On the first day of trying to make the ascent I didn’t even get out of the car. But there was enough time to stare out the window at the towering blackened slopes of Longdendale. to somehow see my life reflected.
A story lyrically chaptered by this ascent – through the leafy foothills, the barren flats and the finally the dark tops.
Something within me has become accustomed to seeing kinship in its somber beauty.
Through these vast monochrome blocks of landscape I have the freedom to feel the appropriate emotions to deal with the colourless smudging of low-level anxiety that has blotted by adult life.
It’s the ability to grieve for personal lost futures. To love for what hasn’t been, yet still feels attainable, even if it is factually ‘no more’.
My attempt at the ascent the next day gets further than ever before. In fact I finally reach the summit of the grey/blue line on that horizon that hangs over us.
This isn’t solely a grieving space, but also a space I can escape the ridiculousness of my romanticism for the world. For, up here it is no longer ridiculous , it is no longer getting triggered into bitterness by all the many things that cancel it out. Up here, I look down, and I wish I and it could open up.
Perhaps this is why the ascent always brought anticipation, on catatonic downers that were emotions craving to be released.
Despite their relatively small scale, their expanse suggests I am climbing up to a portal, through which I will find a way that has thus far been blotted out of the remits of what is possible ‘down there’.
This may originate from their lunar-like quality. It often feels like an extraterrestrial landscape; the Woodhead Pass (cars reflecting the sunlight back from the distance) assuming the form of some astral runway, a symbolic passage out of this place.
In order to understand a landscape, feel it and not just see it, you need to be kind of swallowed into it – maybe even lost. The same applies for urban space, albeit in a different way. The place needs to have left a mark, maybe indelible, or at least to the extent that it will bleed into your subconcious.
I have spent so much of the last 15 years in aimless days, roaming street after street of nearby cities. I assumed that somewhere hidden in these urban clots was the gateway to the body-presence I so desperately wanted.
Being ‘in the city’ began to get very heavy. And any observant passer fuelled by an ego agenda could expose my vulnerable misery to a space which shows no empathy to the homeless, never-mind more fortunate lost souls.
My need to be air-lifted out of a life path stuck in ‘no man’s land’ had become so increasingly desperate, that the inevitable unfulfilment became deeply unpleasant.
I’m no longer 24 and it is no longer 2008. The atmosphere has changed so much it’s hard not to feel washed up on a strange planet. Strange, because it looks like home, yet isn’t. I am so far from being home.
I have masked how stranded, how lost in an unrecognisable time I have become.
I have lost the ability to adapt to our ever-morphing reality frame.
I don’t know what else I can do or say, without falling into the habit of pretending impotent cliches meant something and I could find meaning from using them.
Maybe I have run out of time…
Or maybe I just need a different kind of time?
The present experience of time flow is at best disorientating, and at worst, emotionally exhausting to the point of being traumatic.
It’s our duty as children of a machine age, to keep up-to-date, as if our lives depended on it – and it often does.
‘The Machine’ must always up its tempo, that is how it survives; by overseeing a climate of competition, from land colonisation, competition for market dominance, to mental colonisation (which perhaps defines what we’re currently in).
I believe I caught the tail end of a very 20th century experience of time, of things getting better and faster in a linear direction. It’s hard to pinpoint when that experience vanished, but since the collective temporal uprooting caused by the pandemic, so many of us simply cannot reapply ourselves to the chaotic rhythms dominating contemporary life.
This feels more like a ‘Whirlpool acceleration’ where things are are still getting faster and faster, and we all still look forward, but as if outwards from a vortex. The tempo of contemporary life is no longer to successive (and recognisable) markers in a rhythm, but instead sucks us into a pulped procession of moments.
So many of us can no longer recover from one burn out to the next.
But I don’t want this to be an expression of hopelessness. Largely because I’m now at a point where I can no longer afford to be hopeless. Although I may be out of time ‘down there’, I need to now rehabilitate into a totally different frame.
My 30s have been an unpleasant space. If I have the choice not to remain here, then it would be foolish not to take that choice.
I know there is a lot of people who don’t have that choice.
My most honest assessment of my situation brings deep discomfort to even articulate. Never having a relationship, or children, or my own place for long enough for it to genuinely feel like my own place. I’ve tried things in the past, struggled to cope when things got tricky, but I’ve always had a family home to fall back on.
…and one day I will see this with gratitude, not the heavy shame that has dominated my 30s.
Shame is nothing but debilitating, and it erodes aspects of your self worth, even the sense that you have human rights.
“For ‘who am I to speak up for anything?” the inner story would go, “when I have experienced so little of what makes adult life tricky? I’m not even a real person”.
I could beat myself up about turning away from the world, but right now, I just want a short space dwell in the exterior, the ‘up there’ where, despite the fact it’s not really a natural environment, it still holds its own time(s) – carboniferous, ice age, all meeting and eroding into one, but over millions of years.
There may be fear, in any remote space, but it doesn’t make for anxiety – only the time we humans make between us does that.
I feel like this is where I must do the work I need to do on myself…
…and, despite last chance climate warnings, and a seismic transferal of wealth to the richest, it is something I cannot feel guilt for. For there is now a least one shoot of budding optimism, which is something I haven’t been able to hold onto for some years.
John B Ledger 