From My Memoirs: 'The Woman on the Hill'

Moonlight in the Meadow. Photographic collage by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

*

IT WAS LATE fall, maybe two weeks before Hallowe'en, and the wind was full of leaves and the prophecy of winter. I was still living in Whatcom County on the Sumas River at the foot of Sumas Mountain, and I had driven into Bellingham to listen to some people I knew play live music -- mostly original stoner blues with acid-rock undertones -- at a place called Cal's: an improbable tavern peopled equally by gnarly commercial fishers of both genders and the more genuinely adventuresome younger bohemians -- nearly all of them female -- from Western Washington University and Fairhaven College. An interesting mix, both intellectually and visually: older men with heavy beards and pirate ear-rings and the weather-beaten faces of years at sea and somewhere decades back abandoned degrees in literature and philosophy, older women with the kind of untamed Rhiannon-long hair that has all but vanished since the '70s and the easy loose-limbed joy-in-their-bodies grace that comes from the delicious and uninterrupted flourishing of pagan shamelessness -- most of the men and women people who came here as back-to-the-landers and after their individual communes fell apart took up salmon fishing -- some as couples working gill-netters, others as crew members on seiners, one of the women ranked among the best boat engineers in the entire fleet, in any case everyone enjoying a permanent divorce from the bourgeois ratrace, and the young women from the college watching the men with distant and mostly unrequited lust and watching the older women with unabashed envy ("I wish I was free enough to arch my back and fling my arms and swirl my hair like that") and sometimes one of the younger women asking, and the older women actually saying to the younger women, “okay, honey, here let me show you how to do it,” and everybody despite the age differences united and snug in contented noise and smoky amber beerlight and most of all bound together in a vaguely coital mass of dancing bodies joined by throbbing chords and outrageously apt lyrics:

“Gotta find me a womin
with a chain saw
Cause winter is a-comin on...” 

My dogs Sadie and LeeRoy always enjoyed nighttime trips to town -- even if they had to spend three or four hours locked in my pickup or car -- partly because they loved the ride, partly because they knew it meant a two-mile run down the bay and back after the tavern closed, or maybe a walk of nearly the same distance on one of the paths that traversed the nearby wooded ridges: in either instance the means by which I regained pass-the-tests sobriety before the 25-mile drive home. So Sadie and LeeRoy were there in the cab of my yellow Datsun truck when last call moved the party from Cal's to various private residences -- I had been invited to one such gathering but was in a strangely hollow mood and chose to be alone with my dogs instead -- and because the moon was aging but still swollen and astonishingly gibbous and sailing through broken clouds and undeniably charged with the potential of magic, I chose not to walk along the bay past the tolling gong-buoy at Post Point but rather to climb the path through an abandoned apple orchard to a hilltop meadow that a century ago had held a farmhouse and there amidst the weeds and overgrown foundation rubble listen to the wind roar and bluster in the nearby evergreens and watch the shadows dance in the hide-and-seek light.

 

It felt very secure there, welcoming even. I let the dogs run free knowing they would soon return and after I had been there maybe 15 minutes they came back as expected and took positions to my left and right, darker sentinels invisible in the dappled darkness. Now absolved of any need for watchfulness I sprawled on my back amidst the seasonally crumpled bracken. I was delighted by the unusually large moon and the erratically alternating ice-dark/snow-bright light-show of the clouds, and suddenly I wished I dared undress to be closer to the earth and air and darkness, perhaps even to dance in the curiously wavering light, but I thought about the chill and about all the headline reasons I dast not yield to pagan whim (“old drunken pervo claims religion prompted nakedness on college hill”) and so begrudgingly I submitted to the weather and the tyranny of civilization.

 

I had lain thus for maybe another half hour when Sadie and LeeRoy suddenly stood and LeeRoy grumbled and Sadie muttered and chuffed, not the low infinitely menacing seismic rumble with which they warded off known threats but an almost interrogatory sound: "we are dogs and as you can tell by our voices we are very big dogs and we are here and we don't think you mean us any harm but we're not sure and its our job to find out so please tell us so we don't have to bite you." Mutter; chuff; then again the deeper Rottweilian grumble of LeeRoy; by the focused intensity of their ears and noses something directional, perhaps coming up the slope from the opposite side of the ridge. I now sat up and scanned the unstable darkness with peripheral vision -- the old military night-operations trick -- but saw nothing and could hear no other sound than the dogs and the omnipresent wind: perhaps it was another dog, perhaps I should put them back on their leashes. But -- very uncharacteristically -- I did nothing; I sat motionless waiting to see who or what might come out of the adjacent trees and cross the tangled meadow that had been the long-ago farmhouse lawn, now under this indecisive sky one moment all moon-bright shining autumnal cobwebs and phantom-white clumps of blown thistle and pearly everlasting, the next moment again one with the forest in undifferentiated darkness.

 

A long cloud covered the moon. The woman who came from the woods moved along the path so quietly I never heard her at all, and when the moon was again unveiled she was standing to my left no more than a car's length away, and while Sadie was holding back skeptically, LeeRoy was already stepping forward swinging his strong proud undocked tail, the fresh moonlight flaring gleefully in his eyes, momentary green fire, a normal canine phenomenon some nevertheless regard as Satanic, hence the fundamentalist Christian missionary housewife who rebuked me one evening in my own front yard: "I saw it. I saw it. Your dog showed me his demon eyes. You really are a witch." But of course there was nothing like that from this woman who emerged from the darkness: she saw LeeRoy's eyes and laughed, a warm sensual inviting laugh, and said "your bigger dog's eyes are really heavy they could be very upsetting to some people."

It was a chilly night and the woman wore a long thick shawl, dark, probably wool, over her head and shoulders, and the wind tugged constantly at its fringes. Beneath that was a dark sweater and a heavy dark dress, probably also wool; the dress came nearly to her ankles, which I could see were booted in high soft leather moccasins, the lighter beads in their beadwork reflecting warm little pinpoints of the ambient light: in such footwear a woods-person can cover ground with absolute silence; no wonder I had not heard her approach. She had some kind of shoulder bag too, like a large purse on a diagonal strap, its bulk apparent beneath her shawl. I briefly wondered if maybe she was one of the local homeless.

 

Now she spoke with the dogs, her voice a musical murmur, her words carried away by the wind. After she had at last persuaded Sadie to kiss her outstretched hand she turned her full attention to me. Her face remained in shadow beneath the shawl, though I could see she had dark hair, decades uncut like the older women at Cal's, and I wondered if perhaps she had been among them.

 

"Okay if I hang around?" she asked.

 

"Certainly," I said.

 

She sat perhaps eight feet away on a natural chair I had not noticed, its cushion a slight elevation that might have been an abandoned gopher mound overgrown with bracken already crushed, the chair's back a dark lump, perhaps a section cut from the trunk of a big maple, a round of firewood lost years before when the path was still a road into deeper forests and finally into the mountains themselves.

 

"I usually come here at night to think," she said. "I've been coming here for a couple of years and this is the first time there's been anybody else."

 

"I just came up here to run the dogs and mellow out a little before the long drive home -- I live out in the county but I came in tonight for the live music at Cal's. I hope I didn't frighten you."

 

"No I actually watched you for quite a while before I let you know I was here. But I saw your dogs right away and as soon as I saw them I knew you were fine. Besides I'd seen you earlier at Cal's. We know some of the same people. But I had work to do tonight and you got there just as I was leaving.”

 

LeeRoy was by this time lying beside her, his great black bulk as close to her as he could get, his chin resting on one of her feet.

 

We talked about dogs for a while -- a dog she had raised from puppyhood had recently died of old age, and she was hoping another dog would soon find her. We talked about what we each did for a living -- she said she was a painter and a sometimes college student and she worked freelance for several Bellingham printers doing commercial art, and I knew at least the painter part was true because I was downwind and intermingled with her subtle perfume -- a hint of sandalwood and perhaps some musk I could not name -- I had caught the tell-tale scent of turpentine, and when I asked if she worked in oils, she said yes not many people do anymore, how did you know?, and I told her. A little later she asked me if I had a wife or a lover waiting at home and I said no I had been alone for ten years and she said she had broken up in June with someone she had been with for a long time and thought it would be a long time before she allowed herself such vulnerability again. "It's lonely," she said, "but lonely is less painful than misunderstood and mistrusted." Shielded by the variable night we began sharing parts of ourselves we normally would not have disclosed without the prerequisite of weeks and months of familiarity.

 

Then she said she had brought cookies and wine for herself because the moon was so huge and low and strangely shaped and she wanted to consume the cookies and wine as a kind of offering and would I join her? Yes of course I said and she apologized that she had only one glass and did I mind sharing it and I said not at all that just makes it more sacramental which is how it has felt ever since you got here. You must be pagan she said and I said yes I am and she said "then you will understand what I am doing" and fumbled in her beaded shoulder bag and brought out a dark bottle of wine and a wine glass and a cork-screw. She uncorked the bottle and poured the glass full and re-corked the bottle and set the bottle beside her on the grass and stood and LeeRoy grumbled that he had to move. She switched the glass to her left hand and made an invoking pentagram over it and lifted the glass to the moon and flicked the wine onto the grass around us and turned to me and said "blessed be." Then she said "you'll have to come closer if we're going to share this glass -- here there's actually room for two of us against this log." We sat; it was as she had said and as comfortable as any sofa. Sadie and LeeRoy moved close to us: I pictured stone age people gathered with their canine companions at the edge of some primeval forest, then remembered the ruined foundation nearby and thought of some apocalyptic aftermath: Knossos, Albion, the Death of Electric Man, humankind driven back into the forest and rediscovering the Goddess. Meanwhile she poured the glass full again. She drank and I drank; it was a good wine, probably a valpolicella, seemingly black as ink even in brightest moments of moonlight, and she drank and I drank and we both ate her cookies which were round and thick and tasty and made of oatmeal and raisins and peanut butter and perhaps other more elemental nutrients and she drank and I drank and then drinking and eating we drifted into a long conversation that gradually became more molecular than verbal and then expanded beyond physical limits into a dialogue I am still convinced was pure telepathy: I remember it not as an impassioned sharing of words but rather as a mutually eloquent transmission of images so nakedly honest I was astounded -- and yet it was so dreamlike that the next day I could remember only the vaguest details of its content. In fact I discovered to my profound sadness I could not even remember her name.

 

I never truly saw her face, only the glimpses allowed by the peek-a-boo moon and the ever-changing veil of clouds. Nor, beyond holding hands as we talked, and embracing one another when we parted, did we physically touch -- of this I am absolutely certain -- yet it was as if we had been intimate to a mutual depth few humans ever imagine, much less achieve. I do not even clearly remember our parting: only that it was somehow both fulfilled and empty, as if each of us had passed some pivotal milestone, some turning point, absolutely vital yet forever unattainable without this strange encounter on a windblown October hilltop, an end and a beginning sealed in a passionate hug that is my only vivid recollection of the entire finale: my face briefly buried in her hair, my arms around the rough wool in which she was clad, the combined scents of sandalwood and musk and turpentine and even a trace of wood smoke that told me how she heated her dwelling; and most of all the shawl falling away to reveal the great dark sweet cloud of her hair itself. Yet I remember nothing whatsoever of my farewell words to her, and I have only the vaguest memory of her farewell words to me. I am certain they were powerfully positive, nurturing, strengthening, healing: I can feel their potency even now, 13 years after the fact, and I would love to be able to write them down and add them to this narrative, but they are beyond my reach, seemingly gone forever.

 

The night does not come back into clear focus until I was at the foot of the long hill. I was unlocking my truck and my dogs were waiting for me to open the door and I was again wondering if I was sober enough to dare attempt the lengthy drive home. It was very late. The sky had blown clear and the moon though noticeably more aged was now even larger and more yellow and westering toward the mountains far across the bay. Orion was already high in the southeast. I pulled the door open. Sadie climbed into the cab and claimed the seat under the passenger window. LeeRoy grinned, wagged his tail and flared his daemon eyes like some James Harris in quadruped. In my mind I heard again the hilltop woman’s laughter, and just for the tiniest instant it seemed there was a trace of sandalwood on the pre-dawn wind.

 

LB/ posted 4 April 2013 (Copyright 9 December 2005 reproduction without permission prohibited.)

-30-

Occupy Tacoma: Portraits of a Non-Violent Revolution (2)

Occupy Tacoma visited the city's McKinley Hill neighborhood with an informational march on 4 November. All demonstrations of this sort help bypass the near-total news embargo imposed by Ruling Class Media, but this event was especially notable for its thought-provoking signs. Meanwhile the prevalence of anti-Wall-Mart placards underscored both a boiling local controversy (for details see below) and the great extent to which the Occupation is supported by organized labor.

*****

Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2011. Click on each image to view it full-size. (One-time use rights available.)

*****

"I Can't Afford to Bribe a Congressman" describes the worsening  plight of 99 percent of the U.S. population. The invitation to the Tea Party reflects the Occupation Movement's big-tent nature, focusing on expression of grievances rather than preachments of ideology. "Turn Off The News" calls on people to wean themselves from the Ruling Class propaganda machine, which either ignores the Occupation or besmirches it with negative sensationalism. "Your Bank Is On Welfare" echoes the Occupation's signature chant: "Banks Got Bailed Out/We Got Sold Out." But the slogan in the picture next to the bottom, "Occupy Your Mind," is surely the most thought-provoking text of all. Because the demonstration remained peacefully uneventful even when it picketed a local branch of U.S.Bank, which is part of the national banking monopoly, the smiling faces in the last frame -- at a brief pause near the completion of the 1.7 mile march -- seemed to my out-of-retirement photo-editor's eye to be the perfect ending for this chapter of the Occupy Tacoma story.

     

*****

Visual Thinking: of McKinley Hill, Wal-Mart, Tacoma Politics, the Occupy Movement and Tech Data 

MCKINLEY HILL has a curious history. When I lived there during my first stay in Tacoma, 1978 through 1982, it was a notably safe Working-Class neighborhood, kept crime-free by the resident motorcycle club in much the same way Manhattan's Little Italy was so effectively policed by the Wise Guys from Cosa Nostra.

But sometime during the middle or late '80s – I don't know the details because I was back home in New York City – a new municipal regime in Tacoma ran the bikers out of town. In the aftermath, McKinley Hill fell prey to the street gangs that increasingly provide the sole familial structure available to capitalism's throw-away children. The gangs finance themselves by dealing drugs – all-too-often the only living-wage work available to youths who because of color or caste are from birth entrapped in the capitalists' slave-pens.

Meanwhile the McKinley Hill neighborhood itself – portrayed in Ruling Class Media as the bloody battleground of Asian, African-American, Hispanic and First Nations turf-warriors – justifiably acquired a singularly bad reputation. Some said it was the most dangerous neighborhood on the entire West Coast.

Others, people who have moved there more recently and participated in McKinley Hill's courageous neighborhood reclamation campaigns, assert quite forcefully the era of gang-warfare there has been ended, that the district is again quite safe – as surely it seemed to be during the 4 November event pictured above. Not only were there no adverse incidents; many residents applauded the demonstrators. Some even joined the march.

More than a few of the newcomers to the demonstration were Tacomans furious about the latest Wal-Mart outrage: a breathtakingly successful stealth campaign in which Elks Club officers were used as pawns – whether wittingly or not remains undetermined – to seemingly befuddle city officials into approving the mega-store's sneaky invasion of an old and mostly-residential neighborhood miles away from Mc Kinley Hill.

The people of the afflicted district, who had mistakenly believed Tacoma city government still represented them and not the tyrannical One Percent, feel utterly betrayed and are understandably furious. They legitimately fear that Wal-Mart, with its notoriously anti-social customer base and its street-clogging increase in vehicular traffic, will reduce the neighborhood to yet another example of the slummy, trash-littered environments one so often encounters near the perimeters of downscale shopping centers.

Such is capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – its consequences the predictable product of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, a hearty fuck-you to all the rest of us. Hence the red-and-white placards, “Tacomans United Against Wal-Mart” that -- proudly emblazoned with the “bug” proclaiming a union-made print job – debuted at the McKinley Hill demonstration. Hence too another of the (nearly countless) reasons there's an Occupy Tacoma...with a big sister named Occupy Wall Street.

As always in these post-Leica times, my working cameras are Pentaxes, a pair of reconditioned MXs, the model I used during the late 1970s and with which I am (again) falling in love. The medium is FujiFilm 800. The first and last images were made with the 135mm f/2.5 Takumar, the others with the 100mm f/2.8 SMCP.

LB/15 November 2011

-30-

===============================================================

(Pictures and text published in Outside Agitator's Notebook prior to 1 August 2011 are available via TypePad at lorenbliss.typepad.com.)

===============================================================

 

On the Occupation Movement and Why as a Non-Smoker I Should Never Presume I Can Write; Two Promised Pieces from the Occupy Tacoma Website; Continuity of Blog; Additional Notes on 'Portraits of a Non-Violent Revolution'

Of Occupy Tacoma: maybe – especially colorized – another candidate for iconography. Click on image to view it full size. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.

*

FRANCES FOX PIVEN, professor of political science and sociology at the City University of New York, has written a brief, accurate but unfortunately incomplete history of the capitalists' ongoing war against the U.S. poor. Despite its omissions, for examples of which see below, Ms. Piven's well-researched essay should be read by anyone who seeks to understand the socioeconomic oppression that fuels Occupy Wall Street and its local expressions.

Entitled “The War Against the Poor and Occupy Wall Street,” it first appeared on TomDispatch.com and was further disseminated by Common Dreams, where I responded with a long and carefully thought-out critique.

Alas my critique of Ms. Piven's work was potentially discredited by the fact I misspelled her name in second and subsequent references, the sort of infinitely mortifying dyslexic error that has ruinously plagued me since medical problems forced me to quit smoking tobacco 16 years ago – four months after I wrote the investigative report on welfare statistics referenced below – a project I would never dare attempt as a non-smoker. Nicotine, a potent neurotransmitter, temporarily alleviates dyslexic dysfunction. Without nicotine, my writing skill is effectively nullified – hence my always deep and impassioned preference for photography has become even more compelling since I gave up cigarettes. Indeed one of the most bitter lessons of my post-smoking years is that I cannot trust my (formerly reliable) writing ability unless I am able to have my work scanned by a competent editor. But no such editor was available today, and by the time I discovered how dyslexia had (again) ambushed me and (again) made me look like an idiot, it was too late to correct the error because Common Dreams had closed my post to revisions. My deepest apology to Ms. Piven.

The text below is a corrected and slightly expanded version of what originally appeared.

***

Ms. Piven's data is superb as far as it goes, but she fails to acknowledge how the nation's welfare bureaucrats thrive at the expense of the poor, for example by increasing administrative outlays 5,390 percent (not a typo) even as they slashed stipends and services by 66 percent.

The 5,390 percent increase in administrative expenses and the attendant 66 percent downsizing of stipends and services are revealed by The Statistical Abstract of the United States, the ultimate authority for data about federal and state governmental operations. The changes occurred over 20 years, from 1970 to 1990, the latter the last year for which complete state-level statistics were available when I, then a journalist of some three decades experience, exposed this atrocity via a 1995 Internet story.

In 1970, 87.7 percent of the nation's federal and state welfare expenditures went to stipends and services for the poor, while the remainder, 12.3 percent, paid administrative expenses. By 1990, aid to the poor had been downsized to 24.5 percent of the total, with the remaining 75.5 percent going to the bureaucrats, most of it for radically expanded payrolls.

These findings – all from Statistical Abstract, show how the appointed guardians of the poor became predatory parasites instead.

Not only that: the bureaucrats willingly collaborated with Ruling Class politicians, academics and media celebrities to create the viciously racist Big Lie of the “welfare queen” archetype – some African-American single mother falsely but universally scapegoated as the personification of runaway welfare costs.

But the statistics reveal the real “welfare queens” are the bureaucrats themselves – present tense because the same shenanigans that facilitated their bounteous 5,390 percent increase in administrative expenses are routinely employed today.

For example, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services formerly conducted recipient-eligibility reviews once each year. Now it imposes them quarterly, using the (wholly unnecessary) 300 percent increase in paperwork to justify retaining a maximum number of employees.

Meanwhile it ousts thousands of people from its assistance rolls, inflicting starvation and death by neglect and abandonment.

Thus capitalism rids itself of those of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed or otherwise no longer exploitable for profit.

Whether imposed on recipients of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or welfare per se, social-service cutbacks are literally the U.S. version of genocide, a policy all the more cunning for its lack of barbed wire and death camps.

But not only do these policies provide us with a singularly teachable moment; the associated revelations are among the most terrible truths about the United States.

What imprisons us in Wall Street's slave-pens is the notion infinite greed is maximum virtue. This is the core principle of capitalism. Popularized by Ayn Rand, it is drummed into us until we accept it without question – never mind it refutes every standard of ethics or morality our species has ever uttered.

As a result, capitalism's savage ethos is now as prevalent in the workplace as in the boardroom. From the country-club to the corner tavern, from the executive suite to the shop floor, our national ideology is a relentless me-first/fuck-you selfishness.

Hence the prevalence of the class-traitors formerly called “Reagan Democrats,” the ultimate perpetrators of the ruinous decline in union membership that dis-empowered the U.S. Working Class. Hence too the number of welfare bureaucrats – lowliest clerks included – who happily function as what has been aptly labeled “little Eichmanns.”

As Ms. Piven implies, many New Yorkers – probably a majority – are appalled by the hatefulness and sadism of the war against the poor. But as James Baldwin said 53 years ago, the City truly is "Another Country." Out in here in America, where gentrification has forced me into permanent exile from my beloved Manhattan, the masses cheer, applaud – and vote the fuhrers who command the "little Eichmanns" back into office.

Though such voters are part of the 99 percent, they are conditioned to imagine themselves part of the One Percent. And until they develop a proletarian identity – until they stop identifying with the oppressor – they will never evolve the solidarity essential to what Ms. Piven calls “moral economy.”

Indeed it is the 99 percent's belief in infinite greed as ultimate virtue that facilitates capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

A variant of the same problem – assumptions and reactions tantamount to identification with the oppressor – threatens the U.S. Occupation Movement itself, especially in those locales where it escapes the corrective influence fostered by New York City's uniquely diverse but essentially European intellectual culture.

Contrary to Ms. Piven's optimism, there is grave danger that – once beyond the City and its self-correcting acumen – the Occupation will repeat the errors which nullified the revolutionary potential of the 1960s: that it will remain stubbornly bourgeois, cliquishly shunning the more obvious victims of capitalism.

Though I have been a working journalist most of my adult life, I am also now at age 71 amongst the hopelessly impoverished, and I write (when I am impassioned enough to dare risk dyslexic mortifications like the one above) and photograph (when I can afford the film and processing) from the perspective of an avowedly angry proletarian.

Thus I'm painfully aware how often the self-proclaimed, implicitly self-congratulatory “progressives” – however vehemently they may seem to defend the demographic abstractions they so tellingly label “the poor” and “the homeless” – nevertheless reject us as persons. Their habitual use of the prefatory article – the unemployed, the evicted – denotes a truly unbridgeable chasm, as if the revolution were somehow their own private social club.

Not surprisingly, such “progressives” make no secret of the extent to which they are repelled by our chronic inability to purchase the knowledge and technology required for participation in the Internet and other electronic media. Thus, even on Occupied ground, our poverty remains an inescapable repugnance, one of the unforgivable sins against the capitalist mentality in which we've all been so thoroughly conditioned.

But probably our worst offense – no doubt the ultimate cause of our pariahdom – is the extent to which the emotions that boil beneath our grievances violate the white bourgeoisie's zero-tolerance taboo against anger. Never mind this is the very taboo – so carefully induced by the Ruling Class as its ultimate psychological fail-safe – that now functions as the chief instrument of our oppression, the padlock to the shackles that guarantee our continued enslavement.

Nor – though I applaud the accuracy (as far as it goes) of Ms. Piven's description of the struggle – can I accept her implicit endorsement of reform. The history of the past 70 years – not just the destruction of the New Deal but the methodical murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Karen Silkwood and indeed every other effective reformer – proves reform is impossible.

The body-count alone leaves no doubt capitalism is in fact the greatest evil the human species has ever unleashed. It is terminal cancer not just of our body politic but of our entire planet. And until it is eliminated accordingly, every one of us is at deadly risk.

*****

Promised Piece Nr. 1: Occupy Wall Street's Neva Bridge Moment

(Originally published on the Occupy Tacoma website.)

Once we know the story, a profoundly heartening moment Sunday in Manhattan and an equally astounding event 94 years ago in Russia are eerily similar:

On 8 March 1917 – 23 February by the old Tsarist calendar and in either case International Women's Day –  some 5,000 women of the Lesnoy Textile Works boiled into the streets of Petrograd in a strike against the firing of their Bolshevik sisters who had been helping them organize a union. 

As the women marched through the war-starved industrial neighborhoods and toward the center of the city and the Tsar's Winter Palace, they chanted "Klyeb! Myr!" (Bread! Peace!).

Soon they were joined by thousands more, a huge outpouring of men who had been locked out of the nearby Tupulov Machine Works, then a growing mass of soldiers' wives,  shopkeepers, typists, soldiers home on leave from World War I. 

By now numbering at least 50,000, the demonstrators reached the bridges across the Neva River but were met there by police, formations of Cossacks with drawn sabers and lines of infantry with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets.

The demonstrators paused, unsure what to do next. It was bitterly cold; the Neva was solid ice. Toes and fingers ached. The Cossacks' horses were restless, chomping their bits and stomping their iron-shod hooves on the cobblestones, breath steaming in the frozen air.  

At two of the bridges, the marchers turned away. Then, at a third bridge, something happened.  A young woman stepped forward and pled with the troops to let the demonstrators pass; a man – perhaps a soldier on leave – argued that to fire on women and girls was to fire on Mother Russia herself. Stories differ wildly as to what was said and who said it; nobody was taking notes. But the Cossacks refused orders to charge, the soldiers refused orders to fire. The police-line drew back. The marchers strode across the bridge, onto the Nevskiy Prospekt and into the center of Petrograd.  

The rest is history.

This video, made in New York City on Sunday, recorded what is perhaps our own Neva Bridge moment:            

http://www.youtube.com/user/BklynJHandy

Verily, it is as Peter Gabriel foretold:

You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flame begins to catch
The wind will blow it higher...

(18 October 2011)

*****

Promised Piece Nr. 2: Why I Got Involved with the Occupation

(Written at the request of Stacy Emerson, one of the Occupy Tacoma organizers. It was among first texts to appear on the OT website.)

I got involved because the war against Medicare and Medicaid murders us by deliberate abandonment and kills us by neglect and is therefore a form of genocide.

I got involved because the war against affordable health care is a war against our human right to the means of survival.

I got involved because the war against public transit is a war against our human right to travel to work and to the store and to visit our friends and families.

I got involved because the war against public education and public libraries is a war against our human right to knowledge.

I got involved because the war against firefighters and police and military veterans is a war against our human right to safety.

I got involved because the war against Social Security is an assault by already-rich thieves trying to steal the nest egg I earned by my own labor.

I got involved because the war against unions is war against everything that was good about the United States.

I got involved because the great affliction of our world is war by the greedy One Percent against everyone else.

I got involved because I am 71 years old and sick of being cast away despite the fact I have many useful skills honed in a lifetime of work.

Mostly I got involved because I am damn tired of how our We-the-People Constitution – the Constitution I swore as a young soldier to protect – is routinely betrayed by governance that protects the One Percent and savages the rest of us as if we were but slaves.

(5 October 2011)

*****

Continuity: Where to Find My Pre-Blogspot Pictures and Essays

When I began this blog in 2009, it was on the server TypePad, with free space provided under what its then-owners called “the Journalist Bail-Out Program,” a gift to the U.S. journalists – 85 percent of the total media workforce – who had been permanently stripped of our jobs. The idea was that via on-line publication, at least some of us might by electronic magic somehow preserve our careers.

Though I had no such delusions – despite ongoing freelance assignments, my career was destroyed beyond any hope of repair by the bottomless hatred and fear with which U.S. employers react to mental illness – in my case the clinical depression that followed obliteration of my life's work by a mysterious fire in 1983.

Nevertheless and for obvious reasons I leapt at TypePad's opportunity, particularly to (again) display the few photographs that had been in my working portfolio and thus survived the fire.

But last spring TypePad was absorbed by a global advertising agency, and last summer I was summarily ousted – locked out from the server without notice or explanation, this in obvious retaliation for my ever-more-vehemently anti-capitalist politics.

Even so, my work on TypePad gathered sufficient readership to remain available. You can find it at lorenbliss.typepad.com.

*****

Visual Thinking: More Notes on 'Portrait of a Nonviolent Revolution'

Obviously the one photograph above is part of a body of new work about Occupy Tacoma. The remainder of the pictures are ready for posting, but I am withholding them for a few more days so the above writing won't distract from the imagery and vice-versa.

The photo published here today is an outtake from a mini-essay about another of Occupy Tacoma's informational demonstrations in lower-income neighborhoods. I set it apart from the essay because – though I like the deliberately out-of-focus face against the sea of sharply-focused protest placards I caught with the 135mm f/2.5 Takumar on my Pentax MX – the image seemed to add nothing to the story told by the other frames I selected.

Perhaps though, as noted in the caption, by reducing it to black-and-white and adding colorization I can make of it an icon. But what do I know? (According to some I'm just an uppity geezer with an ancient camera, man and machine equally obsolete.)  As usual, the medium is FujiFilm 800.

LB/13 November 2011

-30-

Unyielding Reflections of Purposeful Defiance: a Locked-Out Blog, a Fire-Damaged Photograph

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

-30-