I admit this new drawing isn’t a cause for personal celebration. It’s a completion of a series of works spanning the last few years, that I wish to see the end of now, begging for a closure of a wound through which the works have spoken.
I once thought this was just self-dislike, but it’s much more; it’s a kind of self-monsterising, that I have had from at least my late teens. I have internalised not only assertions that I am insufficient for the world I must act in, but that I’m also going to do something horrible one day, humiliate and discredit myself in front of an unforgiving crowd. The sad fact is that on the level of self-humiliation and self-destruction this self-demonising has achieved its aims over the last few years.
There’s often the urge to get there before ‘they’ get there. But that urge has been created by the self-monsterisers, the inner ‘they’, who say they will protect me from the external ‘they’. But it’s the inner ‘they’ who have already convinced me to behave in ways that will ‘ruin myself’. My inner enemies are often far louder than any supportive or level-headed voice. They convince me that all the horrible presentations of criminals we see in newspapers are coming for me too.
I have all too often been able to see through the perpetrators eyes more than the victim (s). What I have found is my inability to separate inner and outer, and to find a distinction between autonomy and being a meat puppet to external influences that will do what they will with me.
I often don’t feel I have control. And I fear the future, because I do not know how to find peace, and outrunning inner demons gets harder by the year.
The necessary arrogance in light of this was to think I could burn the oil so intensely that I could slip out of the system, be airlifted out of the ‘austericide’, and be safe from the fate awaiting a lowly man of little self-worth.
I have felt that I have had no choice but to ‘plough my own furrow’ with the art, even as life has passed me by, even as my ability to do this has got so hard and so unpleasant that my work has become incapable of anything but an introspection of this private unpleasantness.
The worst thing one can do is strive when they know they can’t do it anymore. When they keep on doing it because they feel that have no option, trying to pretend each time that there will be no more future articulations of the collateral damage further down the line.
Over the last few years it’s felt like the oxygen can’t get into my lungs fast and thick enough.
There is the truth that I’ve internalised some very unpleasant ideas about who I am, but there’s also an abstract structure of feeling, where life is collectively becoming more brutal – the internal and external diseases combining forces.
‘Historicide’ is the triumph of trauma as the collective understanding of reality through which a society reproduces itself, in the wake of what felt like viral blossoming of something different, almost Millenarian in its nature. It flopped into the mud under the murder of social progress, which has been cut down at the every chance; a reproduction of Victorian-style horrors for the many, and scapegoating for a convenient number of that majority, as their slow suffocation manifests into madness.
Brutal life is the option for the new allegiance of the powerful and reactionary, as we go through both the long unravelling of colonial privileges and capitalism itself. Their austericide sees no means to an end with the demonised ‘chavs’ it went for first.
There is a suffering caused by chasing a quality of life that’s long gone, which was always a dream, a new gold 90s dream of peace and safety. A promise to be released from history, and especially from the return of the horrors of the past. I am haunted by this dream, I remember a moment aged 9, in 1993, stood on a Cornish beach, where everything felt like it was going to be OK.
I earnestly believed that we were on a verge of a critical mass in the 2010s; the increasingly collective awareness of mental illness, global economic and climate injustice, and an emerging gender fluidity that if anything seemed like a shared willingness to circumvent the physical social barriers holding us in the past. It was naive, but it felt necessary to be scooped to safety by a rescue boat for another kind of 21st century. Life has felt unmanageably heavy since the pandemic, since the cost of living crisis, since Ukraine and Gaza, since the failure of this naive rush towards a different future proved an impossible dream for a world stuck in its traumas.
In all truth, I’m quite a bit fucked, with no idea how to stop becoming increasingly fucked. I’ve tried to step away from art many times in recent years. In truth, I want peace with myself. But cannot currently find it, as I encounter reality as a brutal thing, that I don’t know how to stop internalising, and letting it become me.
John B Ledger 