I did not know how to be a body down there in the towns. I didn’t know how to be flesh.
In my younger adult years my guts were saying “take me to the moors, take me to the moors”. It was compulsive thought. Perhaps it was put in my head by words of the ‘The Smiths’. Although I find it more likely that the Smiths were also not the owners of these words, and were but carriers.
It’s a gut instinct impulse for all of those for whom these moors have formed a life-long backdrop.
I think of the moors very much in relation to my raw inability to be a body.
A friend recently spoke of the sheer slicing power of the word ‘Anorexia’, and how he believed it is really, in some way, the same word as ‘suicide’.
I think he is right, I believe they operate in the same realm; when a body feels like it is being edged out of life, as if the sky was solid walls encroaching.
I have always had a fantastical picture of the moorland horizon to the west of my town. I see it as a portal to somewhere beyond the lived experience.
It’s barrenness allows one to reach a space that isn’t dead but remains removed from that of the living.
It is a space where the unbearable feelings produced from having to be a body down there no longer applied.
“They cannot reach me here…”
Cynthia Cruz in her beautiful and personal book ‘The Melancholy of Class’ speaks about Anorexia in terms of existing a ‘living death’.
If suicide is the act of removing yourself completely, obliterating your body presence, to perform the act of living death is to remove your body from life whilst still being technically alive – removing it from its physical and erotic social role in a world where the sufferer just cannot emotionally comprehend existing.
Anorexia isn’t really about food, no more than food is fuel for the body in a body that still doesn’t know how to occupy physical and social space without feeling disgust and dread.
This is, of course, no kind of direct oppression, from any specific agent: yet the reaction is physical.
We are the lumps of clay forced to make ourselves free.
I came of age in a culture of different expectations and horizons than those of previous generations around these parts.
I have long called this world a world cast under a ‘cult of self-belief’, or a ‘cult of constant self-improvement’.
The Factories were ruins, the mines were being blown up, and new shiny retail parks with the promise of an American-style paradise were filling the gaps they left.
The old world, where society made lumps of clay of us, to be factory workers, cannon fodder, and to upkeep domestic drudgery, was melting away.
This was the future, where we, the clay, had to mould ourselves.
…to be whatever we wanted to be.
The only choice we lacked was the freedom not to choose. We had to become ourselves.
I didn’t know how to become, and didn’t know how to go forth and become my own self-made self, who could be a body in this kind of world
I can tack explanations and excuses to this – that I’d lost all my self-worth due to assuming a social-role of class whipping boy -but all I know is that I saw no future in which I could thrive, no future where I wouldn’t feel humiliated and useless.
The biggest thing I feared was the continuation of school life into adulthood as a lowly endgame.
So I fell into my head. With a body that I had no place for, but felt weirdly ashamed of. Exercise and food limitation was a way of keeping it in check, and keeping it inoffensive.
I tried to remain forever young until I found a body which was granted access through the gates.
Pathetic, perhaps, but I’ve been here since.
Early adulthood is accompanied by a greater pressure to act, as the future is no longer coming, it is the present.
It is around this time, that I literally looked sideways, westwards, to see these hills as an escape.
I’ve been coming here again recently. Because I’ve kind of hit a dead end, admittedly perhaps the same dead end as 20 years before. But with the knowledge that I need to get past it.
I’ve spent a lifetime not knowing how to be a body. I’ve watched everyone around me make a life for themselves, and I have felt like I’m stuck behind glass looking at it, banging at it, louder and louder.
I’ve spent a lifetime making increasingly louder and louder artistic statements, screaming at the capitalist constellation all of us have exist within, kind of as a last resort to feeling bereft on any tools to move forward in my own life.
People try to help. “Just do something different”, they say. But there’s something in the way, which they cannot see no matter how loudly I try to point it out.
During previous attempts to overcome this, I have depended on generating some optimism about the goal in question through an idea of myself in a new body…
That next big event, next exhibition, that move to a new place where I finally fit into that work/life in an urban community. All imaginings conjure footage in my head, where I see my body in those spaces, finally embodied by self-acceptance.
But I’m so tired of trying to upkeep ridiculous tricks. I’m still here, still this rigid teenager. It’s humiliating to write, and I’m too old for any of this anymore.
I can think differently up here. It kills the increasingly painful commands to manifest.
Because this is a land that is neither dead nor that of the living, I shed that pressure to shield myself in harmless but mandatory conversations about the passions and joys possessed by our living flesh..
But there’s a life out there for me, somewhere, that does exist, and isn’t through a portal to another world.
John B Ledger 