During the course of my life I’ve realised that I can only reach out and embrace something’s presence/my presence in its total absence.
An inability to be at ease with the living, to do what the living do, as led me to be a living ghost, who in turn chases other ghosts.
I’ve developed a bipolar relationship with life below. Because only when I try to escape it, fleeing towards the barren landscape that hangs above it, can I imagine what it could be like to truly embrace it.
I find ‘down there’ so claustrophobic I don’t think I ever really breathe properly until I leave.
I see all the invisible walls that solder down informal social scripts, because I feel them, as if they were enclosing my lungs.
On a busy Saturday, when the faces, the couples, all come out to play – coupling together in cynically predictable synchronicity – I have an overwhelming feeling of being trapped on the set of a soap opera shoot, with no role, no reason to be there, but there nonetheless, ashamed of every manoeuvre.
There’s nowhere to hide.
I always try to find a seat at the back of the room, to be out of shot, to avoid being noticed as being part of no part.
But it’s too late now. The energy it took to be in constant flight has now gone.
Up here no big Other is doing the background shame-work that clings so heavily and convincingly – a constant reminder of some fateful wrong turn you made all those years back.
Once you stand still and the rustling of your coat stops mimicking the chattering murmurs of inner critics, you realise the only person following you is you.
And that is what up here promises to rid you of: a place where there is no objectifiable self to interrogate.
This landscape with all its near-deadness, at least allows for reprieve from the white noise of the ‘down there’, where the dead-end you’re deep down cannot be reckoned with due to the swarm of emotional auto-corrections attacking your senses.
How do you truthfully find that long-sought-after road back ‘home’ under the daily invasion of micro-instructions, all designed to see fault in your every mortal breath, and adapt you to an alien operating system?
The instructions clash with the body’s resistance and gradually fuck it up. The body that desires only one thing, to escape – its inherent rejection of the commands to be stretched and bent into another smiling face in the corporate blob.
It could never fit anyway. Ones fecklessness and ineptitude would ooze out into the light of day like a spate of teenage acne prolonged until death. A life spent perplexed and distressed at the lack of cracks appearing in anyone else’s face.
For all self-corporatism is now geared towards being competent. To show that none of this horror you are forced to inhale, no dead homeless, no holocaust, no amount of pornification under a dying sky, affects you in the slightest.
Once the half-light sets in you find yourself in the half-world of another place.
There’s a willingness for it, for the unknown, for a doorway to take you outside the realms of the familiar that usher you back into your shame-state. Just the need to find something outside that can re-enchant you out of this half-role in this half-life.
The dry stone walls are draped like prehistoric backbones, like warnings of a lost world, ready to slowly sliver off the beaten hills, as the fading light melts your solid perceptions. The peat, so deep to swallow all stones, would never spare your rediscovery.
Nothing up here eludes to warm reassurances. Mammalian comforts are literally worn to the bone by prehistoric energies that are always everywhere, in the shadows, waiting for us to fuck up our safe-houses.
But up here death is liberated from the humiliating robe that sticks to it down there, where it must now subsist under the white hole of eternal youth, spewing out endless denials of mortality.
It’s all shadowplay; necessary play-acting with the shapes that one cannot be present with down there.
John B Ledger 