Loren Bliss: Outside Agitator's Notebook: A New Direction for a New Year in a New Age of Deepening Darkness

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously, typically to increase the psychodynamic impact of an image. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me that making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfillment of that McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. The Palin/Hitler image, the newest of these works, is a shout of protest and -- though I hope I'm wrong -- an outcry of dreadful prophecy. The other five are related only categorically, as collage, but they address a subject light-years removed from the encroaching darkness of theocratic fascism. In a sense they are its true antithetical, nurturing yang against toxic yin, the remains of the illustrations for "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer," one of the books-in-progress lost forever in the 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work. Yet despite my losses, I still find solace in the declaration of Taliesin that was to have appeared on the frontispiece of "Dancer," and I believe that -- if our species manages to survive -- Taliesin's vision, which was also the vision of "Dancer," may somehow yet obtain. Its words are given here in the form I know best, as set out by Robert Graves: "The tops of the beech trees/Have sprouted of late/Are changed and renewed/From their withered state..." (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2010.)

Hopes Betrayed: Faces of the Health Care Fight

Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of its opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally scheduled for Lakewood City Hall, the gathering was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Given the betrayal of the reform effort four months later, such activism will probably not be seen in the U.S. again. (Two of these images -- "Single Payer Is the Solution" and "The tensions of opposites and opposition" -- were published here on October 12 and November 19 respectively.) Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

Graffiti: From Rural Bullets to Urban Bluster

When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the canine practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Outside Agitator's Notebook...

is a journal of photography and text supplemented by an occasional collage. It is about life and death in the post-humanitarian United States of America. Its context is our subjugation by Ayn Rand capitalism -- the ecocidal credo of infinite greed redefined as ultimate virtue, the Bhopal-deadly dogma under which we in the Working Class are impoverished by outsourcing, intellectually downsized by inferior schools and psychologically terrorized by manufactured crises. Increasingly damned to labor in Big Business sweatshops and corporate slave-pens (if indeed we are allowed jobs at all), we are valued only to the extent we are exploitable for profit, and -- as soon as we become elderly, disabled or otherwise unprofitable -- we are flung away like broken machines and condemned to slow extermination by deliberate neglect and abandonment. The capitalist Ruling Class perfected these measures and built its prototype Moron Nation -- the state of conditioned helplessness and hopelessness it is now imposing on us all -- in the post-Civil-War South. That is also where the Ruling Class perfected Christian theocracy as its brain-police opiate and organized the Ku Klux Klan -- colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men’s Bible-Study Class”-- as its original death squad. When the Working Class resisted, the Ruling Class belittled the Labor and Civil Rights movements as the product of “Outside Agitators” but retaliated with job terminations, mass arrests, torture and homicide. Jailed during one such episode in Knoxville, Tennessee (1963), also the survivor of three subsequent murder attempts (one of which cost the life of a brave and especially beloved canine companion), I have for many years proudly claimed the Outside Agitator label for myself -- all the more appropriately given my recognition that any artist under patriarchy (whether capitalist or socialist), is always an Outside Agitator -- a fact confirmed by our expanding knowledge of the artist’s dramatically different circumstances in the vanquished matriarchies that shaped human society for our first hundred-thousand years. While this is a long and complex topic, at its core is the realization matriarchy recognized artists as not just daughters and sons of the cosmos -- the literal truth in Taliesin’s statement “there is nothing in which I have not been” -- but as its disciples as well, the reasoning behind the invocation of the Muse with which Homer and other ancient poets begin their work. By contrast, the patriarchal system that has increasingly ruled us since the sack of Knossos mandates not only the theological prohibition of such relationships but the sociopolitical and economic suppression (or at least co-optation) of anything definitively or even implicitly female. Because artistic process violates all these patriarchal taboos even when its product appears to uphold them, art under patriarchy is always suspected of revolutionary agitation, just as the artist whether male or female is always a pariah, damned to abject poverty unless deemed exploitable for profit as a propagandist or trinket-maker. Now that “change we can believe in” has been undeniably proven a Big Lie by the betrayal of health care reform and our new enslavement via “mandatory insurance,” the material here will focus less on politics per se, more on photography, everyday life and relevant miscellany. OAN is updated weekly, typically on Wednesday nights or Thursday mornings, with occasional Extras as events or obsessions might seem to require.

01/11/2011

A New Direction for a New Year in a New Age of Deepening Darkness

POST-ELECTION TRAUMATIC DEPRESSION has sorely oppressed my consciousness since last November.

It is a condition profoundly intensified by Arizona's atrocities. First there was disclosure of the murders – two and counting – committed by the state's death-dealing denial of organ transplants to the poor: any Arizonan who lacks the impossibly expensive insurance and/or the ready money essential to pay for such procedures. Next there was the Tucson Massacre: law-abiding citizens gunned down for daring to exercise their First Amendment rights of public participation in the ever-more-deadly U.S. political process.

Make no mistake: the budgetary edict by which Arizona's Republican governor and legislators have already exterminated two transplant-denial victims is direct fulfillment of their party's decades of hate-mongering – merely the first wave of gleefully inflicted right-wing genocide against all of us who are elderly, disabled, unemployed or otherwise impoverished.

Meanwhile the connection between the Republicans' lynch-mob rhetoric and the Tuscon Massacre gunman remains curiously ambiguous. But his maniacally random shooting slew six humans including a nine-year-old girl and a Federal judge, felled a promisingly populist Democratic Congresswoman with the near-certain permanent disability of a 9mm bullet through her brain, then wounded 12 others. And the gunman's crimes have undeniably added a new element of terror to public participation in the paranoid politics of capitalist America, the sole beneficiary of which is – as always – the Ruling Class.

Even so, the most debilitating aspect of my post-election depression is not the (predictable) trauma spawned by the Republicans, who after all make no secret of their malevolent agenda: brazenly tyrannosauric capitalist imperialism bolstered by theocratic fascism and supported, on occasion, by goon squad/Ku Klux violence.

Instead what grieves me to near mental paralysis is how President Obama – never mind the leadership he has (necessarily) demonstrated in the wake of the Tucson Massacre – proves the extent he played us for suckers in the most calculated electoral scam in U.S. history.

Having won the White House by falsely flying the faded flag of Democratic Party humanitarianism, Barack the Betrayer continues to give us all the political finger.

Thus we should be very careful not to let our grief and outrage over the Arizona atrocities distract us from the fact that just last week Obama again outed himself as a hard-right GOPorker (or at best an ultra-conservative Big Business DemocRat), this time with his most damning appointment yet: his replacement chief of staff, JP Morgan-Chase Midwest Chairman William Daley, former commerce secretary/capitalist factotum in the BJ Clinton administration – a gloating fat-cat bankster, the very archetype of the avarice that oppresses us all.

Obama's new bag-and-fixit man is the son of the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, the unlamented despot who was the infamous capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses) of the nation's most notoriously mob-affiliated and corrupt political machine, the tyrant whose sneering mugshot was sardonically captioned “Beat the Press and Mace the Nation” by the 1968 Chicago-police-riot edition of Time magazine.

We already know William Daley holds the Wall Street aristocracy's leash on the president. But considering his heritage I have to wonder about his other functions: is this Daley now organized crime's man in the White House? Is he perhaps then also the Betrayer's ultimate protector?

Not that it matters; not that disclosing any of Daley's real functions could possibly make any difference in this land where – precisely as proven by the aftermath of the 2008 election – hope is not audacity but imbecility; where, exactly as confirmed by the electoral results last November (with never so many enslaving themselves to so few), Moron Nation reigns supreme: a bitter truth underscored by the vindictive idiocy of its atrocities.

Were I a Christian – which I most assuredly am not – I could easily believe I am trapped amongst multitudes who have sold their souls to the Devil, their post-pact masters a tiny coterie of demonic aristocrats: Satanic surrogates who now gleefully march their newly zomboid legions into a triumphant Hell on Earth.

Such is “change we can believe in.” And there is not one fucking thing we can do about it save pray that Mother Nature – the real divinity more god-powerful than all the hypothetical gods combined – will somehow be merciful.

At least now though nearly everything I was saying a year ago is being said by others – Chris Hedges, Henry Giroux, Robert Reich, sometimes even Paul Krugman – with far greater readership.

It was I who first wrote that capitalism is the deadly sin of infinite greed falsely transformed to maximum virtue – the moral imbecility of limitless selfishness elevated to ultimate goodness. It was I who first described the New Paradigm by which the United States is now governed at every level, federal, state and local: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class; total subjugation and genocidal poverty for the rest of us.

Because others with vastly larger audiences are now saying much the same thing, there is no reason for me to repeat this dire message yet again.

Besides which, I have sadly concluded Mr. Hedges and Mr. Reich and all their like-minded colleagues are irrelevant. Our elections permanently nullified by bribery and betrayal, we are effectively disenfranchised forever. Capitalism has robbed us of the means to enforce our political will, without which the potential of liberation by disclosure and protest are delusions. Even the revelations by WikiLeaks are reduced to meaninglessness: no polity anywhere on the globe has the power – never mind the courage – to prosecute the crimes so exposed.

Just as greed and selfishness were raised to virtues, now freedom is redefined as submission to degradation – the basic human right of travel made synonymous with abject surrender to naked body searches conducted by leering sadists. Ask any prison guard: such abusive humiliation has but one purpose. It is designed to rape away our selfhood, to strip us of all human dignity, to torture us into whimpering compliance, to condition our reflexes in the cringing obedience of the concentration-camp inmate – to prepare us for a tomorrow so hellish most of us dare not contemplate it.

The shootings in Arizona not withstanding, already the aristocracy is protected as never before, sustained by a brain-police apparatus infinitely perfected beyond its Madison Avenue/Josef Goebbels/Adolf Hitler precedents and guarded by kill-hardened mercenaries armed with technological superiority utterly alien to previous human experience – a regime of conformity and surveillance and death from which there is no sanctuary anywhere on what is now truly Slave Planet Earth.

Indeed it is precisely as James Lovelock has long intimated: naught save Gaian intervention can now rescue us from our shackles – and in her gift of planetary salvation may well lie our own species' extinction.

As under the (presumably) fictional Borg, resistance is futile; Evil has triumphed, now and forever amen.

Hence I will no longer waste my time with political commentary. It is pointless; it changes nothing. So deep is the quicksand of Moron Nation, political commentary no longer offers even the potential of change.

Instead, as befits a person approaching the end of a lifetime, I will devote this space to my memoirs – anecdotes and photographs sometimes interrupted by relevant correspondence, material akin to my post here on 1 December 2010. (These letters would surely also fit in such a format, but I am not brilliant enough writer to know how to formally include them – especially without the mental clarity formerly provided by the coffee now forever denied me by heart trouble.)

The memoir has a working title of “Encounters: a Latter-Day Odyssey”; for those unfamiliar with literary conventions, “working title” means a name possibly subject to change. The first installment, “Abutments,” will appear Monday. Because subsequent parts will be available only when I deem them ready, I cannot commit to a publication schedule but, with apologies, urge readers not included in my mailing list to periodically check here for updates.

Meanwhile thank you all; perhaps – if any of our species survives the ecopolitical damnation the Ruling Class is bringing down upon us all – some of these words might survive, if only to prove that not everyone in the United States shambled like zombies into the slave pens of tyrannocapitalism.

That said, it seems appropriate to begin this new work with a suitably Homeric invocation:

Grant me O Muse the Moon-bright wisdom
That I like bards and silversmiths of old
Their lives enraptured by your drum-counted dance
Exalt once more its choreography of light and shadow
A dumbstruck witness blest with eloquence and vision.

LB/4-11 January 2011

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Posted at 12:53 PM in Books, Current Affairs, Photography, Religion, Visual art | Permalink

Comments

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I do agree with the sentiments expressed here but also would like to point out that the left is far from innocent in the fucking up of our planet and civilization, if one could even call it civil with a straight face) - of course this comes from an old ex-maoist and Catholic convert so I make no claims to objectivity but I have thoroughly studied both ends of the spectrum and have no illusions about the integrity of political solutions and their master minds - in the end I have much more in common with sincere Pagans than with self indentified dems or repubs, marxists or neocons et al...blessings on you, keeper of the flame...xxxoooxxx

Posted by: Melinda T | 01/16/2011 at 12:49 PM

Thank you, Melinda; a compliment from a musician of your talent is like a compliment from the writer Barbara Mor -- better than all the Sigma Delta Chi awards combined.

As you may remember, I have long reasoned from deep suspicion that today's "civilization" is a self-contradicting label.

My subsequent discovery of the ultimate agnosticism of First Nations peoples -- that the various terms said by patriarchal authority to mean "Great Spirit" (Manitou, Wah'kontah etc.) in fact all literally translate as "Great Mystery" -- merely confirms my sense our species has been on a downward spiral since the sack of Knossos.

At least some fragments of the original human wisdom survive in accessible form: the above (and much more of relevance) in a long-out-of-print anthology entitled "Literature of the American Indian" (Glencoe Press, Beverly Hills: 1973); Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching," which opens with what I regard as the most profound spiritual statement ever uttered, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao"; Mor's incomparable "The Great Cosmic Mother," a peerless restoration of Europe's ancient (and now almost totally suppressed) pre-Christian traditions; and of course "The White Goddess," Robert Graves' work that includes a body of literature strongly suggesting metaphysical kinship between ancient Europe (e.g., Taliesin's "there is nothing in which I have not been") and the vision that shaped the cultures of Asia and pre-Columbian America.

As to the guilt of the Left, you and I are surely agreed, though I am admittedly more inclined to rationalize much of it as the response of peoples under attack by capitalism literally from the instant they tore down the banners of selfish tyranny and raised instead the Red Flag, its color defiantly symbolizing the blood of slain workers. But there is no question the Soviet Revolution was as much co-opted by the deadly undertow of Russian history as it was subverted by capitalist promises of material self-fulfillment, just as there is no question the Chinese Revolution has deteriorated into yet another of the imperial dynasties for which the so-called Celestial Realm is infamous. Nor is there any question the U.S. Left irreparably destroyed itself by its cowardly and lazy-minded embrace of what nearly everywhere else in the world is recognized as the core culture of the entire United States: the most relentlessly savage anti-intellectual conformity ever known on this planet.

Indeed the associated betrayals of promise compel me to accept the Catholic notion of Original Sin as -- at the very least -- an unquestionably accurate metaphor for the genetic defect that has now seemingly doomed our entire species.

Meanwhile in the context of what is so desperately needed -- a combination of democratic locally governing socialism plus spirituality based on the collective solidarity of individual encounters with the de facto divinity of Nature -- our standard political labels (and more to the point our entire political vocabulary) are reduced to gibberish. Thus we remain hopelessly imprisoned, damned to asphyxiation in the self-perpetuating miasma of Moron Nation.

Thank you again, Melinda; XXXOOOXXX back to you.

Posted by: Loren Bliss | 01/16/2011 at 03:12 PM

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Loren Bliss: Outside Agitator's Notebook