Lightning Times

Where the Night Water Runs

Once I chased a dream, a bird song, a peacock feather, through midnight down to the lapping water silver crickets like ear-stars singing all along the fields where fieldmice hide. There is no place to go but down to where the night water runs, and runs black and slow, slow like feet running in a dream. Kind water, sweet and black whispering, "I take nothing back. I only go on." The dream was really a beast covered by night; I did not know, and I followed the rank smell far, too far away, to find it, large and turning, white clawed and snorting too awful for fear, too awful for running, the song of my living too awful for fear - and now to go on, walking; dawn is near.

Stephanie McLintock

The Long Road Home

The Long Road Home
Asher Abrams, 1st LAI Battalion USMC, 1989-1993
Posted to the unit veterans’ bulletin board.

“That is a chapter of ancient history which it might be good to recall; for there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valour, and great deeds that were not wholly in vain.”
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ I:2

“It is not your job to finish the task -- but neither are you free to abandon it.”
-- Rabbi Tarfon, 1st century

We gave what our leaders asked of us. If they had asked more, we would have given more.

Before the ground campaign began, we were told that the American forces’ final objective would be Baghdad, and that we would eliminate Saddam Hussein. As we all know, this did not happen. “The word was passed; the word was changed.” But we did liberate Kuwait.

All of us need to know that what we are doing has meaning and purpose. This is especially true in war. War is a hard thing -- having a reason gives us the motivation and the will to fight. Sgt. Michaels talks about this in his book (pp. 97-100): “It’s about my comrade, and his tiny Kuwaiti flag...” I don’t think this is naive. I think it is honest, truthful, and inspiring.

Nothing we do will ever be complete or perfect. If you’ve read ‘The Lord of the Rings’, or seen the movie, you might have noticed that theme. It’s not a story of superheroes, but of little people who are at the mercy of forces greater than themselves. They don’t set out to do great things; they love their home and dream of returning to it. They confront evil in a world that gives them no choice. Only then do they discover what they are truly capable of. Their victory comes with the loss of teachers, leaders, friends, and innocence. But they win, and some come back alive. It falls to them to tell the tale.

One of Dave Snyder’s favorite sayings was, “This isn’t fun anymore. I want to go home!” What made it funny, of course, was that in the military you can’t go home when you want, and a lot of what you do isn’t fun. But in the end Dave got his wish -- he went home before the rest of us.

Those of us who returned alive from Desert Storm have done many things with our lives. Some are still defending our Nation, either as “lifers” or as defense or security personnel. Others may have turned to teaching, creativity, or volunteering, enriching other people’s lives in whatever way we can. (Ken has contributed this site, where we can share our thoughts and memories, and honor our fallen comrades.) Many of us have married or had relationships, raised children, or discovered things about ourselves we had not known before. All of us have given of ourselves, and continue to do so.

We must all, each of us, find our purpose in the world. In war, your purpose is clear: defeat the enemy and come back alive. Life off of the battlefield is not so simple. All of us must find our own way home. It is a long, hard road.

Portland, Oregon

I moved to Portland from San Francisco in early 2000. I'd been through a difficult divorce, and the cost of living in the Bay Area was starting to exceed what I could earn. So when a neighbor returned from a trip to Portland and couldn't stop raving about it, I had to take a trip to the city and see for myself.

I moved to Portland a month later.

Over the next seven and a half years, I became involved with Oregon's Green Party (yes, really), pondered the meaning of 9/11, and left the Greens; made a lot of great friends, including Michael Totten, Jason Holliston, Patrick Lasswell, and Sean LaFreniere; bought and sold a lot of books at Powell's; lived at the exquisite Commodore Apartments, which I highly recommend to anyone moving to Portland; had many dinners and many, many pints of beer at the Blue Moon; took courses at Portland State University in pursuit of that elusive bachelor's degree which seems, like Zeno's tortoise, to be always just out of reach; and volunteered for Basic Rights Oregon, and for Goli Ameri's unsuccessful campaign to unseat Representative David Wu in Oregon's First District.

I also lost my father and my mother during that time.

I began political blogging at Dreams Into Lightning in April 2004, and created sites dedicated to my family history and my father's World War II memoirs. I also created tribute sites for the poetry and prose of my sister Stephanie McLintock, who died in 1992 at the age of 28. Together with Stephanie's old friend, Georgianne Fastaia, I created a consolidated tribute site at Stephanie Online.

I did some creative writing of my own, including the short stories The Rose of Paradise, The Zero Ring, and The Death Wish. More recently, I began work on The Queen's Courtesan, which is still a "work in progress"; and the Gilkesh language, which is listed in Langmaker.

My seven and a half years in Portland ended this week; I have moved back to San Francisco, where I can spend more time with Georgianne, with my son (now almost eleven years old), and with some old friends who still live in the Bay Area.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Jack Bogdanski of Jack Bog's Blog for the link! I only got to meet "Bojack" once, but he and his blog are an essential part of the Portland experience. Do go pay him a visit.

Cathy Seipp

My one, much-too-brief meeting with Cathy Seipp was at the Pajamas ("Open Source") Media Launch in New York. She is now gravely ill and, her doctors say, has at the most a couple of days to live.

What impressed me most on meeting Cathy was her warmth and openness. It really didn't matter whether I was a "somebody" or a "nobody".

Cathy's daughter posts the following:

As earlier mentioned in the comments section, my mother is in the hospital. The doctor says that right now they're just making her comfortable. She's sedated, with painkillers among other things. Lungs collapsed so right now we just want to make sure she has dignity and is not in pain. The doctor says she has a couple days left. I want to thank all her readers for reading this blog, her friends for supporting her who made up "Team Cathy." Through you all, I learned what a true friend was.

Armed Liberal writes:

Cathy drilled me on my casual assumption that all thinking people were in favor of gay marriage, and when she did that, she didn't only make me think about gay marriage as an issue, but all the other casual assumptions I offhandedly made about what people did and should think. Cathy gave me a zen slap to the head, and it was one of the biggest favors anyone ever did for me.

Richard Fernandez writes:

They say that Good Friday is the ultimate test of faith; but that is wrong. It is Easter Sunday. We have all of us seen paths tracked with tears, but none of us have seen an Empty Tomb. The most heartbreaking thing in life is not to know to sorrow but to see beauty and believe that we will never see anything so beautiful again.

Although I recently quibbled with Cathy (in a post I needn't link here), I've always found joy in her positive and enthusiastic spirit. That magnetism, evident in all of her writing, was tangible and energizing in her living presence. The loss of that presence will leave us all poorer.

Advice Goddess Blog:

Cathy Seipp has lived over five extraordinarily courageous years with lung cancer, and it's 8:10 pm Monday night as I'm writing this, and they took the oxygen mask off three hours ago (because she was suffering so), and she's still hanging on. The doctor apparently thought it would only be "minutes" after he took it off. Apparently, this doctor didn't know Cathy. ...

The Urban Dilemma

Cities, by definition, have more people than small towns; and larger cities have more people than smaller cities. And because the single population is a subset of the population as a whole, it follows that if you are single you will find a larger population of available singles in a big city than in a smaller one. (Barring the case where there's an extraordinary discrepancy in the proportion of singles, such that the absolute number of singles in a given smaller city is greater.)

So that's the obvious factor. Let's call that Equation A. But there's another factor too, I think - we'll call it Equation B - whereby those teeming hordes of urban singles KNOW that they are single, and that they live in the city, and that they have a seemingly endless array of potential partners to choose from. So, is the urban population choosier? More fickle? More jaded? To the extent that the urban single population is self-selected, is it because they're looking to find a serious relationship, or looking to avoid commitment?

And beyond Equations A and B, there's just the sensory overload of living in the city. Even if you live in New York and love every minute of it, you must know what I'm talking about. How does that impact our ability to form and maintain relationships?

And finally there are the reasons people live in cities, which may overlap with Equation A but are not identical with it. There is, specifically, the "safety in numbers" principle. If you are an ethnic minority, a political minority, an artist, intellectual, or queer (there's the overlap with A), you want to go where there are others of "your kind". It's sort of the general case of Equation A.

How do you balance all of these things - especially when your politics and your values are a weird mix of small-town (read "red state") and urban (read "coastal liberal")?

I don't know the answer. When I get it figured out, I'll let you know.

A Day in the Life

Flickr page.

Update

I'm in northeastern Connecticut, staying with some relatives here for the duration of my two-week visit. We had Thanksgiving dinner and I'm enjoying a lot of downtime. Last night I made it to my high school reunion - the first one I've attended - and it was a blast. I haven't lived on the East Coast since I left home, and I'd lost touch with almost everyone back here, with the exception of one good friend who reads this blog and writes regularly.

Probably no political posting here until after I get back to Portland on December 5. For the latest events in Lebanon, go visit Michael Totten. For Iraq, read Iraq the Model. Iran-related matters at Azarmehr and the Free Iran news forum. Great commentary on international affairs can always be found at The Belmont Club. Authentic feminism at Tammy Bruce, and great conservative commentary at Gay Patriot. Cobb is erudite, articulate, and in a class by himself.

Finally, be sure to visit Judith and friends at Kesher Talk.

I Am a Jew and My Father Was a Jew

My father described his father as mildly anti-Semitic, "not an Archie Bunker type" but not without his prejudices either. Dad was born in 1920 and grew up in the New York area, spending some years in New York City. He would later write of his early curiosity about "the people my father spoke of with such contempt." In his later years, he enjoyed reading the memoirs of Aflred Kazin; I believe he was intrigued by the experiences of a man of his own generation, who had grown up in the same area as himself, but on the other side of the ethnic divide - a New York Jew.

My father? Picture a cross between Albert Einstein and Captain Kangaroo, and you begin to get the idea. I remember him as a kindly man, soft-spoken and very precise in his speech. He recalled the Depression years vividly, and spoke bitterly of the humiliation of watching his father search desperately for work. During World War II he served in the Army, in Battery A, 136th Field Artillery, 37th Infantry Division. He spoke of the war occasionally, but only occasionally.

Like my mother, Dad grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home; like her, he started looking for answers on his own as a young adult. They met in a Unitarian Universalist church in Connecticut, and found they shared a fondness for the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson. They were married in 1958.

My father held a master's degree in literature from Wesleyan, and taught high school English for many years before moving on to a new career on the editorial staff of Choice Magazine - a position he held from my early childhood until very late in his life. He had an unappreciated gift for oratory, I think, and enjoyed reading aloud. When he spoke, he always chose his words carefully; losing this gift with the onset of Alzheimer's must have been a very cruel fate for him.

Both of my parents were liberals, but I think Dad was more of an idealist than my Mom, in the sense of being a perfectionist about the future. He didn't share my mother's driving rage (which could be directed against anyone, at any time), but he did have a deep-seated mistrust of anything that smacked of snobbery or elitism. (His war memoir recalls vividly his indignation at being evicted from the unoccupied officers' club aboard a certain ship; he seems almost to have taken it as a personal insult. That's my Dad.) He respected Senator Lieberman, but found him too conservative: "He votes like a Republican," Dad once grumbled.

Looking back, I do not know whether my father ever flirted with communism or socialism in his younger days, but it would not surprise me. From what I know of his life and character, he would have been just the personality type to be vulnerable to the seductions of the lady in red. Born in 1920, he was old enough to remember the Depression vividly, and the inexorable decline of his family's fortunes during those years. He would sometimes speak of some socialist politician with a secretive admiration. And not long ago, I found an old copy of Ten Days that Shook the World - John Reed's breathless account of the Russian Revolution, with an approving foreword by none other than V. I. Lenin - among his books. (To be fair, it was a book club edition.)

On the other hand, I know for certain that my mother was no friend of Communism. She was at least my father's equal intellectually, but she was also cynical enough about human nature to know how easily, and how badly, the loftiest dreams can go wrong. Like my father, she opposed the Vietnam war, but never sympathized with the enemy. She despised Jane Fonda. She loved Russian literature and admired the Soviet dissidents. A philo-Semite like my father, she was sharply attuned to anti-Semitism in the Soviet world: her admiration for Solzhenitsyn evaporated when rumors of his anti-Semitic attitudes became persistent. One dissident she never stopped admiring, and whose name was often heard in our house in the 1970s, was a Soviet Jew then known by his Russian name - Anatoly Shcharansky.

I was the older of two children. My sister, younger than me by a year and a half, was an amazingly gifted writer whose poetry and fiction earned her numerous awards during her teen years. Stephanie never had any interest in formal religion, but her writing is deeply and exuberantly religious. (I often wonder what she would be doing if she had lived; her life ended shortly after her 28th birthday, from the accumulated effects of drugs, alcohol, and anorexia.)

Curious about religion and the Bible, I began studying Hebrew in my mid-teens. After a year or two, I started attending services at the synagogue, and so did my father. When I left home to join the Air Force in 1981, neither of us had officially converted but we were both leaning in that direction. I converted with a Reform congregation in Tucson in 1984, and eventually had an Orthodox conversion in San Francisco in 1988.

What we both saw in Judaism was a balance of opposites: nationalism and universalism, feeling and intellect, mysticism and rationalism, tradition and growth. For both of us, too, it was a gateway into a community, an older and richer one than we could have known otherwise. We liked the way social activism and Jewish values went hand-in-hand. My father was also interested in the theological debates: the encounter with modernity, the problem of evil. He devoured books on liberal Jewish thought by people like Jacob Neusner, with whom he corresponded. (Myself, I always found the scholarly stuff a bit dry. I loved Soloveitchik, but in general I skipped the philosophizers.) Dad's real passion, though, was Jewish music. He collected recordings of the great cantors (another taste I'm afraid I didn't inherit) and in the last few years of his life he became active in the choir at the Conservative synagogue. I'll always remember the joy it gave him to be involved in the community that way - and his sorrow at not having started earlier.

I'm hard pressed to say how much I'm like my father. I do not know whether I resemble him a lot or a little. Sometimes I think I take after my mother more. She was obsessed with the quest for truth. She wanted to peel back the layers of illusion and find the secret that lay at the core of reality. Not formally educated (but with an IQ most college professors would envy), she read books on science, history, Gnosticism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I believe she was deeply changed by the newsreels of Germany that she must have seen as a young woman. I don't think she ever forgave G-d for the Holocaust.

Illness came upon my father quickly. He'd been healthy all his life, but things started going wrong all at once: heart trouble, cancer, Alzheimer's. He had to leave a holiday performance in the synagogue because he was too ill to continue. He died quietly in his sleep in October of 2000, on the second night of Rosh Hashanah.

Mom lived on a little longer. She rarely left the house, being in poor health herself, but she enjoyed the company of her caretaker and her next-door neighbor, who also had an interest in Judaism. I don't know whether she ever made her peace with G-d. She died in 2003, on the second night of Passover.

After her death, I learned that she'd had her hospital records changed to list her religion as "Jewish".

In the Land of the Living

My sister would have been 42 years old last Friday.

I try to imagine Stephanie at age 42. Would she still be writing? Would she still wear leather jackets? Would she still have that michievous smile? I try to imagine how she would look now, if she had lived.

She died in 1992, a couple of weeks after her 28th birthday, in her apartment in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. She had given up heroin about a year earlier, and despite some setbacks, she was struggling bravely with the agonies of withdrawal. But she was also drinking heavily to ease the pain, and was probably anorexic as well. She knew that the alcohol was harming her, and she resolved to give that up, too, after she had the narcotic addiction under control; but her time ran out. The coroner said she died of liver failure.

I remember her body on the steel table, how small it looked.

She did not want to die. She even wrote it in her diary:

I don't wanna die. I was thinking the other day that I should have that tattooed someplace on my person, somewhere in small letters, like

I dont
wanna
die

maybe in the middle of my chest or inside my arm or my ankle, inconspicuous and small. I was thinking about the undertaker who with my cold and white body laying stiff on his stainless steel table would find the small tattoo and read it. I don't wanna die. A message for the undertaker, for my lover, for God, for my aging skin. I would like to see his face, the undertaker's.

When we were growing up, we didn't have much exposure to death. I don't believe we ever went to a funeral as kids. As I grew older, I began to think - with all the sophistication of a young adult - that this kind of insulation was unhealthy and stultifying; and that, therefore, people who had had contact with death must be privy to some insights that were denied to me. Now I know that this was wrong and stupid; that you do not learn anything from death, you only learn from life.

You can read Stephanie's poetry here and her fiction and prose here.

Days Go By

Yesterday, another picture-perfect day in Portland. Today, cloudy, but that's cool too. Spent last night and this morning clearing trash and junk out of the apartment. Today's goal: spend some quality time on creative writing (after I finish procrastinating and doodling around on LJ!).

Found a few of Stephanie's old books: 'The Western Wind', a book about writing poetry; a biography of Ken Kesey by Barry Leeds, autographed by the author; and 'The Recognitions' by William Gaddis. 'The Recognitions' and John Gardner's 'The Sunlight Dialogues' were two of Stephanie's favorite novels, along with several classics of the Beat movement such as Kerouac's 'On the Road'. I never shared Stephanie's appreciation for the Beats, but I did enjoy Gardner's short stories; I especially remember one (based on an event in Gardner's own life) about a boy who accidentally kills his brother with a piece of farm machinery.

Somehow, I was spared the passion for "intensity at any price" that so consumed Stephanie. What I'm left with instead is this obsessive sense of mission, or simply of duty, to try to put it all together, to make sense of the puzzle. All I'm left with is the pieces.