If everything up here is exposed, then this bleached landscape is the necessary negative of the urban spaces below where addiction has become the modus operandi; where every stone is upturned, leaving no secrets, no mystery, no object to desire, just short circuits to quick fixes.
…and it’s for good reason I come here, once optimism has become the junky incarnate
Trying to engage with ‘down there’ has become an overwhelming reminder of how one has made themselves incompatible with a humanity that has found its final expression in the Californian smile and Californian body.
The incompatible have been sentenced. We are the ghosts to an already-dead who don’t even realise it.
The info-sphere’s auto-corrective operating system has invaded our bioRhythms, and to try to fight it merely brings extra suffering, cursing you with an awareness that you’ve been post-humanned. Where the colour-tones of springtime no longer have any more resonance than a computer’s recognition.
‘Woke’ politics is the final expression of generations of political ideas that, bereft of a future, is also unaware of its own nihilism. The deranged, puss-filled fanaticism it provokes in opposition has sadly become not only the last refuge of the scoundrel, but the also final suicidal gesture of a human incompatibility to a machinic way of operating.
I have mined myself for art. But why, when art is now everywhere. Everywhere in a Nowhere.
It is gentrified and petrified into murals that point to White Roses, flat caps, Hendo’s Relish, and meaningless gestures to community that point to a ‘nowhereland’ where you are rewarded for expressions that say nothing.
Art has retreated from its position on the brink of the horizon from where it brought forth strange news of another of world. It now has nothing left to say other than “I am here!”. The assertion of the individual to ‘be themselves‘ is, and always will be, ‘the end of everything’.
Forgive me for purposely walking over metaphorical landmines – this is my longest depression.
Yet depressive space is a safe place, a haven from mandatory optimism, from where “fucked up” is the consequence.
As I’m yet to reach that infamous ‘rock bottom’, I scour for its components in this topsy-turvy landscape where the region’s oldest rocks are at the summit.
Bleaklow is the industrial North’s parent hill. Even more so than Kinder Scout. Up here you can see it all before you as if the entire upheaval of 18/19th century capitalism emerged from it. And in an abstract, geological sense, it did.
In this land of deep time, the addict sees how they have become cut-loose from the temporal textures as they secure our passage from life to death. It is admittedly a safe space for the liver and heart cry that “there’s not long left now…”.
Desperation for something to clutch to, something that holds us to it amidst this senseless storm, can only be admitted when there is nothing in sight except a desert of bleached grass.
Down there, where ageing is failing, and where ones crumbling bones combine with the dust of meaning, we must keep smiling.
You, the unending squabblers, assessing my life – you are all now merely my ghosts. You’ve followed me up to where I had momentarily wished to become out of reach, on some ever-illusive summit.
Yet, the summit is illusive, swallowed inside a sheer horizontal mass that conceals both the beginning and end. There’s even a beach to confuse you. Sand that was once at the bottom of the sea, once again makes coast-like dunes as it breaks free from itself as timeless stone. And you start to think about your own renewal, becoming other than “this” – and starting again.
But it often feels too late. Immortality through different matter is a momentary pain-free thought exercise. Rock bottom and subsequent ego death is not a lifestyle choice, because it chooses you.
The waste that calls one forward remains my muse.
John B Ledger 