Another heavy night, waking up cringing at the ritual, the darkest of my albums on my last played. Regrettable messages sent.
Yet somehow, despite an aching injury keeping me awake, I woke up feeling alright.
The inner monologue, the mode I go into as I react to the world and the state of affairs I must live through.
It is momentarily as if I have been cured of it. That private civil war – the noise has gone.
And I don’t know why.
Yet, I imagine the mind must have to look after itself from time to time, and some survival instinct must say “we can’t feel like that again, at least not today”.
It is a momentary experience of freedom, that will inevitably dissolve away when I listen to one too many news stories, when I think about my future prospects for 1 second longer than I should in order to maintain this experience, this experience of ‘lightness’.
I’m reminded of myself in younger years; buffeted by my student loan, and experiencing the future in front of me as something I can warmly explore, as opposed to one of violent contraction towards the zero sum of mortality.
I used to wake up, write songs, record songs, before I’d even clean my teeth or put my socks on. Excited at the new things I’d produced.
But I’m here now, in a car park, clutching grey hairs from my sides, desperate for the next ‘thing’, the next project, the next affirmation of the infinity of youth.
But, it’s been a deeply unstable path, propped up by illusion for some years now. And one day I have to face what I have been trying to avoid for most of my 30s: that I failed.
Perhaps there would be a liberation if I could finally own failure. I’m fed up of the teeth grinding of the denial, that’s for sure.
Of course failure is subjective. But this subjectivity is cupped by the dual forces of societal expectations and the ageing of the body. And, as I limp around my job tasks, totally at sea in the world I’m supposed to belong to (the artistic world), failure does indeed appear to be objective.
I’ve willed for its ruination for years. The deep deep displeasure in upholding this artistic selfhood, has spread into the actual act of making, diseasing the only thing I understand, the only articulation of existing I know.
I hold back from ruining it, because I’m scared of this nothingness that would envelope all impulse to act thereon after.
Yet, I know now, that it has to be ruined, I have to fail, I have to admit my failure, in order to move on.
But nobody can predict how they will fail/fall.
John B Ledger 