The late John Berger suggested that the body of work of an artist could only be completed by death. When talking about the 20th century artist Giacometti he suggested the artist’s ” …act of looking was like a form of prayer …a way of approaching but never being able to grasp an absolute”.
Giacometti’s sculptures, so painfully and inhumanly thin that their morose meditations are inescapable to any viewer, are, in every sense focussed on an increasingly refined line, that of a human body moving towards its total disappearance, the only wholeness, the only completeness.
The world of Giacometti may have preceded an age where eating disorders are commonplace, but they certainly elude to the anorexic’s compulsive objective to bring the body to a place delicately balanced between life and death – a line that aims to be so fine it constitutes the vanishing point of being.
In the wake of the pandemic life going forwards has ceased to feel like it is going forwards at all.
For many of us ‘imperfect’ pre-pandemic life has been left broken into unfixable pieces by the trauma of the total halt and stop/start of the machinic rhythms of contemporary life we were trained to live by.
Stagflation is experienced as much as a physical trauma as an economic situation, as a kind of continuation of lockdown brain fog. Even while it is mandatory to get up and running as an unending austerity creeps through the bedroom windows of those who thought they’d be safe forever, it just doesn’t feel possible to get going again, without breaking back down, again.
Consequently, in a way that reflects my younger adult self, edging sideways when anorexia could no longer sustain the balance between having to be something, and not being at all, I’ve found myself edging sideways once more.
It may seem like ‘running away’, going up onto these hills as the threads holding our advanced society together continue to slowly erode, but political engagement feels harder than ever. Such engagement requires us to attach our every inhalation and exhalation to a greater goal, but this requires a conviction that ones life can obtain forward direction and is a life worth fighting forwardly for.
A collective political will is a delicate thing, and since the pandemic it lay smashed into many pieces, in an incoherent rubble where the political and personal lay together, refracting stories that no longer captivate.
Edging sideways has always been a last resort for all life that has no choice but to find something else…
All landscapes that we carry in our hearts, for good and bad, begin to conflate the body and land into one. We emotionaly identify with the wounds and fissures in our home towns, and think through the hills around it.
The hills that hang, at the side-ways glance, above the area where I have lived my life, form a vanishing point that is one with the vanishing point of not knowing how to be, not knowing how to comply the body with the demands of the ‘down here’ without being fatally insufficient .
Anorexia is the pursuit of the minimal point of existence, as one tries to escape from ones own body in this world it occupies. Trying to miminise the presence and complicity of their body to a fine line that remains in perpetuity on the precipice between life and death.
But not death….
The desire was never NOT to be, just not to this physical self in the physical space of ‘down there’ where humiliation and insufficiency clung to every breath.
As I walk the roads that served as the gateways to the tops I rarely actually made it to, with music I once had on cassette tapes, memories are triggered of thumbing my many variants of the Nokia 3310 model, waiting for a young woman to text me, to ask if I am ‘out tonight’.
Alcohol replaced anorexia in a pattern that remained in place even as the texts and the hopeful encounters long since passed.
I was always, and admittedly still am, fixed on a sense that secure, guaranteed intimacy with another is a way out of escaping an incomplete self to find a completeness to my being.
It is a completeness that presumes death, all rites of passage do. But markers in life that remind us that mortality is only ever morbid if one remains stuck in limbo outside of life, until death finally takes them.
The wind turbines, which from their base, assume the same lunar-like quality of the distant stream of lights on the Woodhead pass, also assume the characteristic of a fleet of lighthouses, like Guardian guides. In this midpoint between both seas, there are oceanic qualities, and like looking out to sea, vision precedes all sound; an oddity on a land of noisy, anxious hurrying.
Escaping from becoming in a reality where there is nothing one can, or wants to become as defined my adult life.
Maybe this will never end, even as I roll into my home town for yet another chance to disgrace my anorexic angel, messaging disgust at the sweaty, messy fallibility of myself.
But rushing forwards isn’t going to work now, that’s why I’ll remain here, edging out sideways, like an ancient discoverer of this land, hoping that something unexpected can manifest out of nowhere, because nowhere is the only place it can come from now.
John B Ledger 