Remnant of an abandoned commune in rural Washington state. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.
*
Sorry I dropped out of sight: first there was the numbing despair of recognizing Obama truly is Barack the Betrayer, then there was an unforeseen frenzy including two all-nighters to meet a 24 May deadline, finally four days of recovery mandated by old age.
The deadline problem was my fault, a classic example of the folly of assumption: Fairhaven College – of which I'm involuntarily a 1976 alumnus (long story for another time) – wanted five submissions for a special edition of its lit mag to celebrate the school's 40th anniversary.
Without much thought I planned to send five photographs – the social documentary stuff I know I do well enough for inclusion in such a self-consciously artistic medium. Nobody of influence in this ever-more submissively fascist nation gives a damn about the poor anymore – least of all the academic bourgeoisie – but if nothing else such work goads the local Ansel Adams zealots to heights of fury by its fuck-you retort to their morally imbecilic exclusion of the human condition from their Zone System cult of usable light.
But then when I queried the lit mag's editor for submission guidelines (jpeg vs. tif, pixel count etc.), I was told to my horror the magazine no longer has the capabilities to print photography at all – that it was text or nothing.
This created two immediate sets of problems: technical and psychological.
Though I have no doubts about my abilities as a visual artist – I was a painter before I was a photographer and have a strong (albeit pre-computer) design and graphics background too, and though my photographic ability was repeatedly confirmed by gallery shows and publication credits – I have always felt myself something of an impostor as a writer. Never mind half my lifetime income is from writing and editing: photography is my passion -- "choreography of light sculpted in alchemical silver" – while writing is never more than an intellectual exercise, personally compelling, yes, often even an obsession, but always tainted at its core by the fact I'm dyslexic, and that (just as photography for me is often a wild and Zenlike sled-ride on the Tao, at its very best a face-to-face encounter with the Muse), so is writing (because of its implicit battle against dyslexia) ultimately never more than a war against myself.
As a result the whole “lit mag” concept with its oppressive hierarchy of values – “fine” art versus “commercial” art; “literary excellence” versus “mere journalism” – became again as hugely intimidating as it had been in my long-ago undergraduate years.
Plus atop this was as miserable a technological clusterfuck as I have ever experienced: the struggle to transform hyperlinks into footnotes without locking the result into formats unsuitable for transmission as manuscript: the necessary trial-and-error (which never really yielded the results I wanted) combining with other computer problems to burn up at least 60 of the approximately 80 hours eaten by this project.
The resultant rage of frustration lingers yet as elevated blood pressure, and once again I am reminded why the Ruling Class was so cottonmouth-quick to impose computers on journalism: computers reduced the intricate crafts of typographers, lithographers and stereotypers to the mind-numbing repetitiveness of minimum-wage clerical tasks, flung thousands of workers into permanent joblessness and burdened us – editors, reporters and photographers – with its unspeakable insurance-office tedium.
This was probably the greatest and most oppressive forcible workload increase in U.S. employment history – you either accepted it or got fired – and it was imposed without a penny's raise in editorial pay: its result not just the reduction of journalism to its present-day meaninglessness but a genuinely obscene boost in profits to the pigs who own the papers.
Here of course is the reason I so utterly despise computers and the clerical duties they inflict on writers – I am not a goddamn stenographer or clerk-typist nor do I have even a trace of the mandatory occupational submissiveness – and the fact I have to spend at least two hours wrestling with word-processing minutiae for every one hour of genuinely productive work never ceases to infuriate me. Nor is this 2:1 ratio even slightly exaggerated: I typically spend four to six hours writing my blog essays, then twice that time fighting the technology to post via my server: no doubt my neighbors have radically improved their vocabularies of vulgarity merely by listening to me bellow at my computer monitor.
So went most of last week, the entire weekend and all of this week through Tuesday morning.
But now I'm finally finished: four excerpts from Outside Agitator's Notebook revised into the lit-mag format plus something entitled “Doorways,” a condensation of experiences from several places into a text that evolved from a long piece of journalism, the result exhibited here if only to prove that even at age 70 one can encounter new dimensions of the creative process – or perhaps new dementia to display one's utter foolishness – a possibility I cannot ever dismiss because I know as surely as nightfall that once we get into the lit-realm I am as hopelessly lost as London's doomed protagonist in “To Build a Fire.”
*****
The original beginning of “Doorways” in its lit-mag variant is essential for context and so I have included it here:
Abandoned farms always seem like cries of sadness arising from the chaos of their overgrown landscapes, most no doubt harboring ghosts and nearly all inviting photographic exploration, but none that I ever visited were more haunted by palpable despair than the remnants of rural communes that had been emptied in such terror the communards had forsaken all their possessions – undeniable testimony to the relentless malevolence of the Christian vigilantes who played such a huge but plausibly deniable and therefore subsequently concealed part in the war against the Counterculture.
Most of those monuments to Ruling Class savagery are gone now, mercifully reclaimed by nature or buried as if in shame beneath sprawling development, but for maybe a decade after the suppression of the Back to the Land Movement, which was mostly dead by 1973 (though a few die-hard communes would linger into the very early '80s), I'd occasionally find such places in the back country and whenever possible I'd not only photograph them but speak my impressions into a tape recorder as I worked.
As the now forever lost book “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” took on its final form c. 1978-1982, these photographs and impressions – of maybe a dozen abandoned communes in all – appropriately became the core of its last chapter. Though “Dancer” was destroyed in the 1983 fire – likewise all its notes and tapes and nearly all its photography – a few small portions of this work survived in the portfolio and papers that had accompanied me back to Manhattan earlier that fateful year.
Hence the following text – which relates to the above photograph only by topical association – words first set to paper after the rural commune of which I was a part fended off the vigilantes by armed resistance in 1970, the text abandoned in 1983 after the fire, taken up again in 1985 with several changes of form including a couple of foolhardy attempts at making poetry with words instead of alchemical silver, then once more abandoned in despair that same year, now compulsively resurrected (and – dare I say it? – perhaps therefore Muse-driven) into a kind of free-form riff to accompany a quartet of pocket-camera images (Kodak Gold 400 exposed in the Olympus RC that served me so long so well): a belated visual obituary for a commune not so isolated it escaped the vigilantes but remote enough I did not happen on its ruins until 1992 – by which time I myself had been ruined by Ruling Class malice.
*****
If I were to pick the detail that convinced me to photograph the abandoned farmhouse, I would have to say it was the doorway – its gaping darkness a rectilinear equivalent of Edvard Munch's Scream.
For years I felt drawn to the old place – I drove past it whenever I went north or south on the two-lane blacktop – but for most of the decade I resisted its summons. And now in the bare-branched visibility of late autumn 1978 I saw how little time it had left: the cedar-shake roof half blown away by last January's blizzard and further deconstructed by April's storms, too many of its rafters already broken, the walls striving ever more desperately to keep their shape, the glassless windows like eyes emptied by disaster – a perfect tableau of terminal urgency, as if before yielding to entropy the late Victorian dwelling demanded one last witness to its endurance.
I braked, reversed, turned off the blacktop onto the fading trace of the farm's road, traveled perhaps 50 yards in first gear before the overgrown ruts were blocked by brash young alder; I parked, dismounted, shrugged into a shoulder-bag containing camera and tape recorder, forced my way through tangled saplings maybe another 200 yards until the surrounding forest – alder stubbornly retaining its dead green leaves, thinning foliage of big leaf maple still bright yellow against the seasonal somberness of mixed conifers – all gave way to unkempt fields that had obviously once been substantial gardens, their dark-earthed outlines now vaguely emergent beneath frost-withered jungles of weeds.
Here the road became an easy walk.
About 75 yards closer to the house it crossed a creek that murmured through a culvert below a ruined dam; I vaguely remembered I had glimpsed a pond here when I had driven past years before but now behind the dam's broken chunks of concrete the clear water merely slowed to shallow eddies brightened by a scattered fleet of golden leaves.
The house faced the creek – and with the pond full and the gardens under cultivation, the view from its porch and windows would have been truly comforting – but the porch had collapsed, and the rest of the structure was in far worse condition than I had seen from the highway. Long without paint, the exposed wood had weathered bone gray, and now in the viewfinder of my camera the combination of door and windows and color reminded me of skulls at backwoods crime scenes and left me wondering what dreadful memories it might contain.
But I am journalist enough I soon chose to find out; I stepped up over the collapsed porch and through the doorway and onto a drunken floor littered with debris of sudden and terrified abandonment, relics that quickly identified the place as having been a commune: a shattered Buddha, a cast-off sandal, a faded black slip with an East Coast label, a mouldering sodden pile of books torn from their shelves – The Whole Earth Catalog shredded dead center by a close-range shotgun blast, Kahlil Gibran ripped apart at the spine – the shelves violently axe-marked, the window frames likewise, the destruction all the more grotesque in the happy-face sunlight through the devastated roof.
Most of the rest of the day I explored the house and grounds, piecing together its history from documents I found in a rusted tin box. It was a 40-acre farm abandoned in 1918 – probably the sons and heirs killed in World War I – and it had lain fallow until the communards bought it for back taxes in 1968.
They built A-frame cabins to live in while they resurrected the land's agricultural capabilities and remodeled the house into their communal hall – meeting room, kitchen, library and office – a solarium of dreams to house their generational innocence.
But the vigilantes reduced it all to desolation, and so it remained ever since, every year slumping further into midden. To the north the ruined orchard shed prematurely rotten fruit, its grass composted thick by seasons of unharvested pears and apples, its centerpiece the barely visible shards of a sledgehammered Venus and the round pedestal upon which it had stood, an impromptu altar reduced to the quiet tragedy of classical rubble: white marble amidst wild green foliage. To the east was an antique well, its circular stone base now naked to the sky, a glimmer of bones in its depths declaring its water hopelessly polluted. To the south a riot of nettles all but hid the ashes of the A-frames. To the west was the dwindling road, the shrunken creek, the lost gardens, the October sun now sinking toward the wooded ridge on the far side of the highway.
And then suddenly I had no more film or tape. I glanced at my watch; I had been there nearly six hours. It was time to leave.
I crossed the creek, its murmur a lamentation.
I walked past the squandered gardens, their weed-brown hues a cloak of morning.
I paused at the edge of the forest intending to turn around for a last look but instead was somehow prompted to glance down at the road beneath my feet. I saw a glimmer of silver, stooped to investigate, plucked from half-burial in the overgrown rut a woman's pierced-ear earring: a new moon, its crescent big as the diameter of a half-dollar and wrought in sterling, one of the many ancient symbols of the goddess instinctively resurrected by the women of the commune era, typically worn without conscious knowledge of its meaning.
I polished the earring with spit-moistened lens tissue; I cupped the earring in my right hand; I wondered who had worn it and how it had been lost and then like a pilgrim suddenly blessed by the unexpected gift of a relic from a patron saint, I carefully stashed it in an empty film can and secured the can in a buttoned compartment of my shoulder bag.
Finally, as the light faded, I did turn back toward the house.
Amazingly my mind's eye saw the gardens in summer lushness, sunbrowned men and women working shirtless, weeding, hoeing corn, mulching tomatoes; I saw midnight rituals of gratitude, women dancing naked beneath the garden moon, lifting their arms and swirling their hair in sure knowledge their ancient choreography was our last modern exit to salvation;
Memory now jolted me with the Christian reader-board I had seen years ago in a nearby small town on its bible-thump church: "Organic Is Satanic" and "Environmental Means Of The Devil" and of course the nationally ubiquituous “God Hates Hippies”; and then as if I were bearing witness to a history so tragic the very land did not wish to remember, it seemed I saw headlights in convoy; heard loud engines, doors slamming, shouts; saw killer eyes behind slitted pillowcases, firearm muzzles big as sewer pipes; heard eardrum bursts of gunfire; saw bright gushing reds of slaughtered dogs and goats and chickens; heard the splash of carcasses flung down the well; smelled the toxic smoke of arson; heard the whimpers of trembling refugees huddled under blankets.
Among the victims is a smudge-faced young woman. Her crescent-moon earrings reflect the dull red of burning dreams. Her eyes are windows emptied by disaster her mouth is that gaping doorway her tear-streaked face is Edvard Munch's Scream she is the Goddess as addressed by Tim Buckley in “Phantasmagoria in Two” his best work ever: “If you tell me of all the pain you've had I'll never smile again.”
She cries aloud in darkness:
“O do not let our love be lost. O please...”
Yes I answer yes I will be your witness yes until this land is healed of its anguish yes until the time be ours to seize again yes. Your witness. Yes.
LB/28 May 2010 ("Doorways" revised 29 December 2011)
(-30-)
"Doorways" is a lovely prose opening into the lost poetry of America's time on earth, Loren. This is the kind of work Rebecca
Solnit also does, & would enjoy I'm sure. Faulkner's The Bear from
from Go Down, Moses, or the long Ikey & the Cow passage from The
Hamlet, these are my favorite Faulkner, & I wonder what he would
say or write if he saw our US history since the 60s. Perhaps he
would be silent, since he knew the South could only redeem its crimes
by dying -- & clearly this has spread to the entire nation, all its
blood & oil-drenched saga. Thanks for returning to the places where
some tried to change the vector away from dumb disaster.
Posted by: Barbara Mor | 14 June 2010 at 04:48 PM