I’m back in Barnsley now…
Leaving Dufton, and back into Darton.
Back on the heel of the hills I have spent six months in.
Well, not quite.
This area of the North Pennines is its own place, not really comparable even to other parts of the so-called ‘backbone of England’.
I find it hard to document any place that hasn’t somewhat become part of me, a psycho-geographical chapter located in space. Lacking this, it is hard to do anything but document the picturesque, see everything like a postcard. Not that there is anything wrong in this, it’s just that I have no use for it.
This area of the Pennines has its own wind, and its own clouds that roll down their abrupt descent like an apocalyptic vision. I often forget that I have been working with landscapes for almost 20 years. I forget this under the heavy layers of narrative that I build into my drawings – and these landscapes have certainly fed into my most recent drawings. But this landscape still wasn’t my own to imprint myself into, like I can in the eclectic landscape of South/West Yorkshire and the ‘tops’ – their own cut of the Pennines.
Ventures are always made with an idea of life change, which are impossible not to put into mental pictures.
What I have always imagined is my future self avataristically disembodied from the feelings of self-dislike that worryingly even began to thwart my ability to be creative – the one thing I managed to wrestle from its clutches and transform into self-worth (the overpowering affect of the accumulation of schoolboy sniggers and naysayers joining hands with the calls to have your shit sorted as a middle aged man).
I didn’t change myself, but I am different now. So I guess that makes for something.
6 months on, I recalled the epiphany that made me move up to the North Pennines. I’d hit a total life snag. Maybe I ended up putting the necessary change on hold. But also, maybe it didn’t materialise through change but through repetition…?
There always has and still remains a drive to escape the determinism of that which is more powerful than I: ageing, the market, the state, societal pressure, all in a world where I must own what I become. But I’m 40 soon, and it is no longer viable to live life like the insect in the hot summer’s window, smashing itself against an invisible barrier, trying to ‘get out’ to the point of burn out.
I haven’t made any friends up there. And that’s probably my fault. Once again routine ‘saved me’ temporarily, becoming a reliable structure, out of which I made some of the best drawings I’ve made in years. But for what (?), If the overall experience of life remains stuck on a fading loop.
I have never known how to be.
I was still thinking of the south Pennines, their mournful vibrations between the towns of Industrial Yorkshire and Greater Manchester. These hills have grafted into my subconscious a sense of what escape looks like – the ‘just over there’ horizon. They were always there, from 15 to 39, at a side glance.
Because of this, my mere attempts to get to them, in ‘smart casual’ wear [in my early 20s I was always desperately clutching my Nokia in the hope a lass would text me saying she was out in town drinking, and this would instantly reverse the despair that hadn’t gotten me to walk up here] would allow me to meditate on the complexities of life.
The North Pennines, the highest part of the pennines, seemed to be encouraging me to keep on going, to leave the 21st century world behind completely. To ascend and descend, not to anywhere, but towards a state of removal.
And perhaps this troubled me…. to turn my back on the world, as it is.
But what can I say…?
About Gaza, as millions of voices raise social media mental noise to another point of fever pitch, whilst the institutional agents for Western symbolic order watch over ‘officialdom’ with knowing ignorance?
About the devastation of a very 21st century kind of austerity that has stealthily hacked to pieces the collective expectations of millions of people in this country??
Do I have the right to think that I should have something to say? Is it arrogant to think I can say anything? but at least to be there; to be present, to be a body in the crowd?
I still remain convinced landscapes can suggest a way out, even if only poetically…and can be conduits for constructive meditation, and not merely escapes into medicative simulations of a simpler time.
I just couldn’t find a way of doing it up in the north Pennines, I couldn’t find my reason to do so.
…not yet, at least.
For now, I will make sure I take to the ‘outback’ of the industrial north, the south pennines. And continue the work I began.
Now feels like the best time.
On this final walk around Dufton Pike, above the village I was staying in, I want to at least express how remarkably amazing it has been to stay in this place. Watched over by the ‘pikes’ – ancient volcanic conical formations which stand like guards, defences to the sedimentary rock of the pennines proper. Its symbolic potency is mega, but for the time being, it is not for me to imprint myself and my little struggles into.
John B Ledger 