Arc

I’m glad to be back up here. I know the sentiment, and thus there need be no doubt over my convictions.

I’m here as a stalker of exits; peering into this morose land, and trying to unveil and unravel the knots in our Geist. Knots in which we are all tied, condemned to be both spectator and participant to the violence and farcical vices that sculpt fools out of our future selves. The feverishness that leads us to vomit out our all-too-human inhumanity, all over our friends; those our addictions make us take for granted. Laced with issues all wishing to hatch themselves and pursue their demented ends.

Like you (I’m sure) I want to be free of this world. This world in which we all wearily meme out the knowingness that we already all know the sorry script. A sorry script that we must nonetheless play the part in, in which there is no exit, where there is no part of no part.

This morning I felt ill from being spectator and participant. I’ve always felt that somebody is after me. A amorphous, shapeshifting ‘somebody’ who nonetheless is always empowered to condemn as judge and juror what I feel condemned to do.

I am running away from a death drive that looks for an exit from its role as perpetrator and perpetrated, in ways so regrettable to my sober self, who must play his part come what may, in ways that have long since mutated from the primal fear that sought escape through these hills, 22 years back.

This blog is dedicated to two records. I called it Arc, after the 2013 album by Everything Everything.

I come here today with it in my lungs, heavy but yet with the deepest desire to rise and ascend. From a place where is no yet safety from motives that seek to ruin me in the crucible of a world caught in a traumatised whirlpool of its histories.

From a self in perpetual flight.

The day the planes hit the twin towers was the day I became an artist.

The day the illusion of a frictionless future for Western consumer life was shattered and another 21st century began.

The day I freaked out, just like everybody else.

I got on my push bike, collected a couple of cassette tapes, and cycled up to towards these hills.

BIG EXIT…

That’s the name of it! The song by PJ Harvey that melted together with the white hot heat of images of the planes crashing into buildings, the ones that burnt themselves into our memories, into heads still getting used to rolling news.

“Look out ahead
I see danger come
I want a pistol
I want a gun
I’m scared baby
I wanna run
This world’s crazy…”

And run I did. In perpetuity.

Every time reality, and my self within that reality became too much, I would head towards these hills, by bike, then foot. Never quite reaching, but never losing sight, of that which promised a portal. Anxieties that force art to meet life, begging for the promises in the poetry of the landscape to be realised.

At times like this it is hard to feel like we aren’t all just being played, like all claims of individual agency are sucked into the thralls of mindless schemes that crave to exercise the crazed energy of all pasts, all traumas, all congregated here.

Up here I can see it. The somber passage of emptiness between two industrial areas on an island with so much to answer for.

Only up here can culpability rest in peace.

And its raw bleakness is the only place I can accept my culpability.

My culpability in its oneness, for down there, in the towns it must be concealed for fear of being the one with the painted red cross daubed on their front door.

I feel alright with my culpability up here, because only here can I access my genuine humility free of the shame and guilt that lead me towards repeating my doings.

This land is the muse for towns which have made my world.