickly found myself breaking out a large bottle of bourbon. That night, we sat in my tiny living room while Ken told story after story from his weird and wonderful life. I wish I could remember it all. Some things stuck with me, like his tale of visiting South Pacific islands where cargo cults still worshipped a “holy biscuit tin” that had been left generations before by some errant sea captain. Ken learned to speak Pidgin – a most ingenious and amusing language – and the year after we met, he mounted a production of MacBeth, entirely in Pidgin, titled Makbed blong Willum Sekspia. I remember him telling me the Pidgin word for “piano”: phonetically, “big blocka white one black one you kill’em e cry out”. (“You kill’em” or perhaps “ukillim” is the verb “to strike”. “E cry out” is to make a noise.)

Ken also told me about Damunhur, a secret community of artisans who follow an ancient wisdom-magic spiritualism in their village of caves carved out of the Italian alps. He had been there. You can look it up; it’s almost too exotic to be true.

Eventually we got around to the Holy Grail. Years before Dan Brown and all that Da Vinci Code business, Ken and Jeff had become fascinated with the history of the Cathar heretics of southern France and they told me all about it. (Jeff’s book, The Perfect Heretics, is a great read if you’re interested.) The Cathars were a Christian sect established in about the 11th century and flourishing in the 12th and 13th centuries in Languedoc. Cathars believed that all people were “perfect” in that each of us was made of God-material, and thus that God was each of us. They didn’t believe in the hierarchy of the Church, and allowed woman and men both to conduct religious services. Needless to say, the Catholic Church eventually wiped them out in a long and bloody campaign culminating in the Albigensian Crusade” of the early 13th century.

The final battle, the siege of Montségur, gave rise to the story told by Dan Brown and others before him: that the Cathars were in fact the protectors of the Sang Real – the royal bloodline of Christ and Mary Magdalene. The story goes that at Montségur, a Temple Knight managed to escape the siege, bearing with him something of incalculable value – the Holy Grail – a.k.a. the living descendant of Jesus Christ.

Of course I found all this fascinating, Ken being the absolute best storyteller I had ever met. I also had a connection to the story, in that I visited Montségur as a teenager and I knew something of the history. I had spent the last month of my European adolescence vacationing with friends in a tiny village near Carcassonne, and I remember the visit to the ruins of Montségur well. It’s a spooky place, a crumbling tower and ramparts atop a steep rock in the middle of a deep ravine. The day we visited, hawks were circling the ramparts, which was almost too romantic for my 17-year-old self to deal with.

Back to my living room, where most of the bourbon has now been guzzled: the great story got even greater as my guests told me of how the thing of incalculable value (The Holy Grail) eventually wound up at Rosslyn Chapel in the Orkneys, and thence, they say, in 1398 it (or he, or she) landed in Nova Scotia on a ship captained by Henry Sinclair. (This has all been written about in Michael Anderson Bradley’s book The Holy Grail Across the Atlantic. Hell of a read.) Clues to the whereabouts of the Grail were said to have been buried down the Money Pit at Oak Island, and my visiting trio were going off to have a look. They weren’t able to, of course, because Oak Island is privately owned and no one goes near the sinkhole without gazillions of dollars in excavating and film equipment.

Being around Ken was a dizzying experience, and not just because of the Wild Turkey. His stories leapt from marvel to marvel. He had famously bushy eyebrows that seemed also to leap from his face. He could make you laugh so hard you’d wet yourself one moment, and the next you’d be holding your breath in awe at the telling of some great mystery. When speaking, he crackled and cackled like a cartoon magician stirring some great fizzy cauldron.

Most of all, he was the most alive human I had ever met. After they’d gone, it occurred to me, what’s this 55-year-old semi-famous man doing, rambling around, crashing on strangers’ couches? Well, I think he was just following the expanses of his mind, which just reached out everywhere in all directions at once. Having caught the twitch of a tale, Ken would excitedly follow. Yet he never lost his way: he had a genius for being able to connect ideas, stories, places, people. He lived in a multidimensional map. A big picture, a great, spiraling story that got bigger the more of it he told.

Ken connected me to his picture when he saw the tattoo on my forearm. He’s probably the only person I’ve ever met who didn’t ask me what it meant. He told me. The egg, the spiral, the number five, and the triangle are all symbols of life energy, connectedness with the earth, knowledge, mystery… All the things I was trying intuitively to convey when I designed it. By coincidence (or not…), my prototype was an ancient, battered silver pendant I found that long-ago summer in the dirt outside Carcassonne; it’s in my wallet as I write.

Well, heaven knows I learned a lot of useless but quite entertaining gack that day – like how to say “piano” in Pidgin – but the real gifts that I got from the visit of Ken and his mates are harder to describe, though the impact has stayed with me these 11 years and I believe has helped shape the person I try to practice being. Ken would put it much better, and much funnier, but the upshot is this: Always open your door to strangers. If they don’t kill you with a pig-bonking stick (always a grim possibility!), you will at least be rewarded with a good yarn, and at best a moment of connection with the great, crackling mystery that binds all things in this life.

And perhaps, as Ken would suggest with that mad grin of his, beyond.