Kendall’s Quest:

If I could read five pages at once, I would be doing that. My hunger to know is so great. I’m dimly aware of the rest of the world: 360 women, many of them Tibetan nuns, arrested in Nepal. Unimaginable suffering in Burma, where a Red Cross boat full of aid supplies for survivors sank in flood waters. But inside my head, I’m transfixed by the baby daddy drama of my own life. Max–via his girlfriend Susan, who has the computer skills–has sent me pictures of Jacob Paul Linn, Jr., and his second family, Max’s family. (Third family if my mom and I can be counted as his first “family,” and then what is family? is it a genetic unit? an emotional unit? a legal entity? what are the ties that bind?) I sit and stare at the pictures on my monitor, inviting them to talk to me, tell me stories. There is something eerily familiar in these faces. I study the forehead, the nose, the bridge of the nose, the slant of the eyes, the cheekbones, the shape of the head. What do we get from our genes? I’m reading books I never imagined I would read in all my life: books about merchant ships during WW2. I even got a 1943 Humphrey Bogart movie in which Bogart is First Mate on a merchant ship: torpedoes, flames on the water, stereotypical German officers in submarines (observation: when the “Germans” die, they scream in agony; when the “Allies” die, they look stoically and silently toward heaven), violins playing as the wives back home wait for the news.  The movie must have been in production when Jacob Paul Linn, Sr. was First Mate on the S.S. Leslie and died at sea. The movie starts with a quotation from FDR that ends, “Damn the torpedoes. Full steam ahead!” and it made my eyes fill up. I’ve heard that phrase before, but I didn’t connect with it. Now I do. I’m also reading Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai (wonderfully well-written, fascinating: and here’s a short, powerful article by Judith that’s like the condensed version), and I watched a documentary on the Yiddish Theatre . Even if I’m not Jewish, even if I’m not Jake Linn’s daughter (but I think I am, I think I am), I’m having a great time learning all of this.

I just went for a long, long walk down 21st Street and back up 23rd Street on a Friday night studded with stars, flower petals, and teenagers with pink hair and nose rings, trying to take in the staggering revelations of this day and to make sense of the existential koan in which I find myself. Who am I? Or more specifically, whose DNA am I carrying around? If Jacob Paul Linn, Jr. was, as my mother said, my father–then in addition to the three children my mother had after me, I have one brother who was profoundly retarded and spent his whole life in a mental institution in Gainesville, Florida; a sister who killed herself; another sister who is severely mentally ill; a brother who is a Ghostwriter and lives in Montreal; and another brother who ran for Governor of Florida a couple of years ago, is still running for public office, and has a picture of himself with Barack Obama on his homepage. I have seen, finally, a whole series of photographs of the man my mother said was my father. All my life I thought if I could just see one photograph, I would know without a doubt whether he is my father or not. But I’m still not certain. I sort of look like him. I have the same wattle and jowls he developed in his sixties, the same high, broad forehead. But he had dark hair like my mother’s. How did I come out blonde? He was sort of tall and rangy in his youth, but he drank and put on weight before he died from a heart attack at sixty-nine. He sort of looks like my sons, but not enough that I can say for sure. He was not raised Jewish, and nobody who is still living knows whether his father was Jewish or not. [read on]

For the past couple of days I’ve been obsessively and delightedly exploring my Jewish grandfather’s life story, as far as I can piece it together from historical records. I’m riveted. About an hour ago I got an email from a genealoger who says my Virginia grandmother was not Jewish, but was the daughter of a Baptist preacher! If that’s true, Hildegarde must have stirred a hornet’s nest by marrying Jacob Paul Linn, a Jew from Latvia, in 1920. Their story continues to grip me, but it has taken me off the task I’d started, which is saying something about “race,” so in the interest of finishing at least a piece of what I started…I want to get back to Rev. Jeremiah Wright , Barack Obama, and Race. When the right-wing media had its heyday with Wright, they cut his speeches and sermons to shreds and left out everything he said that didn’t suit their purposes. I’ve already posted Father Pfleger’s defense of Wright. Father Pfleger knows Wright well and says it better than I ever could, but I’d like to take an academic’s approach and direct us to the text. I had listened to Rev. Wright’s speech to the Press Club on the radio while I was doing something else, but I went back again to the Rev’s speech (all of which is on Youtube, along with the hateful cuttings of his sermons) and I took some notes. I want to point out what Wright says that the media didn’t pick up. [read on]

I’m going to write about race again, and I will get back to Rev. Wright and Barack Obama, but first, this hot news flash. While I was fiddling around on the internet yesterday, I found out who my father was, who his parents were, and that they were Jewish. I had suspected this, but until now I wasn’t sure. My mother told me my father was Jewish, but she wasn’t always a reliable source, and she only mentioned this, often calling me a “Kyke,” when she was angry. I’ve never seen a picture of my father or seen any other proof of his existence. So last night I stumbled upon a couple of websites that have all kinds of documents (passport applications, military draft records, border crossings, ship passengers, death records), and I got completely caught up in detective work. What a love story I discovered!

[read on]

 I’ve tried to make my life my statement about race, even though we’ve known since W.E.B. DuBois said it in 1914 that scientifically “race” doesn’t exist.  Race is not inscribed in our genes, any more than “class” is. But the perception of race exists. People have been enslaved, imprisoned, lynched, raped, tortured, and shot because of the perception of race. People hate each other, fear each other, and make assumptions about each other based on the perception of race. I am racist because I was born White in a system of power based on the perception of race. I’m part of that system. I can’t get out; my skin is what it is, and there is nowhere on this planet untainted by that system. Therefore I choose to work on myself, to be aware and vigilant for ways I embody or absorb racist ideology, and to put the whole weight of my life into the effort to educate myself out of it and to counteract racism in every small way I can. I will always have plenty of work to do, inside and outside. Plenty of people have written about race better than I will ever be able to. But I need to begin putting a few words together, if only to join a conversation with White people about race in our lives. Anybody else is welcome to listen in, chime in, or quit reading now. Very few people read this blog, so what I’m about to say will remain secret. Despite that, I have trepidation. My grandmother told me a version of something Jeremiah Wright’s grandmother told him: “If you keep your mouth shut, you won’t ever say anything to make people think you’re stupid.” He didn’t heed his grandmother’s warning, and neither have I. Whatever it is that I’m about to say will be flawed, imperfect, inadequate, and a work in progress. So here I go. [read on]

Thanks to Hafidha, whose blog brought this amazing ten-minute argument to my attention! I haven’t heard such a powerful anti-racist statement in years. Those of you who are not in the USA may not understand the whole argument–and you don’t need to understand the whole argument. The core of what this priest says is simply obvious to anyone who looks closely at what passes for dissent in the USA: when a white person criticizes the U.S. government, it’s “criticism”; when a Black person criticizes the U.S. government, it’s “hate.” The hate-mongering Fox News interviewer is utterly out of his depth with this man, and it is a thrill to see how powerfully Father Pfleger re-frames the discussion in terms of poverty, class, race, and history, and away from the interviewer’s intention of fanning hatred, bigotry, and ignorance by means of kneejerk soft-headed opinion and out-of-context sound-bites .  Father Pfleger speaks with clarity, force, and sharp intelligence. Anyone who has not seen this video, please drop everything else in your life and watch it now. Or as soon as you possibly can.

As all the people who have been part of my life know, I get migraines. I have chosen not to write much about them on the blog, because it’s just boring as hell to talk about, but I’ve decided to do this one post now and then shut up about it unless there is a big change. If the subject disgusts or bores you, skip this post. [read on]

I live in a culture of more.  More music, more cars (or in Portland, bicycles), more food of more kinds, more exercise, more sex, more multi-tasking, more electronics, more travels, more therapy, more personal growth, more “friends” (oh, those social networking sites!), more recycling, more news, more movies, more social action, more websites, more art, more appointments (crowded palm-pilot or Blackberry), more service to more people, more photographs, more phone calls…. But just this morning, as I was exchanging emails with Susan (more emails), it occurred to me that I may be hard-wired for less. Or to put it another way, maybe I need more solitude, more silence, more daydreaming, more walking alone in the forest, more reflecting, more gazing into the clouds. Reading. Writing. Maybe my attraction to Buddhism is really an attraction to sitting still, doing nothing, and not being perceived as lazy or inadequate for it. (Not that I am much bothered by other people’s perceptions. The problem is that I absorb those perceptions and judge–and limit–myself.) In fact, my need for more quiet may actually have something to do with these damn migraines I have been suffering from increasingly since I was in my twenties. Is it permissible to seek less stimulation in life? What a concept. [read on]

Recently I’ve been going through another wave of wondering who my father was. My mother claimed his name was Jake Linn and that he was of Russian Jewish ancestry and came from Virginia. She said she met him when she was at Duke University in 1944. Nobody in her family ever saw him and she had no photograph, so he’s always been a phantom in my life. In fact I don’t much resemble the rest of mother’s family physically, so I’ve always wondered where my tall, angular build and my large-faced blondish looks–which I passed on to my sons–came from. When a man named Jake Linn who came from Florida was contacted by a lawyer representing my mother in the 1950s, he denied ever knowing my mother. He could have been lying. It could have been a different man by the same name. But then my mother had, shall we say, idiosyncratic ways of experiencing reality. Her story about my father changed from time to time. I would passionately love to know who he was, to see a picture of him, and to know a little about his medical history–whether his name is Jacob Paul Linn or not. As part of my recent quest for answers, I googled the name Linn and came up with a Jewish scholar named Ruth Linn whose main body of research is “mature unwed mothers” and their choice to bear children, which she sees as a form of “resistance.” Naturally this interested me, as I flatter myself that I have always been about “resistance,” and I chose three times to have children as a mature single woman–once by birth and twice by adoption. So I got Ruth Linn’s book via Interlibrary Loan, and it is absorbing both in the abstract and in my own particular. Eventually I’ll connect the dots to the profile I just created on Myspace. Read on only if you’re interested in this. Otherwise wait till another day and I’m sure I’ll have another topic. [read on]

I have considerable personal history with Coriolanus. I first read the play as an undergrad English major, while I was in love with the man who later supplied half of Seth’s DNA; some years later I studied it in grad school and came to love its complexity; still later, I taught it to students who found it boring till I persuaded them it was about war vs. peace, democracy vs. oligarchy, and pride vs. compassion. So watching the play in Ashland, I was actually watching three plays: the one I read in 1969 when I was a long-haired romantic college girl in love with an arrogant professor twice my age; the play Shakespeare wrote, based on Roman sources, soon after he finished writing Antony and Cleopatra, around 1609; and the play a specific director created for an audience in Ashland, Oregon in 2008–the title role so brilliantly acted that I have to count it among the top five live performances I have ever seen in my life. [read on]