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| Relishing the morning sunlight, Tacoma, 2011. Fujicolor 800 in Leica M4 w/135mm f/4 Elmarit, no exposure data. Desaturating the image -- rendering it in black-and-white -- enhances its timelessness. Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2015. (Click on picture to view it full size.) |
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PERHAPS
THE BITTEREST lesson of old age is that – contrary to the mercenary
lies of the USian psychology business (which revealed its true moral
imbecility by its anything-for-profit service to the empire's torture-masters) – the toxins of familial dysfunction never die.
Though
I had assumed for nearly a decade I had finally resolved my conflicting
emotions about my father – on the one hand his often contemptuous,
sometimes hateful and occasionally downright sadistic behavior toward
his children; on the other hand his admirable political courage,
socioeconomic insight and Mensa-caliber erudition – the newly disclosed
terminal illness of my oldest male half-sibling summoned all that
presumably buried angst from its grave and sent it rampaging like some
vengeful zombie through the (again) suddenly vulnerable structures of my
selfhood and identity.
The
immediate result was the intellectual paralysis that delayed this blog,
for which – particularly since I see how many people checked in Monday
looking for new work – my apology. But it is impossible for me to write
the sort of material I normally post here when I am suddenly confronted
with the realization that, as I said on the comment thread of Rebecca Solnit's superb essay on post-Katrina New Orleans, Ms. Solnit is what I think of as a “real writer,” in comparison to which I am scarcely more than a presumptuous hack, and it would be dishonest of me not to admit I envy her talent. (Emphasis added.)
What I was actually thinking was infinitely more self-damning. As I admitted to a relative in a letter discussing the long-ago origins of the animosity between the half-sibling and me, whenever (economic or professional)
circumstances compel me to define myself as a writer or an editor, it's
always accompanied by an inner voice...shouting “Phony. You can't be a
writer; you're a dyslexic.” That voice – obvious to the recipient
of the letter but needful of clarification here – was the echo of a
familial chorus of belittlement in which the half-sibling was one of the
lead singers. But its choirmaster was my father, whose favorite
pejorative for me until I was 11 or 12 years old was “goon boy.”
It was that same voice that prompted my desperate effort to escape the curse of dyslexia
by trying, from my mid-20s through my mid-30s, to abandon newspaper
reporting for a seemingly dyslexia-proof career in photojournalism. But
the barriers – despite photo credits that included Newsweek and Paris Match
– eventually proved insurmountable. The first of these was Moron
Nation's visual illiteracy, which almost invariably prompts employers
and patrons to chose photographers on the basis of personality rather
than talent or vision, and which – because I never learned how to be “a
fun guy” – usually excluded me from serious consideration. At the same
time there was the USian Empire's post-World War II taboo against
social-documentary photography – the resultant censorship of any images
that focus on the savagery of capitalism or on the deeper aspects of the
resistance thereto. Then there was the cosmic finale of the 1983 fire,
which destroyed not only my life's work – all my photographic prints
(save the few in my working portfolio) and probably 98 percent of my 31
years' production of negatives and transparencies. Because of the
post-traumatic clinical depression that followed – or more specifically
because of Moron Nation's thoroughly documented loathing
of anyone who is even temporarily disabled – the fire ended forever any
possibility I would ever again work as anything other than a (mostly
unemployed) freelancer.
A
further complication, which had actually become apparent seven years
before the fire, was my inability to work outside specific environments,
as for example my truly abject failure as a suburban newspaper
photographer c. 1976-1977. I failed because, in the USian suburbs, which
are to me the personification of Moron Nation, I could almost never
find anything with which I could empathize. This meant I seldom found,
apart from dogs and children, subjects I could photograph effectively.
My one memorable image from that entire dismal period was a published
but long-lost picture of workers in a ramshackle (and therefore visually
intriguing) machine shop.
The real problem, of course, was that I was
congenitally unable to come up with the Disneyland-type imagery my
employers preferred. I had lived a big part of my teens in a suburb and
knew its malevolent conformity and its enabling hypocrisies entirely too
well. Hence I recognized the suburbs not just as a cultural,
intellectual and emotional wasteland but as a behavioral sink – its
superficial serenity yet another of capitalism's Big Lies – which means I
knew the suburbanites themselves to be debt-slaves feigning happiness
merely to alleviate the bottomless desperation of their hopelessly empty
lives.
While that failure was meaningless in Manhattan, where my primary employer looked upon me as a latter-day Jacob Riis, potential employers
outside the City regarded it as definitively terminal. Hence in the job
market west of the Hudson River, it nullified my three major
photographic successes: the three years I was the social documentary
photographer for Beth Israel Hospital's free-clinic program
(photographing the peoples and neighborhoods served thereby); my
on-the-spot coverage of the 1967 Tompkins Park (Police) Riot (which got
my work into Newsweek, Paris Match and The New York Times); and my brief but productive tenure (1974-1976) as the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly organized and staffed by seasoned pros that as a consequence was second only to the old pre-Murdoch Village Voice in quality.
Visually The Sun was far superior to The Voice
– Fred McDarrah was not that great a lensman – but my
strip-away-the-camouflage imagery was lost on xenophobic Seattleites,
who regarded Ansel Adams as the photographic equivalent of Jesus Christ
and disdained human-condition photography as an unconscionable waste of film. In a sense my career was therefore dead even before the fire.
Which – albeit indirectly – is precisely what made the fire so emotionally ruinous.
The
photographic project on which I had worked the longest, 24 years in
1983, had evolved into a book, its working title “Glimpses of a Pale
Dancer.” Though the work began as a 1959 journal entry describing an
idea for a sociology paper, by the mid-1960s it had become an extended
photo-essay, with the accompanying text birthed by the scholarship
mandated by my need to understand what I was seeing and recording on
film. Backboned by approximately 5,000 pictures – among them at least 50
of my iconographic “sandwiches”
(photographic collages made by printing two or three negatives
simultaneously) – the carefully footnoted text argued that the untold
(and perhaps deliberately suppressed) story of the Counterculture was
its rebellion against patriarchy. Its main disclosures are summarized in
a post-fire memoir here (for which I apologize because it so desperately needs editing by a real editor, someone whose competence far exceeds my own).
Thirty-one
years earlier, when former Grove Press Editor-in-Chief Cicely Nichols
confirmed the original “Dancer” was publishable and said she believed it
would be one of the most influential books of the 20th Century, I
immediately recognized it as the salvation of my career. And when Cicely
offered to edit the text and mother it to publication, I not only
accepted her offer, I did so with an intensity of job-related ecstasy I
have never felt before or since. It was definitely what the comics would
describe as a “WHEW!” moment. But its skyrocketing emotional uplift was
the cruelest, most injurious prelude possible to the psychological
nosedive inflicted by the fire.
The
plan was that Cicely, a longtime friend, would unscramble the dyslexic
dysfunction that had grounded my 50,000-word rough draft of “Dancer” on a
reef of organizational problems, and I would edit the photography to
eliminate all but the very best images, probably 100 at the most. Then
as soon as I got my next paycheck from the trade journal for which I was
working, I'd arrange to have the pictures, the manuscript, its
accompanying research notes and all the rest of my files shipped to
Manhattan from where I had stored them in Washington state. In my mind I
was dancing with joy – something I was entirely too grotesquely clumsy
to have ever done in real life. But on 1 September 1983, literally at
the same moment Cicely and I were meeting to finalize our working
agreement – 7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight
Time – came the fire. “Dancer” was dead. So was my career, not just in
photography, but in the low-level, minimum-talent-required jobs in word
journalism by which I had so often financed my photographic efforts.
Now,
32 years later, I still sometimes photograph, though – as I must now
confess – I am able to do so effectively only when the post-fire terror of another
such loss abates to the point I can pick up a camera and view the world
through it without being visually hamstrung by the associated fears.
Sometimes the result is actually a halfway decent piece of work, like
the image above and some of the other pictures I have made and continue making of my neighbors here in this senior housing complex.
One
of the corporate names by which this dwelling-place is known includes
the word “Commencement,” to which my infinitely cynical mind invariably
adds the never-to-be-spoken-aloud tagline, “your first step toward the
grave.”
But
none of that really matters simply because at my age – 75 years old
last March – there are no second chances. Yet I see now, in the bitter
clarity of these reanimated familial hostilities, how so much of OAN's
textual content was indeed nothing more than a desperate grasping at an
imaginary second chance that would never materialize simply because, as
I already said, there is no such thing, not the least because at my age
and with my personal and political history, any notion of a second
chance was never more than grandiosity, presumption and denial. More
than anything else I was (obviously) still seeking to win the approval
of my long-dead father – and perhaps the half-sibling as well.
Maybe
now, in the renewed hope of having at last settled this matter, I will
find some art-for-art's-sake way of rediscovering the pleasure and
passion and usefulness I found in photography before the fire took it
all away from me,. Perhaps my new digital single-lens-reflex, which came
to me in affordable form only through one of those startling
combinations of coincidences we know as synchronicity, is a genuinely
positive omen. Perhaps fate is not setting me up for yet another
encounter with the agony of loss.
And
perhaps too my eldest half-sibling, a three-times Pulitzer nominee whom
I fear was driven from journalism by our father's absurd but
maliciously intended and therefore profoundly hurtful criticism of his
work, will accept my turning away from OAN's previous format as
a final conciliatory gesture. For it indeed marks my painful (but not
begrudging) acceptance of my half-sibling's judgment of my own
reportorial and writing skills: that they are – just as I so vividly saw
when I compared my work to Rebecca Solnit's – mediocre at best. (Why
not begrudging? Because, as I should have found the strength to say to
him decades ago, any notion the writhing-spaghetti intellect of a
dyslexic can produce “real writing” is patently absurd, our father's one
slyly malignant claim to the contrary not withstanding – a truth I know
perhaps better than anything else in this life.)
Until
now my primary response to the self-hatred that is the inevitable and
inevitably self-perpetuating consequence of dyslexia has been identical
to my response to the horrors of my childhood: most of the time I lock
them all away in a mental strong-box which I then hide in the most
inaccessible corner of my alleged consciousness. The problem is that
whenever I do this, I eventually lapse into self-deception, imagining
myself to be normal rather than genetically defective and therefore
capable of all sorts of impossible feats including being a “real writer”
– a compensatory lie all the more easy to fabricate when (as had often
been the case since the fire), there was not enough money for film and
film-processing. No doubt the surprise entry of the digital SLR into my
life, with its liberation from film and processing costs, is helping
pull this pattern of self-deception into sharp focus.
Meanwhile
I am left with the concurrent and no doubt final realization there is
absolutely no escaping or even ameliorating the legacy of my childhood –
a mother who so despised me she tried to murder me; a father whose
early return from work saved my life but who nevertheless regarded my
mother's toxic genes with such repugnance he soon afterward sought to
abandon me in a state orphanage; maternal relatives who with but one
exception thereafter regarded me as an unwelcome but legally unavoidable
reminder of a socially embarrassing, potentially status-damaging and
therefore wealth-jeopardizing incident that was never to be spoken of
again; paternal relatives who were at best frigidly polite; a stepmother
whose good intentions toward me were finally undermined by my father's
relentless disparagement; four younger half-sisters who were subject to
the same paternal conditioning (one of whom despises me, one of whom is
indifferent and two with whom I am genuinely close); and the three older
half-siblings, two male, one female, I did not meet or even know of
until 1952, the children of my father's first wife.
The
eldest of these was born a decade earlier than I and would become the
primary role model of my adolescence, the man I so worshiped during my
teenage years I sought to follow in his professional footsteps, the only
male kindred for whom, even in adulthood, I ever truly dared feel love.
I will mourn his passing, just as I have mourned the festering familial
abscesses that so long ago drove us forever apart – conflicts neither
my brother's fault nor mine and therefore eternally immune to such
commonplace remedies as apology or forgiveness, unhealable wounds of
enmity inflicted even beyond the grave by our father's everlasting
malice.
LB/28-30 July 2015.
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