WHAT AM I? A photographer who also writes, or a writer who also photographs, or some hermaphroditic – or perhaps more appropriately hermapholiterate – combination of both?
It's an old and vexing problem, a helluva thing to still be asking myself at the approach of my 71st birthday. Though probably two-thirds of my lifetime income is from writing and editing, my picture credits sound a lot more impressive.
The latter include sales to Newsweek, Paris-Match, Newsday, The New York Times and of course United Press International, for whom I was a stringer almost continuously from 1963 until 1982.
Additionally I was the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, which was one of the best alternative weeklies ever published. I was also the social-documentarian who portrayed the people and Manhattan neighborhoods served by Beth Israel Hospital's free clinic program. At last count I had six gallery shows to my credit too.
For the sake of fairness, I should disclose that my camera work garnered only one press-association news photography award – this as compared to a half-dozen such honors for reporting and column-writing plus a couple more for general and/or photographic excellence to publications I helped edit – but the photography side of that particular scoreboard is less than indicative because I never considered myself as much a news photographer as a sociologist with a camera, more interested in zeitgeist than breaking stories.
In any case the preponderance of the objective evidence plus a lot of supportive experience on the Great Hamster Wheel of Life under Capitalism has always bolstered my sense of myself as a photographer first and a writer only second – if even that.
Moreover (and maybe most of all) photography for me is passion and sensuality – choreographies of light sculpted in alchemical silver – while writing seldom transcends my struggles with dyslexia and my constant terror some clinically characteristic mistake might make me look as if I am an idiot.
Thus for me it is a rare moment when the act of writing acquires sufficient Zen momentum to lift it above mere intellectual exercise and into the easy mindfulness from which I typically photograph, a state close kin to satori – that momentary death of ego wherein all distinctions vanish into an omnipresent now of ineffable oneness: not only am I the witness of a kindergarten child running to embrace his teacher but I am the camera and the film and child himself and the teacher herself and the energy and luminescence of our mutual existence until the quiet exclamation of the shutter resurrects ego and my left brain goes, “O wow man that was a Zen experience” (The End).
Yes this describes a real photograph, a cover for The Seattle Sun.
Perhaps the easiest way to explain the distinction between the two states visual and verbal is that when I am photographing I usually feel real and complete; by contrast when I am writing I typically feel not only fragmented but fraudulent: as if am playing a role that has no foundation in personal reality.
Nor does the Hamster Wheel of Life provide any therapeutic resolution.
My late father nurtured my photographic talent with gifts of cameras on my 12th, 14th and 16th birthdays but frequently told me he also thought I was by far the best writer amongst his three sons – all of us professional wordsmiths – which given his bluntly and often harshly critical nature was high praise indeed.
A dear friend, herself a top-level editor at Viking Press during the 1960s, said my photography was “so far out on the cutting edge there aren't words to describe it” but regarded my writing ability as “mediocre at best.”
My stepmother contemptuously trashed both involvements at every opportunity – “why don't you get a job in business and stop trying to be different from everybody else?” – and my mother invariably belittled my words and pictures with genuinely hateful disdain: “when are you going to go back to college and do something worthwhile with your life?” (never mind – no thanks to any of my parents – I already had my BA, paid for by G.I. Bill stipends earned during a Regular Army enlistment).
I never dared tell anyone – certainly not the Viking Press editor, not even the late Cicely Nichols (who intended to mother my “mediocre” writing into suitable accompaniment for my Goddess-emergent sandwiches and other camera work in “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer”) – that after you've encountered the Muse, nothing else really matters.
Yes the Muse is that intoxicating, for an earthly sample of which ignore the obnoxious master of ceremonies and the hokey special effects and listen to this woman singing a relic of our pagan past:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5f9eZR51Sw
For those unfamiliar with the breathtakingly ancient liturgical roots of British folk music, what is happening is a lay of magic: the singer as if possessed by the Goddess herself is telling us that despite “a young man's scorn,” she will never be denied: “so don't you bid me farewell here, no farewell I receive,” and that – perhaps in a far more antique version of the prophecy in “The Partisan” as sung by Leonard Cohen – “the snows they melt the soonest when the winds begin to sing.”
Meanwhile back here on the Wheel there remains not just the lesser personal conflict between writing and photography but also the greater political conflicts of a time in which betrayal and atrocity and yes Moron Nation outrage are the new and unavoidable norms.
Perhaps it is only coincidence that as the greater conflict intensifies within our society, the lesser conflict within myself seems to be resolving itself now that I am sufficiently exiled and blacklisted I can write as I please with no deadline pressure other than the biological clock of incipient mortality – liberations that do indeed seem to be letting a touch of Zen creep into the act of writing.
It is a very different Zen from the Zen of Photography, which is nearly identical to the Zen of Archery, but its Zenlyness is confirmed by the increasing frequency with which I lose myself (including all the various aches and spasms of old age) in an almost-trance perhaps analogous to the ego-less psychodynamics of action-painting, albeit my dance purely mental and its images of course made from words rather than paints – yet like action-painting the final form and content not determined (and perhaps not even known) until revealed by the end.
This is all so new to me I have not yet learned to trust it, which – apart from the fact this was my winter of bacterial discontent – is why there have been such huge gaps in my postings here: I write a piece in a 16-hour frenzy then spend weeks even months agonizing over every sentence, every punctuation mark, a process in which my friend Joy Kidstry is helpful beyond all measure – and certainly beyond my ability to adequately express gratitude.
But I also make fairly regular, often brief comments on other websites' story-generated threads.
And it came to me yesterday afternoon thanks to an intense conversation with Melinda Mohn – a singer, composer and musician with whom I became friends long ago and just recently reconnected – that these too might be well worth sharing: legitimate material for updating this site far more frequently.
Though I have posted such items here before, it was typically only when they were essays of some length. Now though as an experiment I will post all such comments, complete (of course) with links to the articles that spawned the threads of which my comments are part.
What follows – very slightly revised for stand-alone clarity – is a weekend's worth of hopefully provocative remarks.
*****
"Urbanist creed"? Please don't make me laugh.
Were "we the people" not already disenfranchised – and now facing methodical reduction to an inescapably wretched neo-serfdom – the points raised by Roger Valdez would be relevant.
Particularly since the Klanish coterie of local xenophobes and bigots – mostly in Seattle and Tacoma – continues its relentless war against the increasingly urban reality of Pugetopolis.
That said, this entire thread is a damning demonstration of denial and even dementia.
The notion we are still allowed to "determine what kind of lives we want" is as big a Big Lie as "change we can believe in."
Two pretty young women I overheard on the bus a several weeks ago understand our plight perfectly.
(I was not eavesdropping but had been forced to the bench seat that spans the very back of the bus because a gaggle of grotesquely obese and arguably irresponsible breeders with filthy-blanket perambulators and squalling stinky-diaper infants and clusters of Wal-Mart bags and no doubt an easy-read Teabagger pamphlet or two in their suitcase-sized purses had seized all the front seats theoretically reserved for elderly and disabled people including aged cripples like myself.)
The two young women were already in the two-person seat immediately ahead of and below the bench-seat that was now mine by default after my ouster from the crip-and-geezer section; unless I had stuck my fingers in my ears there was no way I could have avoided hearing their conversation.
One young woman, a blonde with long straight hair neatly pinned up beneath a gray wool knit stocking cap fetchingly embroidered with maroon reindeer, said she was terribly worried about her older brother, an honor student who had expected to go to college but – because of huge cuts in financial aid – had realized his only options were to join the military or suffer a lifetime of chronic unemployment because there will never again be any public money for education.
“He's all, 'if I have to face death I want the best training there is,' and last week he joins the Marines. I so have nightmares he'll get killed but he goes, 'there's no jobs never again I'm dead anyway.'”
The other woman shook her copper-colored curls and said she felt sorry for boys because they have no other choices but “at least if we look hot enough maybe we can marry rich men.”
That sort of cynical realism amongst people so young – earlier conversation had made it clear both women are high-school seniors – used to be unheard of outside the ghettos. But now even the middle class understands hope is not “audacity” but imbecility.
Such is the new American truth.
Wake up, people. Capitalism allows self-determination only to its ruling elite. The rest of us, whether urban or rural, are allowed no meaningful choices at all.
The American Dream is dead beyond resuscitation. The American Experiment in constitutional democracy has been betrayed beyond restoration.
And though it pains me to say it (not the least because I am in part an unabashed urbanist myself), Mr. Valdez's discussion of an “urbanist creed” is thus reduced to the usefulness of a pipe organ on a sinking ship.
*****
Three bitter truths:
(1)-The draft was NOT abolished because Nixon was a man of peace; it was abolished because the Ruling Class was (correctly) terrified the draft was training a future revolution (exactly as it did in Tsarist Russia);
(2)-For this reason, the draft will never be reinstated;
(3)-Unlike a draft military, the All Volunteer Force is by definition a mercenary force, which means it will ALWAYS reliably follow the orders of its paymasters, even unto turning its guns on U.S. citizens.
http://www.truth-out.org/rich-mans-war-and-a-poor-mans-fight67666
*****
Thank you, John Carlson, for the biggest Big Lie I've ever seen in Crosscut:
"But the old man had it right. Better days were ahead."
Better days for whom? Surely not for working Americans -- we who haven't had a real raise since 1973; we who are now abandoned as surplus humans no longer exploitable for profit; we who are the victims of the trickle-down (urinate-on-the-poor) Reagonomics that yet poison the darkness here beneath the ObamaBush.
To praise Ronald Reagan is to praise the traitorous zoo-keeper who maliciously opened the cages of an economic Jurassic Park and loosed the tyrannosaurs of capitalism to savage us all; to applaud Reagan is to applaud the Happy Face executioner who killed the American Dream and slew the American Experiment in constitutional democracy; to cheer him is to cheer the New Paradigm by which the United States has forever become the neo-feudal United Estates – absolute power and unlimited profit for the capitalist elite, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.
*****
Irony as history:
The one great-power ally of the American Revolution -- the ally that enabled victory over the British -- was pre-Revolutionary France, the France of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the House of Bourbon.
How ironic the United States that defeated the British solely because of Bourbon support is now the neo-feudal United Estates -- the modern reincarnation of pre-Revolutionary France.
http://www.truth-out.org/robin-hood-dead67679
LB/13 February 2011
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