"Are you married?" shouts a girl in the gallery.
"No", he answers, promptly, jotting down a word as he talks; "It’s my work that makes me act like this."
And in his final demonstration of "word-juggling", clearly explained in the photograph on the next page, he maintains the interest by hanging upside down and reciting a poem!
"That boy will go mad", said a woman sitting behind me in the theater where I first saw Mr Kahne perform.
"He is a genius", exclaimed a gray-haired gentleman who looked like a medical man."Very wonderful, but he won’t live long", he added, shaking his head.
But to talk to Mr Kahne is to discover that, although he ahs exceptional abilities, he is not by any means a freak. If he displays genius, it is not the kind that is akin to madness, but rather of the more creditable variety, generally spoken of as "an infinite capacity for taking pains".
"It is all a matter of development and practice", he told me. "Just as the acrobat or juggler trains muscles and nerves that even an athlete overlooks, so have I trained brain cells which the average mental worker seldom attempts to being into use."
"But you must admit that you have been endowed with an exceptionally good brain", I said.
"Yes, it is a good brain --- call it a first class brain, if you like --- yet there are thousands of other brains in the world just as good as mine. There are thousands of pairs of legs in the world just as good as the champion sprinter, but they do not all win races. Mental development is very much like physical development --- it is mainly a matter of exercise."
"But to exercise the brain in the way that you do must surely exert a very severe strain upon it?" I ventured.
"So does an athlete exert a very severe strain upon his muscles when he runs a race", replied Mr Kahne, smiling.
"Agreed", I said, becoming argumentative, "but mental strain is surely far more dangerous than physical exertion?"
"Well, I suppose you’re right there", he replied. "When I first started this sort of thing the psychologists and mental specialists declared that I had better get myself measured for a padded cell or a coffin. At that time I was performing only four feats at once, and I think it was the strain of trying to do five that really upset me. Anyhow, at the age of 23 all my hair came out. I didn’t like that at all. It made me look so ridiculous. But I thought it over, and came to the conclusion that the trouble was due to nervous strain --- quite a temporary affair, like the stiffness an athlete feels when he starts to train a new set of muscles --- and I reckoned that if I kept on practicing I should soon get into the way of performing feats without any serious strain at all. So I stuck to it, and as soon as I mastered the five feats my nerves quieted down and my hair came back again!"
"Do you not mean to infer that your present demonstrations are carried out without your feeling any strain?" I said.
"No sir --- I do not", replied Mr Kahne, emphatically. "The strain is still there, but the worry has gone. You must bear in mind that, apart from the fact that I do six things at once, the words and figures are given me by members of the audience, and the questions they ask range anywhere between baseball and the Einstein theory. So, you see, my performance is practically extemporaneous."
"You have compared your training to that of an athlete", I said. "Does that mean that you have to diet yourself in any way --- taking ‘brain food’ in the form of fish, for example?"
Mr Kahne laughed.
"Oh, no! I just live naturally and eat what I like. All the same, I have to keep my body fit, or my brain gets tired, and I cannot work well if my stomach is overloaded. But here’s an interesting point. Strange though it may seem, I can concentrate better hanging head downwards than when in an upright position. The rush of blood to the head stimulates the brain. Do you know that when people lie awake at night, thinking and worrying, unable to get to sleep, it is often due to a rush of blood to the head, caused by indigestion or something of that sort? If they were to prop themselves up with pillows they would probably manage to get to sleep without further trouble."
"When did you first discover your ability to direct your mind into several channels of thought simultaneously?"
"At the age of 14, when I was at school. In most lessons, excepting mathematics, I was rather backwards --- not because I hadn’t the ability to learn, but because I did not pay attention. I was an absent-minded youth, a daydreamer --- always letting my mind wander, thinking out little mechanical inventions, planning new forms of code writing, or evolving plots for short stories. One day my teacher fired a sudden question at me, and finding that I was not paying attention, hauled me out for corporal punishment. It was really the feeling of his cane that first turned my thoughts in the direction of multiple mind concentration. I did not want to give up my daydreams, but on the other hand, I had a distinct aversion to corporal punishment. So after a while I got into the habit of letting one part of my brain wander into the realms of inventive fancy whilst I kept the other alert for an enfilade fire of questions from the teacher.
2 comments:
Kirkland -with a borrowed light key in his pocket- could yell swa, whilst chewing on a banana, dunking on an eight footer, telling Frederick the janitor how to better sweep the floor, steal a comb out of Pete Holbert's sock, throw his voice to make Red Jenkins think that there were ape pictures pasted behind the bleachers and borrow unused shoes-all at the same time.
Hey jbanholzer,
It's Pete Holbert. I now have a flat top....no need for a comb. I like it...funny. A friend of mine found this and sent it to me.
Living in Virginia Beach!
Pete
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