I’ve never much gone into WHY I use this mask for spoken word pieces.
Well, in the most simplistic way, once I put on this mask, I now feel comfortable speaking what I speak. I escape a lot of shitty feelings about my facial expressions; I was made aware at a young age that I have a face that looks like it deserves unwanted comments (became a self fulfilling prophecy, as I learned to show my paranoia in public space). Kind of helps me deal with shit I was dealing with pre-pandemic, until I got subsumed in all that self-hate wank again (an inability to sort things out that a neoliberalist self-helpism finds deplorable, in an almost Nazi-style vision of self actualisation within the Real).
In this sense a mask helps me exorcise my own hell, in its intersection with larger shit going off, in a way that is one step removed from me, and my face.
It’s a messy inner monologue channeling the contemporary social media wars of judgement which is haunted by two specific horrors that I felt define England; the plague doctor mask that is associated with perhaps an era where England made a significant break with it’s medieval past; the 17th century, the civil war, the great plague, and great fire of London. These traumatic breaks were coupled with the chancellor’s ‘budget box’; a symbol of the silent horror of what Mark Fisher called ‘capitalist realism’, an ongoing ‘reality management’ by the powers that be, to convince us that capitalist drudgery/misery is everlasting.
But the mask isn’t just about all that, that’s just what it helps dissipate. What I speak feels specific to being behind the mask. I feel like it is an avatar for allowing two things that to coexist, and be performative: my own battles with self hatred/my inner monologue, with the collective psyche of 21st century post-Brexit, ‘capitalist realist’ Britain.
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John B Ledger 