Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1967, 2010.
In belated mourning for Cicely Nichols, who died of cancer two years ago tomorrow, 5 April 2008, and in compensation for my ongoing and increasingly unpredictable absences from this space, I offer the above photograph.
I made it in the late spring of 1967 as Cicely and I were crossing a Lower East Side pedestrian overpass that leads to the walkway along the East River. In those days I always carried one camera even if I wasn't officially working -- two if I thought an off-duty occasion especially promising -- typically a IIIG Leica or a VT Canon with a 35mm f/2 screw-mount Summicron and a Pentax H1A mounted with a 135mm f/2.8 Spiratone, which for the mid-'60s was an unusually sharp and fast short telephoto. It was the latter combination that recorded the bicyclist. The film is Tri-X; the grain tells me I exposed it at 1200 ASA and processed it in Diafine.
The picture is another of the very few that, by one happenstance or another, survived the devastation of the 1983 fire. The original was an early portfolio piece, printed on the now-deservedly legendary DuPont Varilure, not just a good stock image of a bicyclist but especially meaningful to me for two reasons: the memento of an intense conversation with Cicely – writer, editor and above all friend – and the product of one of those blessedly leisurely Sunday afternoon walks that so characterized life in Manhattan during the 1960s, when the City was – precisely as James Baldwin had named it – Another Country.
Cicely was a pivotal influence in my development as an artist. Her encouragement c. 1966-1967 played a substantial role in fostering my recognition that while writing is a compelling intellectual exercise, photography is my passion – the medium of self-expression to which all my other endeavors are properly subservient.
My images, she said, captured "the overwhelming ambiguousness of human experience" more truthfully -- and more poignantly -- than any other such work she had ever seen.
Thus it was entirely appropriate that 17 years later she would offer to shepherd the pictures and text of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” into mainstream publication.
So it was we met on 1 September 1983 in the Lion's Head – where else? – for drinks, dinner and discussion to formalize our collaboration. I remember we greeted one another that evening with special pleasure – Cicely always said an across-the-table, deep-in-conversation photo I made of her at one of Manhattan's sidewalk cafes in 1967 was her best most-telling portrait ever – and I approached our meeting in 1983 with the strong sense my life was finally achieving fruition, that “Dancer” (which had evolved from a 1959 academic paper into several thousand rolls of film, several hundred prints and perhaps 80,000 words of manuscript) was to be my passport to the long-sought realm of self-employment as a journalist who did sociologically relevant books of photographs and text.
I remember too I glanced at my watch as Cicely and I walked into the Lion's Head dining room. I try to be punctual about appointments, and as usual I was right on schedule; it was exactly 7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
Eerily and with an undeniable message of infinite malevolence that becomes ever more crushing with the passage of time, three thousand miles westward on the same day and at precisely the same instant – 7:30 p.m. EDT is 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time – someone or some thing ignited the fire, the moment recorded by the melted clock at its point of combustion, that turned “Dancer” to smoke and ash, destroyed all my other work whether visual or verbal and – as I have come to acknowledge via the brutal honesty of advancing age – stripped me of my identity, murdered my soul and spirit and obliterated from my life any significance (or potential of significance) beyond the reptilian egotism of survival.
Precisely because of that loss, I am deservedly forgotten – the reason I have 30 readers not 300,000 -- and when I am dead it will be as if I never lived at all.
Which is relevant here because it was post-fire depression that within a year had turned me away from Cicely's friendship, just as it prompted me to leave the City in 1986: Manhattan is for those with something to offer the world, and the fire took all that away from me – wiped out everything worthwhile I had ever done, abolished any possibility I might somehow replace it with offerings of comparable value or even of any value at all.
Forever.
By contrast, Cicely's offerings are so great and valuable and true, no hostile fate could ever force their suppression or abandonment, which is why – as poverty and declining health gradually taint me with ever intensifying bitterness – I am increasing grateful for my memories of Cicely's friendship and my recollection of that warm, slightly muggy April afternoon we went walking by the East River and I made this picture.
Thinking back to that moment I recognize now I merely operated the camera: the credit line should rightfully be Cicely's.
***
The unpredictability of my absence here has three causes:
Two are medical. The first is ongoing struggle – already nearly three weeks in duration – with an exceptionally nasty low-grade virus that leaves me physically exhausted and so intellectually unfocused even after 10 or 12 hours of sleep per day, any serious writing is an ordeal. The second is an unrelated affliction of undetermined severity that requires immediate attention; given the required medical appointments and the mental paralysis imposed by the associated anxieties, it will probably rob me of at least another seven days of the properly sharp-edged consciousness from which I do my best work.
The third cause of my absence is the delay thus imposed on an essay I had hoped to have posted here as early as week-before-last. It is an admittedly perplexed and therefore somewhat crow-eating analysis of the paradoxical behavior of President Barack Obama.
Indeed I had hoped it would be my definitive word on the subject, a hypothesis that – once stated – would require nothing more than the elaboration of unfolding events.
***
I had also intended to post a commentary on the Feast of St. Patrick, which I daresay few modern-day celebrants understand.
For those of us who are Celts or whose hearts pump some fraction of Celtic blood – my family name is English but most of my ancestors are Scots and I have Mohawk and perhaps Ojibway lineage as well – St. Patrick's marks the destruction of our ancient pagan heritage: the extermination of the last remnants of the civilization that built Stonehenge, a society that had it not been genocidally destroyed would be every bit as old as the culture boasted of by China.
St. Patrick's should therefore be a day not of drunken celebration but of the deepest and most contemplative mourning.
The event St. Patrick's commemorates is the triumph of an invading desert-god over the mother-goddess, of Yehveh Wasteland-Maker over Danu Who Birthed Us All: Yehveh savaging Danu until she flees battered and bleeding into the oblivion of women's shelters -- she whose form is not imagery on stained glass but mist and moonlight and the heaven of stars; whose voice is not hymns but the haunting murmur of troutly water; whose music is not vacuous rectilinear predictability but the spiral choreography of wind-chimes and breeze-fingered harps, the sitar-like resonance of the rising Full Moon, the hiss and crackle of Aurora Borealis, the modal chords of storm-tuned forests...
What St. Patrick's commemorates is the day an intruding step-father beat our Mother into submission.
That is why I refuse to celebrate it. Even its shamrock is stolen: originally it was a symbol of the Triune Goddess – Maiden, Mother, Crone.
Like Yeats' Oisin, “I will...dwell in the house of the Fenians...be they in flames or at feast.”
***
As to the repeatedly delayed Obama essay, I have been thinking about it for some time: is he truly Barack the Betrayer, as I have so often called him? Is he instead a man trapped – like some protagonist in Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama – in circumstances too powerful to master?
What of this is truth, what of it is mere perception (whether induced or coincidental), and how might we identify each of these qualities?
Of equal importance, is there any sure-fire test by which we might accurately distinguish between legitimate political criticism and the disguised but resurgent venom of Ku Klux Kapitalism?
In actuality I began asking myself these questions long before Obama was elected president.
Eventually my subconscious refined the topic enough I began to wake up mornings thinking about it – a condition that for me is always the precursor to effective writing.
I started making notes, collecting references.
And then fate, karma, divine will or randomness – qualities that however named have proven relentlessly, even sadistically hostile throughout all the 70 years of my life – yanked away the metaphorical crutches of intellectual energy that enable me to temporarily escape, often via keyboard and occasionally even via camera, the ever-more-painful prison of physical disability in which I am condemned to live out the remainder of my life.
In truth I have not had a day without pain – nagging, demoralizing, constant pain – since the autumn of 2003.
And yes work truly is the best anesthesia I know – which means that when I can't work, I can't distance myself from the worsening pangs of the back injuries inflicted on me in late 1978 by a judicially protected, habitually drunken (and therefore unforgivable malicious) driver – wounds long ago deteriorated into scoliosis and now many times intensified by osteoarthritis.
I curse this man daily: may he suffer 13 lifetimes of the misery with which he wantonly accursed my life.
Meanwhile a consulting nurse at Group Health – the superb medical-care cooperative I joined in 1972 – says my battle with this damn energy-draining virus is typical: she says that though the virus characteristically lacks a high fever, it is otherwise symptomatically as vicious as the flu, and at least as long-lasting.
And now, just as it seemed I was beginning to recover, there's another medical problem, not debilitating – at least not yet – but every bit as time-stealing as the virus was.
Which again consigns my Obama essay to the Cosmic Garbage of Words Unwritten.
As it says on the bumper-sticker: “Old Age Is Not For The Faint Of Heart.”
LB/4 April 2010
(-30-)
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