The image that inspired a project I will never be able to complete: I made this picture with a Rolleiflex F and Kodak 400 portrait film in 2008. The extent to which the submissive posture of using a waist-level viewfinder instantly relaxed my subject started me thinking about making similar portraits of my neighbors here in the senior housing where I live. But I began to fear my Rolleiflex F was getting old, sold it to finance the purchase of a reconditioned Rolleiflex T and was thus victimized by a thieving merchant, who took my money and sent me worthless junk instead of the camera I ordered. This terminated not just the portraiture project (which I had intended to do in black-and-white) but several others as well, all permanently canceled because the theft-loss combined with the meagerness of my pension forever prohibits me from purchasing another professional quality medium-format camera. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.
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THE STRANGE REALITIES of synchronicity are often beyond my abilities to describe or even exemplify, but the synchronicities within this moment are undeniable.
I awoke today intending to write about why after 59 years (my father gave me my first camera for my 12th birthday), I am finished with serious photography – not because I am suddenly willing to give up the greatest most dependable joy and passion of my inner life, but because I am now hopelessly obstructed from ever experiencing that ecstasy again.
Meanwhile Franetta McMillan has addressed a matter that is as politically relevant to the conflict that rages all around us as it is personally relevant to my own now finally abandoned struggle against the lifetime curse that has so eerily blighted all my photographic efforts – a jinx so powerfully devastating I can no longer deny that my commitment to photography (or for that matter to any visual art) was the most pointless, wasteful and self-destructive act of my entire life.
Yes, mine was always a history of photo-related tragedy – inexplicable malfunctions of equipment and chemicals, picture credits omitted by “accident” nearly every time my photographs appeared in major publications, work lost or maliciously stolen – a pattern established long before the irremediably ruinous denouement of the 1983 fire.
But now a thieving merchant – that consummate archetype of capitalist greed and malice – has inflicted a genuinely terminal wound: he has stolen the money I paid him for a reconditioned Rolleiflex.
What he sent me instead is worthless junk, not even an approximation of the camera I ordered.
Due to the crippled condition of our once-formidable consumer protection laws here in Washington state – another depredation of capitalism – there is no possibility I will recover my money, never mind the offending business is less than a hundred miles distant.
The money is gone forever, and my tiny pension – my sole remaining source of income – leaves me no way to replace the loss, which means that no matter how much longer I might remain alive, I am denied forever the tools to do the medium-format work I had envisioned as the grand finalé of my memoir.
*****
I am not a writer. I despise the act of writing; it is like trying to wrestle a washtub full of lubriciously writhing worms into a huge vase obstructed by an impossibly narrow neck. I am in fact a total fraud as a writer – a gravely handicapped dyslexic who has merely learned to (mostly) hide his abysmal failings behind a smokescreen of eloquence.
But as a photographer I came alive, in love with the sensuality of light and shadow and the ecstatic Zen of recording it. According to my parents, the first word I ever spoke was “light”; in one of my attempts at writing poetry – usually a ludicrous even lugubrious waste of time – I described photography as “light sculpted in alchemical silver,” one of those (rare) lines so apt it could never possibly have come from my own defective brain and must therefore be absolute proof the Muse is real.
The medium-format photographs that now thanks to the thief will never be made were to have been not merely the concluding images of my memoir but its very post-fire core, just as the photography destroyed in the fire was to have been the backbone of the original “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer.”
Such is my accursedness.
In other words, the thief has murdered not just my photography but my memoir too and therefore all my work – any (slight) remaining possibility I might have achieved even one scintilla of immortality.
Thus the curious but undeniable timeliness of what Franetta wrote this morning in response to the piece entitled “Barack the Betrayer: Glib Enabler of Wall Street's Republican Despotism.”
“There's just one question that's been nagging at me for the last few months,” she posted. “If predator capitalism has already won, and resistance is futile, do we still have a moral obligation to resist? I still haven't figured out the answer to that one.”
*****
Good morning, Franetta: again your comment inspires not just a quick response but an entire essay.
Your question is really three questions. What is the nature of capitalist victory? What is moral obligation? And what is futility?
To adequately address any of these issues, it seems to me we need an entirely new vocabulary; the relevant buzzwords – used here in the positive sense of a buzzword's function as a source of epiphany rather than as a pejorative implying mindless agitation of Moron Nation's omnipresent rage – have all been rendered so meaningless they put most of us to sleep: not the sound slumber of satiated comfort but the desperate narcolepsy of powerlessness and escapism.
Such is the reality of Moron Nation, the former United States of America now transmogrified by greed and selfishness into the United Estates of Wall Street, the Big Plantation on which Massa Obama is the present overseer and – in all probability – the Machiavellian nemesis of any hope the African-American liberation movement might yet have saved us from ourselves.
To talk or write or photograph or paint the dread reality within this realm of consummate moral imbecility – to name or portray “racism” or “class struggle” or “progressive values” or “economic democracy” or “collective bargaining” or even “the social contract” – is now most often merely to convince the listener to change the channel and the reader to look elsewhere.
Capitalism – all capitalism is innately predatory – won here by dumbing us down, jamming our dunce caps on so permanently most of us now reflexively think like peasants: note again what I said about “hope” at the conclusion of “Glib Enabler” (15 April).
Worse, we think not just like “peasants” per se but like the most notoriously reactionary peasants in human history, the Mujiki of Russia, so savage in their theocratic proto-Teabagger conservatism they murdered even the doctors, nurses and teachers the Soviet government sent into their communities to lift them into wellbeing. (This is part of the background – conveniently omitted by capitalist censors – of the deadly policies subsequently imposed on so much of rural Russia during the 1930s.)
But here in Moron Nation, with its neo-peasantry of selfishness-addled and celebrity-seduced troglodytes, the capitalists did not need their characteristic bayonets and rifle volleys, though there was that too, the blood shed at places like Coal Creek and Everett and Ludlow and Kent State University and Jackson State College – just as there is bound to be much more of it spilled in the years ahead as our few remaining humanitarians are finally pushed to the point of active resistance.
And “humanitarians” – women and men moved to action by deep concern for our fellow humans and therefore the environments in which we live – is what we truly are and what we should begin calling ourselves. (Note too the term “Leftist humanitarian” is redundant, while the terms “conservative humanitarian” or “Rightist humanitarian” are self-contradictory.)
In any case we are not really “Marxists” or “Communists:” or “socialists” or “progressives” or “organized labor” or even “liberals,” much less a genuine resistance. To claim one or more of these labels, we'd have to at least have an ideology and an analysis of our grievances if not a full-fledged party or a movement. But in fact we have neither a solidarity-sustaining manifesto nor – as the increasingly obvious failure of the Midwest labor protests prove – any effective organization. Yes some of the most brutally fascist Republicans are facing recall elections, but as we have already seen proven in Wisconsin, who controls the government controls the outcome of the vote-count.
Meanwhile the reflexive anti-intellectuality in which every resident of Moron Nation is conditioned from birth guarantees we will never again be allowed to evolve a manifesto or an organization, each of which are quintessential cornerstones of rebellion and resistance.
As I said said here on 24 June 2010 (“The Stolen Prerequisites of Liberation: Why Change Is Impossible”), history proves winning revolutions whether peaceful or violent have four absolute requirements: ideology; organization; technological mastery; the backing of a major foreign power.
Every revolution good or bad that lacked even one of these elements – from the various rebellions in ancient Rome through the French Revolution of 1789 to the Fascist and Nazi uprisings in Europe and Pol Pot's anti-urban bloodbath in Cambodia – has been defeated; every revolution that had all four elements – ours, the Russian revolutions of 1917, the Nazis and Italian Fascists prior to World War II, Franco's, Gandhi's, Mao Ze Dong's, Ho Chi Mihn's, Fidel Castro's, Pol Pot's, Pinochet's – has won.
(Note the Nazis and Fascists were winning until their premature assertions of capitalist brutality became so gory, their original enablers, which include Wall Street, were forced to repudiate them. The same applies to China's support for Pol Pot. The fact these revolutions have all been overthrown by subsequent events is also true. Note too the deadly demise of the “good” revolutions proves – just as surely as the murderous duration of the “bad” ones – the historical reality of what the Catholics call “original sin”: a theological explanation for the psychologically undeniable malevolence of the human mind.)
Thus we are trapped in what is surely the ultimate manifestation of an ancient Chinese curse: “may you always live in interesting times.”
And our time is indeed unique in human history. We are oppressed by tyrannies the totality of which have no counterpart in our species' experience even as we have communications capabilities that are themselves unprecedented. But the former always outweigh the latter. Because we are the subjects of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class; total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us – the (formerly divine) powers of retribution given the tyrants by their technologies of surveillance and death will always trump the theoretical powers implicit in communications. Our Bradley Mannings will always be imprisoned and tortured to death if not murdered outright; our Martin Luther Kings will always be gunned down and the true assassins always hidden.
Our error – a genuinely suicidal failing – is that we refuse to accept just how absolutely dis-empowered we already are.
And until we truly dare open ourselves to that acceptance – which given the intellectual and psychological strictures characteristic of Moron Nation may well never happen – our powerlessness will merely worsen until the now-metaphorical slave-pens again become absolutely real: antebellum horrors maintained not by men on horseback but by cameras, death rays and other high-tech supremacy – capitalism turned fascism in fulfillment of the patriarchal mandate.
On the other hand, were we to collectively acknowledge what has been done to us, there is always the possibility we might evolve an adequate response.
But until we do, resistance – as under the jackboots of the (presumably) fictional Borg – is indeed futile.
*****
What then is “moral obligation”?
And what is “moral obligation” when all hitherto-proclaimed moral standards have been overthrown, when infinite greed is exalted as ultimate virtue and limitless selfishness proclaimed the greatest good?
More to the point, what is “moral obligation” in a time ruled by moral imbecility so aggressive it has reduced resistance to futility?
I think the sole pathway out of this conceptual cul-de-sac (and here I can speak only for myself) is to (again) discard our (deliberately) perverted language and replace “moral” with “human,” the term “human obligation” not just lifting the discussion beyond ever-contentious matters of creed and dogma but psycholinguistically relating it to the notion of humanitarianism as deep concern.
My personal sense of human obligation was defined in boyhood by the almost-paradoxical combination of my father's Marxism, my aunt Alecia DuRand's tutelage and artistic encouragement, my own resultant commitments to the visual arts and the Boy Scouts of America ethos of “leave the campsite in better shape than you found it.”
The fact all my efforts to improve the campsite have been totally nullified by the accursedness that plagues my life does not invalidate the definition. (Note that according to every mythology I have read, accursedness such as mine is the fate of anyone conceived as a sacrificial victim then rescued from the preordained death – apparently the very sequence of events that concluded on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945, when my father rescued me from my mother.)
Nor is the notion of improving the campsite – in this instance our nation and our world – invalidated by the fact I failed totally at my self-appointed task or by the corollary fact my accursedness has finally reached the point the associated anguish has become unbearable.
*****
Any a piece of art whether visual or textual or in other media is implicitly an expression of optimism, but such exaltation radically intensifies the torment when one's work is doomed by circumstances beyond one's control.
A prelude of optimism – especially this-is-well-within-my-grasp rational optimism – elevates our expectations and therefore deepens the awful plunge into despair inflicted by the destruction of the art itself (the fire) or the permanent loss of means to make art (the theft).
The resultant emotional see-saw has finally proven so agonizing I have no choice but to admit total defeat: the realization nothing I have ever done, nothing I will ever do, will ever be seen by enough people to even possibly make a difference, whether in my own (nearly finished) life or in anyone else's.
Bottom line, I can no longer deny that from 1945 on, my entire life is nothing more than an expression of futility.
Knowing now my efforts will always come to nothing, I am sorely tempted to sell my remaining cameras, all of which are 35mm, certainly adequate for snapshots or the sorts of happy-face society-page clichés one finds in today's newspapers but utterly useless for the infinitely more somber work I was doing and planned to do. I could even apply the money I would get for the sale of these machines – about 35 cents on the dollar – to paying off my dental bills more quickly.
I am also tempted to destroy what little remains of my extant work. That way I would not be haunted by might-have-beens every time I look at my apartment walls and I could damn well use the additional space in my file cabinets.
But I probably will neither sell nor destroy: though I will never again dare imagine fate might allow me to do anything of even minimal significance – as I said at the beginning I will never again be able to afford a reconditioned Rolleiflex (or any other professionally useful medium-format camera) and therefore cannot even finish current projects – it is also true that 35mm photography (which is otherwise definitively useless to me), will at least function as aesthetic masturbation – a final defense against visual decay analogous to the elderly man's or woman's last physical defense against terminal loss of sexuality.
Which brings us to the matter of moral obligation – human obligation – in response to futility.
It may be that we as a species need to admit something John Paul Sartre and Albert Camus strongly hint at in their recollections of life under Nazi occupation: that the ecstasy of momentary freedom we experience by resistance in the face of hopelessness is a powerful stimulant – perhaps the most powerful stimulant we will ever experience – and that such ecstasy is its own reward, sufficient unto itself whether our lives continue or not.
It is a concept I suspect my some of ancestors would have understood instantly, especially those from the misty domains of the Goddess Danu or the Great Forest of the Iroquois.
LB/18 April 2011
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On my way to Mass...I will pray for us...yikes! So very sorry to hear about your camera woes...that completely sucks...but you are are a very good writer actually, even though you hate it, so quit putting yourself down...:)
Posted by: Melinda Mohn | 04/22/2011 at 05:53 PM
Thank you, Melinda. I had forgotten this is the beginning of Easter weekend, a holiday I no longer celebrate. I appreciate any prayers sent my way -- though I believe there can no longer be any doubt god despises me. Either that or there is no god -- and I have the worst random bad luck anybody ever heard of -- which is actually the less frightening alternative. In any case, Happy Easter, sustained health, and thank you again: especially given the unforgettable magnitude of your musical talent, your encouragement is worth more than gold.
Posted by: Loren Bliss | 04/23/2011 at 04:59 PM