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| W. EUGENE SMITH in Seattle, 1976. Details in text; click on image to view full size. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1976, 2011. |
*****
What, exactly, am I trying to do here? What is the real purpose of Outside Agitator's Notebook?
The short answer is OAN serves the two Muses to whom I am wed – photography and journalism – and thereby (or so I hope) serves you the reader with reflective pictures and thought-provoking commentary on the week's news.
In a major sense OAN is thus a continuation of the award-winning op-ed column I wrote c. 1978-1981 for a mainstream newspaper that served a big suburb of Seattle. The paper, which died in the late '80s, was an almost-daily, published every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. But our editorial pages never included photos, which were generally taboo in the era's op-ed sections, and while it was ok to imply socialist leanings, I had to keep my Marxist tendencies carefully closeted.
The main inspiration for the OAN mix – an eclectic blend of pictures and text whether political or personal – probably came from Jill Johnston of The Village Voice, who during the 1960s and through most of the '70s wrote a regular feature entitled “Dance Journal.” Ms. Johnston (1929-2010) was originally the paper's dance critic but defied the capitalist taboo against mixing art and politics, often (correctly) approaching one as the symbiosis of the other. Though her favorite medium was unquestionably text alone, I see in retrospect it was especially her influence that shaped my view of photography – indeed of visual art in general – as tragically weakened (if not reduced to meaninglessness) when divorced from its socioeconomic and political contexts.
Even now in the radically diminished never-again-a-Leica circumstances of inescapable geriatric poverty, photography remains my passion, and that so intense it surely deserves summation of its pedigree. Ergo: as I have noted before, I'm told the first word I ever spoke was “light.” But the real mother of my interest in visual art was my dear Aunt Alecia – Alecia DuRand (1909-1993), a Columbia University MFA and the first woman to chair a U.S. collegiate art department. My first cameras were gifts from my father: a Kodak Brownie Reflex on my 12th birthday, an Agfa Press Miniature on my 14th and a Polaroid a year later when I turned 15.
Writing is a skill I learned on my own, though the process was much more haphazard, profoundly discouraged by mediocre grades in the exercises-in-tedium that characterize high-school English.
Nevertheless, probably by the time I was 16 (when I began keeping a journal), certainly by the time I was 19, writing had become a consuming intellectual exercise, though it never offered the always-seductive visually orgasmic Zen of photography. In fact my discovery of the difficult pleasures of text probably started as a quest for psychological compensation, a response to the trauma inflicted when my burgeoning interest in science – biology (specifically forestry) – was torpedoed by the dyslexia that so often reduced me to apparent idiocy. “Science is mathematics,” my father always said, “and you can't be a scientist because you can't do math.” My haughty peers in the youth group of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church painfully echoed his judgement: “Some people say ignorance is bliss; I say Bliss is ignorant.” (The religious schizophrenia of my boyhood years in Knoxville – Monday thru Friday the academically superb Roman Catholic Holy Ghost School, on Sundays the implacably hostile Unitarian youth group – is another story for another time.)
In any case, midway in my 15th year (and probably for all the wrong reasons), I decided I would be a journalist – a “newspaperman” as we said then. The very few occasions I wavered from that path were moments of overwhelming hopelessness, invariably relieved by circumstance at the last possible moment – or so it seemed until clinical depression drove me onto welfare. At that point the ruinous notifications mercilessly sent out by the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services c. 1987 (in essence “Bliss has applied for nut money and we need confirmation he used to be employable”) destroyed my reputation (and therefore my career) beyond any possibility of repair.
Which – an oblique explanation of why I'm on Blogger and excluded from major media – brings me back to OAN and what obtains here.
Normally I spend the week collecting and evaluating what goes into this blog, then write the text and choose the featured photograph on Saturday for posting early Sunday morning. But the huge technical problems imposed by my ouster from TypePad – the necessity to learn the radically different software employed by Blogger (and to do so without any technical support) – literally stole the last seven days from my life.
Obviously, much of the OAN material is based on news reports. These news items always exceed the space available – this week for example I bookmarked 27 separate stories for consideration. But the struggles of the past seven days denied me the time to do the requisite reading, and after spending all day yesterday trying to catch up, I realized the task was hopeless. There was too much to absorb and not nearly enough time for the absorption. Maybe later this week I'll manage to post what should have been uploaded last night; maybe not, as the forthcoming days will undoubtedly produce more that demands comment.
Meanwhile – and surely to the detriment of my always troublesome blood pressure – I can't seem to stop boiling with rage over the obstructions themselves. Despite the tremendous help given me by a Blogger discussion-board veteran whose screen-name is Katley – to whom again my most profound gratitude – I cannot remember ever in my life having endured a week of such relentlessly bitter frustration.
Part of the problem is I genuinely despise computers: I recognize them as perhaps the ultimate expression of the capitalist Big Lie, and I therefore regard them with undiluted repugnance. Beyond the disinformation and denial that facilitates their imposition into all our lives, computers are not labor-saving devices – not at all – but are instead the ultimate Ruling Class power-source, alien machines perfected for job-theft and subjugation, the core vehicles of outsourcing, downsizing and the most brazenly cruel profiteering in human history.
Utterly appalled by this – appalled too by how computers originated as the essence of cruelty itself (that is, as war machines born to solve the riddles of making atomic explosives in furtherance of capitalist imperialism) – I'm also blocked by my dyslexic inability at the rote learning essential to computer operation. But whether we are dyslexic or not, computers convert our lives to a uniquely vicious game of Simon Says – a contest that in childhood I always lost and therefore hated. And now – through a twist of karma or the malice of some divine sadist – I am damned to endure it again, this time for the highest stakes of all. My struggles during the past seven days are final proof that no matter how long I am around computers, I will always regard them as expressions of malevolence, invasive technology that compels us to learn a mode of thinking so radically anti-intuitive it cannot but threaten our survival as a species.
It is a game that is always an ordeal, a game I cannot ever view as “play” because any sense of playfulness – or any vestige of the delight and the good humor with which I normally approach learning – is forcibly excluded by the process itself. A final twist of anxiety is added by the fact computer operation is conducted not in English but in Nurdish, a post-modern language for which there are no reliable dictionaries – no doubt because the core tenet of post-modernism is the absurd and morally imbecilic notion meaning itself has no meaning whatsoever.
What then – besides ranting like some unreconstructed Luddite – am I trying to accomplish with Outside Agitator's Notebook?
My main intent here is to illustrate and/or verbalize those socioeconomic and political suspicions we are too often afraid to say aloud, thereby showing dear friends and other dissidents they are not alone. Part is to leave a message for the future – assuming there will be any future – that even amidst the deepening darkness beneath the Obama Bush, not everyone in Moron Nation had been subjugated to zomboid ignorance and/or pathological denial.
Another objective is purely egotistical: to showcase what little remains of my work as a photographer, thereby perhaps regaining just a trace of the potential that was stolen from me by fire and the odium of its psychological aftermath.
This is problematical for two reasons.
One is the fact my photographic best is social-documentary photography, a medium prohibited by Washington state's vindictively broad definition of invasion of privacy. A late-1970s judicial ruling – as far as I know never successfully challenged – specifically bans publication of any photograph, even news photos made in public places, should the subject later find the image objectionable. Thus my clinically-depressed decision to return to Washington state in 1986 now forever forbids me from documentation of the savage material and spiritual poverty that characterizes the human condition under capitalism – and it was this purpose I am now denied that always shaped my photographic aesthetics and intentions.
The second and far more insurmountable barrier is that of the fire itself, the mysterious blaze that in 1983 destroyed at least 90 percent of my photographs, all my research files and nearly all my writing – including the book project to which, up till then, I had devoted nearly every otherwise-unobligated moment of my adult life. Eventually entitled “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” it was a 24-year project in investigative journalism, an analysis – profusely illustrated with photographs – of the sociological, anthropological and semiotic evidence that defined the 1960s Counterculture as the spontaneous first wave of a revolutionary transformation (back) to matriarchy.
Despite its final form, “Dancer” began with a single question. During my college freshman year, 1959, I wrote a proposal for a dual-purpose English and sociology paper focused on what seemed to me the glaringly obvious anomaly of the folk-music renaissance: why, if the United States was bound for an era of scientific glory, were its young people resurrecting the Western World's oldest folk music? Though the paper was never written, its central concern remained profoundly compelling, leading me on a pathway of research, discovery and learning oddly akin to the widening ripples that result when a stone is tossed into a pond, a process far more spiral than linear and – or so I've been told – curiously feminine as well. Eight years later I recognized the results as what I still think of as the untold news story of the century – “the resurrection of the goddess” (that conclusion not just emerging from my notes but implicit in my photography too) – and I thus started shaping “Dancer” into a book of pictures and text.
Other writers, among them Robert Graves (The White Goddess, 1948); Gary Snyder (Earth House Hold, 1969); Edward Whitmont (The Return of the Goddess, 1983) and the aforementioned Ms. Johnston (Lesbian Nation, 1973), had voiced similar arguments. But none connected the resurrection of the goddess-ethos to what the late Walter Bowart labeled “revolution in consciousness” – his breathtakingly apt description of the Counterculture's psychological wellspring.
“Dancer” was therefore, from the perspective of the Ruling Class, undeniably dangerous. It identified, combined, photographically illustrated and thereby potentially united the revolution's diverse currents – feminism (including the re-emergence of deliberate single motherhood); environmentalism (especially the Gaia Hypothesis); the Back-to-the-Land Movement (including the instinctively matriarchal structure of many communes); the anti-Vietnam War protests; the re-emergence of the poet as cultural leader; the revolution in aesthetics typified by rock poetry; the folk renaissance (which resurrected many lingering remnants of pre-Christian liturgy); and finally goddess-worship itself – shaping all these (and much more) into a hitherto-unnamed solidarity that might indeed have eventually spawned a Countercultural tsunami strong enough to sweep away patriarchy and thereby cleanse us of the psychological mandate for capitalism.
Inspired by the findings that produced “Dancer” but still profoundly unwilling to publicly name the goddess (whether as symbol or reality it mattered not), I used the one-time pen-name Aengus L. Forsythe to write a 1970 Northwest Passage piece describing a fictional “crypto-radical seismology faction” far to the Left of the then-notorious Weathermen. The Weathermen, I wrote, were merely out to change the political climate, while the Seismologists sought to “fault the very bedrock of civilization.”
Though there was no immediate response, 13 years later the Ruling Class seems to have answered my challenge with customary violence. The message of the 1983 fire is unmistakable. It occurred on the same day I met with an influential editor to begin a process we reasonably believed would lead to major-media publication of “Dancer.” More pointedly, a half-melted electric clock found at the fire's origin was stopped at the exact moment we began our meeting. Though fire investigators soon backed away from their initial verdict of probable arson, such malignant synchronicity as was implicit in that silently screaming clock can hardly be coincidental. It is indeed a defining characteristic of psychological warfare. Thus I cannot escape the loathsome probability my work was destroyed by government inflicted (or at least government-sponsored) arson.
All of which turns my subsequent encounters with censorship – the newest is yet another anti-OAN embargo imposed by Comcast (the fourth to-date) – into fuel for my determination not to be silenced.
The photograph above also expresses that stance – and it does so in every sense possible. The negative was part of a batch of work salvaged in the spring of 1974 from the post-fire ashes. The image is one of a series of photos I made of the late Gene Smith – W. Eugene Smith to the photographically uninitiated – on 8 March 1976, the night he was shouted down and jeered during a reception in Seattle, the most maliciously xenophobic city in the United States. Mr. Smith's alleged sin? He tried to answer a question the small-minded Ansel Adams cultists loudly damned as “mixing politics with art.”
Mr. Smith is undoubtedly the best American photojournalist never to be known in the United States. His name is a household word everywhere else on this sad planet, but here in his homeland, his persistently anti-capitalist images got him fired by Life magazine and subsequently banished to an obscurity that – tragically – extends even unto the photographic community, which damn well should know better.
Another frame of that night's take was published to illustrate my review of Smith's superb book Let Truth Be the Prejudice; I wrote the book report as editor-in-chief of Art Direction magazine. But this image shows both Smith's contemplative warmth and the relentlessly cold damage done by the flames and subsequent exposure to several months of rain. The cameras were of course M Leicas with Summicron lenses of 35mm and 50mm; this was probably with the 50. The film was Tri-X at 400 developed in D-76 diluted 1:1.
LB/28 August 2011
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