I took these photos over 10 years ago, in inefficient pumps my feet could no longer tolerate – trying, in a repeated fashion, to see how far I could walk it to the horizon on ‘the tops’.
Today I’m up there, on the top, walking the very boggy old Yorkshire/Cheshire border, up to ‘Dead End Edge’ …
Today I became like I have become in many parts of my adult life: paralysed by my own presence – the horror of being living-mass; a face, a mask, a persona that must act and become in this world.
Feeling the draping of a well worn claustrophobia around my chest, I did what I attempted so many times in my adult life. I put on the albums that I once had to carry as cassettes, and attempted the ascent.
The songs that are now so embedded in the ascent are not worth disclosing. It would feel so odd to sing along to them in big crowds; they are moments that even close friends need not know.
All except the landscape…
There must be a universality of music in its relationship with landscape, in how we imprint the former into the latter through our need to nestle meaning into something that folds out before us. We all do this, yet we will all have different landscapes and different songs.
Every road-bend up here, every monolithic object, every distant land-block meeting the sky, all are imprinted with lyrics, songs that mark every step on this ascent.
…trying to get somewhere. A point of clarity that always felt like it lay just above, on higher ground.
When the overlap of fantasy and reality inevitably receded, I would accept that it wasn’t worth trying to push myself beyond the threshold on the horizon.
If, through my adult life, I have been saying anything without actually saying it directly it is “Help: I want to escape. How do I get out?”
I normally did my ascent to ‘the tops’ in the aftermath of day when I’d felt like I’d done something horrible or some event was too intense.
Maybe I’d had a messy and destructive night out, maybe I’d binged on food to the point that I had nowhere that I wanted my bloated body to be present in. Whatever the cause, I would walk and walk as if I could escape my own flesh, and out-run my societal skin upon these hills.
“take me to ‘the tops'”.
By and large this life-long pilgrimage was only in my head; the prospect of ‘escaping’ being a secondary reflex to all ‘down there’ stuff.
…and ‘the tops’ are always in the subconscious. They’re always there;
…their thick black line on the horizon, looking back down on us. They are always there to meditate on, wondering if one could ever choose to commit themselves into the portal they promise.
It’s only this year that I’ve truly understood what ‘the tops’ mean to me and especially my attempts to ascend to their horizon point.
It’s as if these boggy hills are thick with the stories, trials and tribulations that cannot speak themselves below, in the cities, with their dizzying mist of unending upgrades, and continual sticking plasters over yesterday’s doings.
It is as if these hills both bequeathed these cities, and now stand somber, with too many memories that have nowhere else to be heard.
It sometimes seems that it is only in a familiar vastness that we can speak to ourselves and tell ourselves our true stories, devoid of judgement.
I love these hills because they let me do.
I can access them here, and better understand the fundamentals of motives – better understand myself, in a way that enables me to think about what I should do next.
John B Ledger 