I think my 20 year old self may have a lot to tell me tbh…
As somebody who is slowly but surely coming to terms with realising he most likely has a neurodiverse mind, I would most likely find a version of myself more commited to celebrating difference than at any other point in his life.
Aged 20 I did not want to fit in at all. However, the following decades would slowly beat it out of me, convincing me that the ony way I could actually live in this world was to work my socks off to do things ‘normal’ adults achieved.
I’d tell my 20 year old self to keep going as he was.
Always too scattered in mind and physical movement to be academic, I love a term that is short-form for “this might be a mad idea, but…’ – and it sits more comfortably with the creative minded.
A couple of years ago Novara Media did a very interesting Podcast called The Nasty Noughties. A decade still revolving around the attitudes and norms of the 1990s had lost it’s optimism, public spiritedness and resorted to a downward-punching mentality.
The downward-punching wasn’t a straightforward top-to-bottom class-based exercise, but one that was far more nuanced, based on picking up on any vulnerability wherever spotted (although inevitably slanted in favour of the better off).
The working class began to split itself apart in the years after Blair’s government vowed to build on Thatcher’s work. One section began to see its future within the framework of Blair’s “education education education!” mantra and the other half began to exist, by and large, in a process of intergenerational brutalisation. Jock-type uni lads would pick on the ‘chavs’ (not a term I enjoy using) who couldn’t never go to ‘uni’, and the ‘chavs’ in turn would make life hard for those of similar economic status who had nonetheless maintained abstinence from the self-brutalising processes of post-Thatcher in hope that they too could one day use education as a way out.
All in all, the decade that lasted until the student protests and English Riots of the early 2010s, was one where prejudices and outright bullying were disguised as moral missions.
The 2010s were a weird decade, in the fact that although defined by a brutal Tory regime of public sector cuts and much more, saw less bullying and downward-punching in everyday life. This, for me, rather than being caused by the shame of seeing the lads who used to bully you now sleeping rough in town, was mainly due to the fact that we were all now fully online, able to constantly contact and be contacted and to engage with content instantaneously.
Not without serious concerns, this was still relatively novel, and inconclusive as to where it would all end up. Not only this but for the first time you could walk down a street and pass the kind of places where you used to feel intimidated to find nobody is remotely bothered with you because they are staring at their screens. Subcultures also began to merge into one thing offering hybridised fashion styles, and gym culture and personal goals became more important than hating your neighbour.
Move on to the 2020s, and although delayed due to lockdowns and readustments to public life, my hot take is that we are currently witnessing ‘the Return of Nasty’
My hot take is that Nasty has picked up where it left off at the start of the 2010s, but by utilising cultural norms and events of the day: largely the success of far right politics in infiltrating everyday life.
For those who gain power by picking on what they see as a vulnerability, a politics with a pretence of decency so thinly veiled only journalists and news reporters can believe in it simply offers an opportunity to pick on and take their anger out on whoever they please.
Although a white straight man, I’m also somebody who learnt to be vigilant to bullying in my younger years. This often means, by looking out for it (the bullying) I am spotted more easily. Equally, I wear glasses, which sounds so miniscule compared to other visual differences, but trust me, Nasty is fine-tuned to utilise anything for it’s ends.
Sunday has long since been a ‘day of rest’ on this anxious island, and weekends, albeit a time perceived as one for leisure and pleasure, is the time when Nasty is fully on the prowl.
I walked out of the Poundland in my home town earlier, shoving a drinks bottle I’d bought into my rucksack in the anxious manner of someone always fearing judgement. In the corner of my eye I noticed something, that I’ll never fully know the cause of. Whether it was how I looked or how I moved, I had caught the attention of a woman and her daughter (or granddaughter). I couldn’t help but look back and see her staring at me with what seemed to be a look between disgust, hatred and mockery as she said something to her young daughter to make her also oggle me.
Even as I walked on, she was still looking at me in the same manner. I could only put it down to being akin to what was said to a passer by at a Unite The Kingdom rally: “you look left wing”.
I drove home taking a longer route, wanting to enjoy a percieve peace within the grey skys and rich greenery of June. Yet as I approached the crossroads near to home, a BMW full of young men lunged out and into my path, with enough space to avoid any necessary conflict, but close enough for the driver to still choose to spit at me in my car for no apparent reason then a “fuck you, buddy” gesture to a total stranger.
This is a rambling hot take, and probably needed more punch to highlight something I’m genuinely really worried about right now…
Something’s not right. Something about the behaviour of numerous people in the last month, especially since Reform did well in the local council elections, has made me really worried.
We are still in the Final Battlefield of Thatcherism, and who knows when or how this battle may end.
Daily writing prompt
What’s a song that always puts you in a good mood?
Everything is always in a process (long or short-form) of morphogenesis. Even in repetitive movements.
Our perception of repetition misses this because of the trauma capitalist acceleration inflicts on time itself: we constantly feel retrograded, fighting our way out of a mannequin museum dedicated to our own experiences.
OR, as Paulo Virno suggests; we think we feel deja vu, but what we are actually expering is a cognitive short circuit, that unveils our ‘memory of the present’. AND, because capitalist media production increasingly floods our memory with historical artifact in real time, we feel like we have seen ‘everything already’.
The above title is a lyric from Pink Floyd’s iconic Syd Barrett-era ‘Pipers at the gates of Dawn’. It’s seemingly a throw-away rhyme to go with ‘cloak’.
There again, don’t our ‘throw away’ moments of creativity sometimes turn out to be our most poetic, our must truthful?
Barrett-era Floyd was short-lived. Yet in this one album they created something that walked that fine line between artistic masterpiece and something that was ‘a bit of a joke’.
This album taught me about how creativity must straddle the line between artistic seriousness and the utter ridiculous.
20 years ago, it is most likely that so many people viewed me as a ‘bit of a joke’. I had realised, perhaps prematurely, that I was incapable of adapting to acceptable forms of adult personhood, and in turn I was bursting with a desperate need to prove my worth via creativity.
I’d spend all my time trying to come up with artistic ideas and music lyrics, but I would be in such a rush to share my work, it was always embarassingly executed.
I would rush making recording after recording and then hand copies to random people in town, bemused to have a CD copy of recordings I’d often taped in a toilet prior to having other way of creating reverb. I even once walked up to the singer of a small indie duo called Slow Club in the Sheffield Leadmill and shoved a cd in her hand. Slow Club’s singer is now known as Self-Esteem.
Exactly 20 years ago (the final week of May 2006) after month after month of making heavy and rigid work that largely documented depression, I shaved my head, stop caring so much, and knocked up a ‘silly’ little CD turning a ‘nickname’ that once was a point of humilation into my creative psyedomyn: Ooon Badger.
This knocked-together, bit of junk, proved to be a kind of wierd creative fluke. As a friend told me, “it’s shit, but really good at the same time”.
It was one of my most enjoyable artistic projects, ever – one I’ll never forget.
Social piers loved it, even if they thought I was kind of ‘a bit of a joke’.
However, validation-seeking never creates good energies when trying to be creative, and perhaps it’s rightly so that this a was one off piece of art, rather than the start of a music career.
But “as the first song says “I may be dirty, but I’m not rat – I’ll never join the rat race”.
I’ve uploaded 4 of the tracks from the project here:
One crucial lesson I learnt the hard way: you can’t ‘do’ politics when you’re at constant war with yourself. If you’re always criticising yourself, any dialectical opponent can easily perform character assasination on you with a well-timed verbal insult.
(I recall a life-beaten Londoner looking at me with weary-yet-strong judgement as I tried to scale the bottom half of a lampost in the 2011 Anti-austerity march. I only wanted to feel part of the energy, but ended up being talked down by the look of a man that took me right back to being called “a stupid little boy”).
….Alas, public displays of political conviction have never gone well…
However, I have now realised that even to speak from such a position is still to tell a story worth telling, even if that story illustrates a ‘wrongness’ latent in the times you speak of and also latent in you…
How do you properly convey politics from the position of being ‘dark-matter’? From a subjective hinterland? I’ve never really been part of any demographic. I’m an outcast to the urban sensibilities, and to the suburban senility growing all around me: I am invisible to ‘voxpop representation’.
I subsist in full view of a settled suburban demographic, which knows its place. I have been trying to walk out of it all my adult life; backpack on back, and surely with a purpose on the horizon awaiting me(?).
Yet all of this aimless walking has given me a keen eye for difference within place (and, often, sameness). I used to walk and write nearly every week in the 2010s. I would map out the world I saw In front of me, as evidence of struggles that I prayed a peaceful future could work towards healing.
Now, as we descend into the late 2020s, I try to retrace my steps. Deeply lost in my home town, where the idea of the aformentioned prayer seems utterly ridiculous. And, since the Pandemic the main desire has been to retain my dignity as I grow older.
For all my adult life, my home town has had a continuously contested geographical identity: sometimes post-industrial, sometimes rural, sometimes urban, and increasingly suburban. Yet in the 2010s this side of town began to gentrify, and assume a quality that felt more attuned to the leafier suburbs of Leeds and Sheffield.
Yet, as I walk up this B road I approach a pompously large “Vote Reform” banner draped over a mechanic’s garage door; and, at least to my eyes it is a statement of pure aggression, which seems such a far cry from the decade-old ‘hipster dust’, sprinkled over the pub/restaurant opposite which still manages to entice the region’s gym-going professionals to dress up, for either Instagram or a possible Tinder date.
It’s at this moment that I viscerally realise that this synthesising ‘hipster dust’, that brought both liberal and conservative together in polite gentrification, is slowly evaporating in such places, only to be replaced by something deeply unpredictable, but most likely volatile.
You must proceed. It’s all that you can do on this road, the road to what was once a huge spoil heap, but now overlooks an hinterland of random out-of-place industries and a new-build estate stuck in limbo.
The village up here is very typical of a small pit village that became a partially-desirable suburb due to its proximity to the M1 motorway. Old collier terraces still resemble a skeleton; bones surrounded by the fatty tissue of suburbia.
In one of these gardens stands a large flag pole. Yet, the flag upon it is not just any old St Georges flag. This is a flag that refers to the Crusades; it’s a flag that announces that ‘we have no wish to be peacefully patriotic‘.
I begin to sweat as I try to document it. “Why am I documenting it? What’s the point? A long-lost sense of affinity with a collective mass?
I feel deeply alone post-pandemic. There is no ‘we’ I can currently attest to belong to, and it’s an unpleasant feeling. A feeling, dare I say, that is so widespread, it makes some people climb up lamposts with flags, asserting how alienated they feel with spitting vengeance.
The Spring green that decorates the motorway junction is accompanied by grey skies; two colours that used to feel heavy with a potency ripe for a new tomorrow from the election box. But not this time…not here, at least.
The grey turns to cold by the time I have descended into the town centre. Addicts who look thinner by the day, carry the weight of it all in their plight. It’s why we turn away and pretend they don’t exist, like they do in turn to our moving cars, that they think nothing of walking in front of in their desperate pursuits for what they need.
A coffee is the only thing I can think of right now. To sit down, in a place where the background music suggests history never returned; where we are all coffee shop customers, writing, typing and meeting friends ’till the end of time…
If Reform win (as predictedd) many councils in places like this tomorrow, it’s arguable it was a victory won in 2019, 2008, 1997, and every other moment where alternative pathways from this moment were blocked. Moments where there was a gigantic opportunity to be seized, to significantly take us away from a route that was laid down in 1979.
I walk homewards afterwards. There is slightly more sunlight permeating the greyness. A perfect atmosphere to conjure hope, you could say? (cloudless blue sky conjures nothing in a climate like ours).
However, it’s not there. The roads are angry, you can detect motorists driving slightly more hastily than normally. Everybody seems to be wearing their toughest emotional body armour, as car exhausts growl and pedestrians look away. I sense a latent aggressiveness; “don’t mess with me, today” postures, even as the luminous green of the graveyard Lime trees hangs above us, even in a place softened by commuter-belt accents and craft ale bars.
I walk home and get in my car. Around here, right now, I feel safer here…
But it’s not that simple. I can go for months, even longer lacking purpose and direction because I lack any ideas that have any sense of purpose and meaning.
It’s how I define, and have defined myself: against a world in which I’ve never felt equipped for, or any good at, but aware that I have to exist in. Obviously this sews together personal and political exclamations, and it’s excruciating when you have nothing that feels valid up your sleeves, because you feel like you’re reduced to having to play by rules in which you always come up short in every concievable way.
Coming up with ideas for certain pieces of work, or projects has been repeatedly life-affirming, and suddenly you have an energy you forgot you had.
However, because it’s always art in ‘fight mode’, it doesn’t allow anything else to grow, which makes it harder to live like this the older you get.
There is no exit, but death. But up on the tops the notion at least remains; a breathing space necessary for the escape-desperate pathos to recognise itself.
The possibility of a way out via peaceful parliamentary measures had its last chance in a hot June month of 2017 that momentarily melted perceived certainties as if they were plastic. And for many of us it was the first time in our adult lives we escaped the weight of depression. Perhaps this itself was already an hallucination, a Millennial one?
But it took until‘operation: return to normal’, the escape from lockdown, to realise there was no longer a ‘way out’.
Operation: escape the Maddening House.
Between the Russian assault on Ukraine and the ‘atrocity exhibition’ of Gaza live-streamed, I reached an epiphany upon these tops, above the old-industrial North of England: I had never known how to be a human being, and by adulthood, through disorders, addictions, avoidance, art, I had been trying to find different ways of expressing this desire to ‘get out’.
These tops are the outback for the Northern psyche, they store our collective trauma as if it was carbon. They also speak the language of the ‘frontierism’ that scoured the desert, reached the moon, and then crashed back down and began to devour itself.
The roads and paths towards here have always held an absolutist promise to them, in that they seem to offer one way in/one way out. No crossroads, no choice paralysis – just escape or come back down.
In my early 20s I would impulsively seek escape, drawn towards the tops by the trance-like Joy Division chant of ‘day in/day out/day in/day out’. I felt it ‘closing in’, and needed to get out before ‘it’ got me.
Today I know there is no true escape up here. ‘it’ is closing in; ‘it’ has won.
Regardless, the tops remain a crucial space in which to think.
Down there there no is thought no more, just chaos in the mind.
Technically in the Peak District, this area has avoided the post-pandemic influencer influenza that tramples over everything just to prove “I exist” in a culture where to be ignored is to be a living ghost, unimportant and forgotten.
On these outer-edges it is still possible to be alone through escaping the loneliness you feel subjected to down there. Its emptiness and waste allow for a reprieve from a socially-constructed loneliness, dealt out as punishment for ‘failure’. Here there is space to be weak, to be a loser, a degenerate, a nobody, with no shame.
At the very start of the decade this epidemic of loneliness was eased by the Covid Pandemic Lockdown. Although it caused mass isolation, there was a reprieve from the loneliness of humiliation, failure, and all the necessary afflictations dealt out to mediate a functional separation between successful and failed subjects in a neoliberal society.
But unfortunately it was also in this period that the networked mind ‘lost its mind’.
My late tutor called social media ‘the final battleground of Thatcherism’, and in the wake of the pandemic we were all now infected. All words became weaponised. And once the ‘better angels’ realised there was no escape, and justice had no horizon, indignation and accusation were all that was left.
Finger pointing in hell.
I feel a temporary peace looking at 320 million-year-old rocks, sunken and hidden amidst a deep mass of peat, like abandoned and rusting army tanks.
It seems that everything peaceful was formed in violence.
I long held faith in the human ability to prove such an idea wrong; that seismic change could be prised out on a pathway of peace. In the back of my heart the 2010s was the test ground, and I still had faith that the ‘networked mind’ could compound all historical traumas to reconstitute the collective psyche into something I felt was necessarily conducive towards thriving and surviving the 21st century.
I admit I no longer believe any of this. I now fear with an empty heart, that the violence that exploded since the pandemic is the start of what is to be expected.
I also admit am a weak person. I am somebody who has never been able to approach a conflict without taking the side of the opposition (I usually want to destroy me as much as they do).
For a long period of time I tormented and chastised myself for not being part of the noisy, active crowd – I felt I was betraying the mantras of the memefied 20th century activists, yelling at me from their graves.
I went to protests in the 2010s, usually balking, only to be found shakingly clutching a Strongbow in the nearest pub. The pressure to ‘show up’ contributed to excessive burn-outs as the 2020s restarted.
I fear the violence is now necessary, and inevitable. I sometimes believe it is collectively craved subconsciously in the collective mindset: the only craving that unites us all in the Maddening House.
And it is on this subconscious level that it seems that all of us secretly wanted Donald Trump; we want the next catastrophe, we want the haste towards destruction, because destruction is the only thing that makes any sense when locked inside a Maddening House.
Progress lost its soul to the machine. It can longer separate itself from all-encompassing spectacle and doesn’t even conceive that we need a way out. It produces pop culture that sounds increasingly dead behind the eyes before Ai could even get to it.
I am a weak person, violence makes me nauseous and shakey. I cannot be part of the violence that is already around us. The violence that I fear is tragically necessary in order to get out of the Maddening House. None of this is easy to admit as a child born the year and in the place of the Miners’ Strike.
I wish I was more.
Part of my ‘journey’ since my epiphany 3 years ago, was to accept myself. But it’s hard to go easy on yourself in the Maddening House.
At least up on the tops (my tops) I can accept that it for what it is: locked in the Maddening House.
John B Ledger 