“2013 is unfolding real horror-show-like” said the protagonist Alex, as he sat back in a bubble of styles and tastes, mixed, and mashed together from decades gone, too alcoholically inebriated to care that the here and now is almost unidentifiable  except for a general distinct lack of faith in everything” (Imagining the protagonist from A Clockwork Orange inhabiting  our present social landscape).

The ghosts of every era have frighteningly come fully to life in our times. Full-throttle hyperreality. A world where people are more Victorian than the Victorians were; more 60’s than the 1960’s were, more Madchester than the Madchester scene was. A world full of simulacra. But why?

Surely the anxiousness caused by the inability to visualise/represent our postmodern (or late-capitalist) times need to be fueled by more than just confusion, in order for the past to embalm the present to such an extent that it becomes alive at the expense of the present? A collective sense that, in our blindness to our times, something is running amok, off its leash, slowly unraveling that which holds together civilisation?

In my last blog I described a feeling that 2013 gives me: a feeling of the uncanny. That all that should be dead and gone – inanimate – has now been brought back to life; or in another way of looking at it, we are behaving like ghosts ourselves; that the world we knew is dead, yet we go through the motions. We go through the motions despite there being so much scandal and corruption, in media/political/business establishments, that there is nothing left to trust in. We don’t know what else to do put to repeat our old actions.

A protective veil of simulcra helps us believe we are elsewhere in time. This veil gives way (either due to a descending social gradient or the passing of hours in a day) to the protective bubbles of alcohol/drug intoxication. You happen to pass through a certain part of your local area, at a different time of day, to realise the necessity of illegal drugs in peoples’ lives in order for them to exist (subsist). All avenues to deny the present have become so entrenched that you realise out-right madness is indeed a requirement to survive the strange and unsettling passing of days in 2013.

Amidst, what I would describe as a landscape of chaos,  two television dramas (in particular) have settled into this mental environment, like large plants that have grown out of it all. They portray a tangibly close to The Now world, a sort of science fiction; the type of science fiction specific to a time that no longer believes in a future (our time). They are so close for comfort to be Pizza-eating TV-watching fodder, that you have to be in a severe state of disillusion not to notice that we are indeed looking through a Black mirror.  Appropriately most of us are in just that state – in order to refrain oneself from running around and screaming. These two dramas being Utopia and Black Mirror, both shown on Channel 4.

As much as the extreme violence in Utopia initially sends jolts of shock through your nervous system, it isn’t what makes the lasting impact: it is that all this violence is perpetrated in order to find certain people and certain items crucial to controlling a global sterilisation project, which is being planned due to the very same issues that we must face in the century above anything else; resource depletion and feeding a growing population, with such a situation possibly leading to hellish ends.

Utopia reflects back to us the humongous issue that, due to its appearance of having no immediate effect, has almost vanished to the social conscious since the financial crash in 2008. We are locked into a cultural infliction that the theorist Mark Fisher diagnoses as ‘Capitalist Realism’. Utopia presents back to us the only solution we would have to save the human race under our ‘Capitalist Realism’ infliction: mass sterilisation. Surely one must retain the hope that a human race outside the dynamics of capitalism may yet find itself with a humane way of dealing with these century-defining problems?

Utopia’s networks of conspiracy get the mind working overtime, but the lasting mark it carves into our minds is the thought that says “hang on? what are we actually going to do to save the human race?” The violence is perhaps a welcome reflection of the levels on inhumanity that unaccountable powers will go to to get their way, but we need not rely on the possibility of acts of secrecy to know that this occurs. One must surely then follow up the first thought by asking whether the continuation of humanity under unaccountable power, which leaves a snail-trail of corruption as it inches towards the cliff face of civilisation, would be worthwhile anyway. But I’d argue that this is when one’s thoughts die via the thought-guillotine of Capitalist Realism, that places thought back into the survivalism of the here and now under extreme austerity.

If I do appear to have a somewhat paranoid feeling that I’m seeing the unraveling of things, so be it, (I hope it is!), I can’t help it, but I don’t think I’m alone in seeing the drama Black Mirror as being a zeitgeist-moment. Black Mirror is written by satirist/presenter Charlie Brooker, a man who is so apt for our cynical times, that it is maybe right that he doesn’t show the true size of his intelligence so often, allowing him to sneak it under peoples’ noses without them knowing.

Black Mirror is Science fiction specific to these cynical times, where we just hold on day in day out; a science fiction for a time when we have forgotten our own times, unaware that they are far more futuristic than we think – which has disastrous consequences. Three different episodes show a future so incredibly close, but it’s like looking a picture you know well yet then suddenly spotting something is incredibly wrong. This is our future, as with the future depicted in the Children of men; one where what is already present now is just made to get more extreme.

Yet Black Mirror operates perfectly in a postmodern society where more pedagogical warnings are told to go fuck off and get back on their high horse; it’s incredibly subtle. For example, the last episode. A cartoon character standing for election becomes more popular than real politicians. Anybody who has read ‘The Hell of It All’ ( a collection of Charlie Brooker’s columns for the Guardian’s G2 section) will know that this is what he more or less summed the then-London-mayor-candidate Boris Johnson up as being. Brooker showed a meek fear of the political consequences of people voting for somebody for their cartoon-character likability. With Waldo (the name of the character), in the last episode, who actually is a character, Brooker subtly leaves the consequences of the rise of such a figure to political power to short intervals between the ending credits, the point when people usually assume the story has ended: the man who did the original voice for Waldo, who quit because he became worried about they way it was all going, finds himself homeless in a fascist-looking state ruled over by Waldo television screens. The last shot shows him being beaten by police in black uniforms.

What does such an ending have in common with our times? Black Mirror’s subtle stabs through the blindness of cynicism, show us what social consequences can arise from a culture of cynicism and lack of trust. Our cynicism has been growing and growing, as the pillars of society have crumbled into total untrustworthiness over the past decade. In 2013, we now find ourselves in a landscape where we have no trust or hope in anything that orders our society, yet we have to carry on because we know no other way. We just Ipod ourselves out, even further so, and drape ourselves in even thicker reflections of a more comforting past. But the cracks in the present are getting harder to step over, and many are already tumbling down into them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCB8ZVxKqyI&feature=emb_title

(Note: my dark imagination got carried away here; it’s not really a blog that calls for optimism)

Whenever I hear two particular sounds they  emotionally grip me so intensely, because they seem much more than sounds that embody a time; they sound as if all elements of an entire era were being smashed together at high speeds. These two sounds are the terrifying siren noise made by the German second world war plane, the Stuka, and the monstrous sound of the flamethrower (which one is most likely to be accustomed to hearing from footage of the war between Japan and the USA in the Pacific).

The period that sounds like it is being smashed together within these noises is, for certain, the first part of the 20th century, but I’d probably argue that those noises are almost a some sum total of the entire 20th century. The noises sound more futuristic than possibly anything that has come after; an horrific modern era, where all the hopes of modernism were being torn to shreds, landing us in a postmodern desert, abandoned by geography;  when the rock music (a sound of freedom), that rose up and died in the stars that culture burnt to a cinder, was at its most violent sounding, it sounded like the noises of warfare from the first half of the century.

In fact the death drive of modernity, and the death drive of the fated rock stars (who were possibily fated due to their late arrival to the modernist project), is what these sounds almost seem to capture. They are darkly intoxicating noises to all generations born afterwards, who don’t really know where they are in time anymore. One could actually imagine the protagonist from A Clockwork Orange enjoying the sound of a Stuka on repetition. Sometimes it feels like the future did well and truly die in the 20th century. And these noises sound like its death.

That my life doesn’t seem to grow and change is because time itself doesn’t seem to move things on anymore.

Oh yes, things change, but it’s as if the entire world is speeding up its exchanging and obtaining of things already bygone. And when all that happens is that things are circulated faster and faster, little of it seems to have any substance. When one thinks of our present time and what could be seen as new, one thinks of applications, social-media sites; they don’t bring anything new into the world they just stretch out and speed up the circulation of everything that’s already happened in our civilisation (recent technological advances merely turn the world into one giant tin of old photo’s, and all we do as a culture now is constantly browse that tin).

I have never found myself able to allow myself to leave my teenage physique and demeanor behind. Reality would show that I have left it behind, but it doesn’t stop the need to maintain what has already gone.I cling to a past that retroactively becomes more and more massive, as a future never seems conceivable. The more I speak to others (although it is played out in different ways) the more I realised it wasn’t specific to myself.

That I make sure that I can still fit into (some) size 30 waist jeans is merely reflective of a culture that continuously makes sure it can still riff on the past. According to The independent newspaper,  the United Kingdom, in terms of soft power (or cultural capital) is ranked as the most influential nation in the world, and if there was ever a nation that has continuously managed to riff on its past (whether the royal spectacles or re-hashes of the same British rock group formula every 5 or so years) it’s the United Kingdom.

We are trapped in a cultural logic that believes nothing can be done to shape and make a new world. Because of this we are held to ransom by the logic of a system that told us its world is the only world. Our culture has nowhere to turn, and as this systemic logic brings the world into farce, we look further and further backwards, in order to grasp something that we feel we can control, in order to stay sane.

I would speculate that with every crisis the capitalist system has produced this side of the year 2000 that it further entrenches this immersion in things of the past (albeit with modern devices that we rarely try to rationalise). The legitimacy of the system has been smashed by farce after farce; we know we it is failing us, but we cannot perceive away around it, so our world is built out of a past that we can control and predict.

Because we can’t face up to the present, or even acknowledge it, time feels out of joint. This disjunction between time and our experience can be unnervingly evident in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Dotted around every urban settlement up and down the U.K are, what I call, ‘Mary Celeste‘ Developments; never completed housing estates, barred off by metal barriers, and skeletal structures which are frozen in their foetal position. Precisely because we are culturally unable to face up to the present, we usually walk past these spaces and instantly forget about them. But if we make a conscious effort to observe them  we are confronted with the disconcerting fact the the financial crisis began half a decade ago, when it doesn’t feel long ago at all. It only feels like it happened a few weeks back, and everything at these construction sites stands, waiting to resume business, as if it were only a temporary blip.

Because we have found ourselves at our cultural dead end (or at least at a blockage in the pipelines of time) the world hasn’t been able to come to terms with the truth that the world has been irreversibly changed from that day on. We can’t really picture the world as it actually is, now, because it gives us the sensation of already being dead, and having an after-death experience. So we wait for things to return to as they were; we wait and wait, and only rarely realise just how much time we have spent waiting.

It’s like we are the new Pompeii, but haven’t realised that we’ve been turned to stone and burried by the normal functioning of time. At times when we can passively flow through this world, without observing or experiencing the world-wide suffering that confirms that the world is still alive, one can be forgiven for at least imagining that the end of the world has already occurred, that we are literally spectres going through the motions unaware of being so, like the fate of the Characters in the film The Others, who do not realise that they are the ghosts haunting the living.

More people now dress like people from the past than the people who lived in them time-periods did. People in the 1960’s thought we’d be walking around in space-suits, but we actually walk around looking more like them than they did. More 1960’s than the 1960’s; more 1980’s than the 1980’s; we are more or less living in a simulation of the past, which helps keep us blind to ‘the desert of the Real’. This is the world of simulcra/hyperreality, understood well by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard in the 80’s and 90’s. Yet he makes it somewhat fantastical/exciting to read; it doesn’t feel like the bleak haunted house our post-recession culture occupies. The ghosts of the past are running out of energy just as we crave them the most; the music/pub/night-out scene which embalmed our culture with cheap drink is now often the arena where you feel most like you’re in spaces haunted by their past (empty pubs).

On a personal level, my predicament could be clumsily described by the previous generation as that of somebody who is “30 going on 18”, but the situation is far more serious. Much of the previous generation often refuse to acknowledge the reasons for this cultural inertia, because they grew up in a time when culture burst forward faster than anything before, only to exhaust itself in the form of tragic endings for many young pop icons. I have to ask myself whether I will be still heading to the “indie music” bars, not knowing where else to go, when I’m pushing 40. Experience of my past ten years, living in a culture that turned up the volume on its IPod every time news arrived of another crisis/catastrophe, is that doing so may be a necessary coping-method.

Leeds

Along with the Engineering of Leeds (my 4th town) into a (relative) economic powerhouse, there seems to have followed an almost identi-kit pasting of all the traits usually found in the big financial centres like the City of London, yet in a much smaller area circling the railway station (after which it begins again to look more like a typical post-heavy industry northern city, and a Yorkshire town).

The swankiness; a desert to all retailers except the most upmarket of independent and chain stores. The speed of life in this colony-island of the global finance empire is much much faster than ten minutes walk either way. There is an expectation to be met with tuts if you take your time; you have to run across the street after actually casually stepping out, because a car, that in normal circumstances is a safe distance away, advances towards you with the speed of a motorway slip-road acceleration. Maintenance; you get on the train in your local town feeling pretty well dressed and tidy only to feel like a medieval peasant in contrast to those rushing back and forth from the train station. Homelessness; the homelessness in Leeds, in comparison with its size (irrespective of the wider urban area now dependent on it), is apallingly bad. You do wonder where they could have all possibly come from, as it looks too extreme – without forgetting the suffering such a existence must create, it does often look like a stage-set of a typical city scene, almost hyperreal, which could explain why people find it so easy to be indifferent to others’ suffering in such areas.

Leeds is often seen as the capital of Yorkshire, and this is very true – certainly regarding the West Yorkshire Urban sprawl, as Leeds has increasingly become the only hub of this 2 million-plus area, as other large towns (especially Bradford) have seen gradual decline since their demise as industrial bases.

Wakefield

This may not include Wakefield (my 2nd town, living 8 miles from the centre), which does often seem to have something going for it now, quite possibly down to the needless construction of the outdoor shopping centre Trinity Walk and two international sculpture galleries (The Hepworth and Yorkshire Sculpture Park),which surely do deserve their place here with two of the most accredited sculptors of the 20th century originating from the borough.

But Wakefield, or the half of Wakefield mentioned so far, is if anything a suburb of Leeds, that seems to owe its ascendancy to what Leeds has become. This seems to be in an almost identical manner to the relationship towns such as St Albans, Reading, Stevenage have to London. This could well be because Wakefield is the only stop the mainline train line from London (which is so important in the ‘commuter-age’- which shrieks at the sight of snow on the tracks) makes in West Yorkshire on its way to Leeds.

In fact what has become more evident, since the observant eyes of the Southerner Owen Hatherley pointed it out in his book The New Ruins of Great Britain, is that Wakefield feels “like a southern city” (for which he did instantly offer his apologies for saying). But if you look at all the towns served by the East Coast Railway from London to Leeds, they all have a similar feel to them; all commuter towns, and they reek of modern industry, which to inhabitants of the old industrial areas of the north looks like the south (If you were that way inclined you could certainly feel a little bit of treachery, when seeing the a large London Underground map at the visitor service desk in Wakefield Westgate station).

But there again, this beating organ dependent on the beating heart that is Leeds is only really one half of Wakefield. Wakefield really does seem to be two towns stitched together. One half of the city is the aforementioned town, served by the suits-and-ties-populated Wakefield Westgate station; the other half  is the remnants of a former mining town (culturally closer to Barnsley and Castleford than the other half of the town), served by the incredibly neglected Wakefield Kirkgate station, in a side of town that is full of sad sights, especially once the night draws in.

This is the problem with Leeds in general, it is the hub of a larger Yorkshire urban area (which Hatherley suggested is a Supercity which possibly doesn’t know that it is), yet much of the urban area is neglected/ignored for the sake of Leeds, which itself is now nothing but a colony of the financial world-city. But there again, could the same not be said for Canary Wharf and its surroundings?

At one point Bradford was probably as big as Leeds, and Leeds would not have the gravitational pull it has without being less than 10 miles away from another large urban settlement. If West Yorkshire was recognised as the metropolis it more-or-less is, one would maybe begin to see a more reciprocal relationship between these already conjoined towns. What you get instead is each town (and this applies for all of England expect London) maintaining a provincial small-town mindedness, which results in London absorbing the lion’s share of (what remains of) alternative culture.

(Emley Moor Mast, from the former Woolley Colliery pit site, between Wakefield and Barnsley)

I have always had a bit of a longing for West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire to be re-merged to reform the old West Riding of Yorkshire, which stretched from the Yorkshire Dales, down to Sheffield and Right across to York where it ended. It would mean an end to the ridiculous train fare hikes once you cross the South/West Yorkshire border to a town not 10 miles away. This has helped create a divide, with everything in West Yorkshire being Leeds-orientated and everything in South Yorkshire Sheffield-orientated. This is maybe a personal frustation due to being raised in an area right at the top of South Yorkshire, just a mile from West Yorkshire.

Because this area will always be what I call homeland I never really differientated between South and West Yorkshire. Yet there is certainly a gap in the continuity of human settlements around here, which does seperate the South Yorkshire mining-village-conurbation – which begins in Barnsley, heading down the Dearne Valley to join Rotherham, at which point becoming the Sheffield urban-area – from the West Yorkshire urban-area, which begins with Wakefield, Dewsbury and Huddersfield, just over a series of hills.

Barnsley

There’s just enough of this gap in continuity to give the town of Barnsley (my nearest town) a more isolated location than the other (former) West Riding towns. Barnsley is a strange place. Defiant, proud, but confused about what it is actually defiant and proud about. It certainly has a sense of self (under of the banner of ‘tarn ‘n’ prard – meaning ‘town and proud’) big enough to match that of the much larger urban settlements around here. And I would argue that what has elavated this sense of self in recent years is that it is relatively more isolated and hasn’t become a suburb of the bigger cities, which is evidentially the case with towns such as Wakefield and Rotherham.

But I would also argue that it stems from its identification as being the centre of the South Yorkshire Coalfield, possibly with more right to claim the east side of Wakefield, the mining villages within its borough, and the Dearne Valley than the actual townships these mining areas resided in. Despite the pomposity of the size of the construction at the time of its erection, perhaps the reasons for the construction of Barnsley town hall, upon a hill looking across the landscape, were for it be a beacon to all of the mining villages under its far-reaching gaze, like a benevolent Mordor overlooking its coal-ming empire(the clock at the top even looks like an eye). However, since a neoliberal agenda replaced the damaged and scarred physical landscape with a more invisible damaged and scarred mental landscape, the idea of what Barnsley is, and how it is still important has been shaken to the core.

The result of this has been an ever-more defiant sense of self with fewer and fewer decent sources with which to proclaim this sense of self; a culture obsessed with past because no real alternative identity has been found. ‘Professional Yorkshiremen’ such as Dickie Bird and Ian Macmillan have capitalised on this huge sense of self, magnified by the ridicule the rest of country deals the place, to the benefit of their careers, but unfortunately (I would argue – although not to completely slag them off, just that I observe this to be the case) it is to the detriment of the town – because by playing this parody back to the rest of the nation, they give it what it wants, which is beneficial to them no doubt, but unfortunately seems to have helped culturally stunt a borough that contains a quarter of a million people; a place where countless people have thrown energy into trying to help the place develop, but to no avail.

The culture of the area is difficult to build on however because of the lay-out of ex-coal mining areas. Barnsley, the town, probably only has 70,000 residents, but the wider borough (not even including the mining villages which are under town halls all-seeing-eye, but not in the town’s borough) has over 220,000 residents. But this village-after-village layout creates a village-culture that dominates the entire town. A village culture is very damaging to a town centre that still sees itself so central to these 220,00 plus residents. For this reason I did have some sympathy for architect Will Alsop’s idea for the town (not the one about having a giant Halo of light over the town, making it look like the class-clown of the north) to rehouse a greater number of the population within the town centre. True, the reality of this would be massively different, but I liked the idea on the grounds that I wish for something to generate life back here, even although the sell-by date for these Blair-year grand schemes has long passed.

The F.E. students, who populate the centre during term-time give some life to the place, and as much as Barnsley College has shrunken from what it was at the turn of the millennium (largely due to financial difficulties caused by corruption at management level) it still attracts many students from all over South Yorkshire, and parts of West Yorkshire. But they leave. Or merely give up on their dreams (not necessarily careerist ones, but also dreams of a different way of life) and return to their respective village quagmires, leaving an age gulf in the town’s culture; a gap that seems to begin at 18+ and end with 40 year olds. Most young people who don’t give up on their wish for something different, and have the (all important) means to do so, leave Barnsley, usually for Sheffield, but also Leeds, Manchester and London.

There is a new museum opening, and as much as museums are obviously about the past, that past doesn’t seem to have anything now to enhance the future of the place. Especially the romantacising of it. Of course there is plenty of unfinished business; the poverty left from the demise of the coal-mining industry and the police brutality dealt out in the strikes. But the centre of an empire of coal mining it isn’t now, unfortunately.

That centre was moved, perhaps with tactical intentions.

Meadowhall

As much as Barnsley constructed its large Portland Stone town hall in the 1930’s seeing itself at the centre of the greater Yorkshire coal-mining area, this centre has been moved since the demise of the industry. The centre of South Yorkshire (specifically) is (and has been for 20 years) the Meadowhall Shopping complex.  Sheffield is a city with much to offer, and the only place that can really offer decent (again, what remains of) alternative lifestyles to the one just mentioned in Barnsley, but it is not the centre of South Yorkshire, it is more of an alternative within it; the centre is Meadowhall.

This consumer paradise/hell on the north-east edge of the city is where all of what remains of the railways in South Yorkshire connect; it’s the hub that brings together all the scattered ex mining villages, and steel towns. It is the nearest connection the railway has with the M1 Motorway, and it is where all the coaches for Sheffield pull up. It certainly takes those villages away from towns like Barnsley, and one could certainly speculate that there were political means behind the locating of such a huge shopping centre here. South Yorkshire was once referred to as the Socialist Republic, as after the war it was the home of strong unions and home to a lot of very socialist-orientated housing schemes. It was surely a statement to the New Capitalism being drilled into us at the time to bury the epicentre of all of what South Yorkshire was under a palace devoted to consumerism/commodities (and just a few years after the defeat of the National Union of Miners in a battle at Orgreave just one motorway junction down from Meadowhall).

If you want to see the dominant culture of South Yorkshire, don’t go to Sheffield go to Meadowhall via the interchange. See the masses leaving the trains to walk the aisles (sometimes not even shopping, just going there because it’s where to meet people), people who have had all meaning ripped from under their feet, not future granted to them, save one of acquiring more and more consumer goods. The sight of all these people flocking here is far sadder than the sight of the characterlessness of such shopping complexes.

Sheffield

The Majority of people in South Yorkshire don’t even get as far as Sheffield (my 3rd town), one finds the train completely empty for the final leg of the journey on the Hallam Line from Meadowhall to Sheffield.

Sheffield is certainly a far more attractive city centre than Leeds. Although apparently the opposite was true in the 1930’s when George Orwell visited it during the great depression. The centre is certainly my favourite urban area in the old West Riding, and is where I wish to relocate if I get the chance. The hillyness of it, and thus the areas of it unsuitable for development make it a relatively green and attractive city; the train station layout is incredibly attractive, being greeted with pleasant water features and walkways, the opposite of the grey,hustle and bustle outside Leeds station. The city has always seemed to be an important place for street art, and compulsive taggers; I like this, as for me, it almost seems to be an embodiment of the aforementioned unfinished business, and makes me imagine that an alternative to capitalism lies dormant in the rolling hills of South Yorkshire. The Supertram system, as it goes up and down the steep hills, has something really positive about it, just to see it, perhaps it feeds into the potentiality of the city to be something different from the others, looking more like a European city.

The city itself is as big as it’s more money-minded brother Leeds, but the wider urban area dependent on it is quite a bit smaller, and the Meadowhall shopping complex prevents it from having the level of consumerism seen on Leeds’ streets. Which, all in all, is definitely a good thing. Meadowhall largely takes the landscape of shopping bags and legs away from Sheffield, and as much as this has shrunk the city, it has opened up opportunities for the creation of many small independent art/music venues, something Leeds may have, but always seems pushed out of reach by the big money in the centre. Not to say that Sheffield hasn’t got all of these things mentioned here, and that Leeds hasn’t got alternatives to its finance, but they are both far less prominent features.

But one thing that can easily go unnoticed, unless a concerned local tells you, is that the poorer residents of Sheffield have been by and large turfed out of the centre of the city into estates on the outskirts. One of these estates is Gleadless, which is a peculiar looking low-rise estate. Obviously real thought was originally gone into the layout; the buildings weave in and out of the steep green hillsides, and the views are quite leafy, and apparently architects from all over Europe came to view it when it was completed. But now it is a sad place to be. With exhibiting my work quite often in places in the centre (the city’s receptiveness to artist is one of the reasons I’ve warmed to it more than Leeds, for example) I was picking up something from a house down there one day. I just felt sorry for the residents, and realised that many of them are as abandoned and isolated within this city as people in the deprived mining villages are further out in South Yorkshire.

I will always have some kind adoration for the 1960’s brutalist Park Hill housing development next to the train station (whether is a morbid and more positive fascination, depends on my attitude towards the past and present), and I actually would have liked it if they have kept the other similar ones (Kelvin, and Hyde Park) that were demolished in the 1990’s, because the steep rise of the hills around there makes the buildings look so much more profound. But Park Hill is now nothing but a shell, much like the way that New Labour were nothing but a shell of the old Labour party. The original inhabitants of the then-run down estate were relocated, and then the regeneration company Urban Splash turned them into luxury pads for city workers/Young professionals, going for £95,000 each.

But in many ways the reason I do have more positives to say about Sheffield, is because it always makes me think of what Barnsley could be, and is often in dreams (sleeping dreams not daydreams) what it is (as Sheffield’s proximity to the Peak District, Woodland, and then almost immediately high rise, and factories, has an almost collage-like nature to it, usually found in dreams). One just wishes there was something that connected all these towns up better, and didn’t leave them to be the provincial small-town fortresses they seem to end up wanting to be.

I am sat staring down a hillside, sat where I often sat when I worked here for 5 years, with my mp3, on shuffle function, playing out sounds from my last 10 years of accumulated music, staring as if looking for something in the manner in which I have so for as long as I can remember.

After trying to make a change in my life only to have it fire me backwards as if there was an elastic band tying me to something, I find myself one year off 30 and on the same ring-road lacking exits as I have been on since  the fading days of naive and sentimental youth-hood.

I’m sure it would be a mistake to wish myself into a relationship, my own family unit, and a joint-bank account, but what I have is no kind of existence to wish to take to the end of my life.

It’s like No-man’s land never ceases in my mind. The opposing sides never reach a conclusion. A cold grey sheet of mist blocks the view past the trench that I have planted myself in. I sit and wait and wait, for something to change, after a decade of failed attempts to change the predicament myself. Yet I know this to be fruitless.

I am told I have built walls; that I need to knock these walls down. I know I have built walls. This advice misses one crucial factor: there may be nothing behind that wall, Like the void left when a rain-forest tree is so strangled by vines, it dies and rots away leaving just a coffin of vine branches reaching into the canopy.

We aren’t born with a solid personality that  remains to the day we die, we are layers that are built up over the years. Peel back too many layers and you may find everything has been bled dry. After all, the one thing in the world that has given me the confidence to live in it has been my art, a form of expression that has become so congealed within my obsessive and negative tendencies that any attempt to kick down these walls could crush my art underneath.

Nor do I buy the philosophy that one is “fully in control of their destiny”. A human being is thrown right into the world. He/She is hammered, and shaped, as if a  sculpture,  by his/hers immediate (mediated) environment, the historical period they find themselves in, their family genetics, and, let us not forget, the social ranking he/she is born into.

Like the difference between a strong, confident-looking English Oak tree in a country estate and a withered and bent English Oak which has been long  exposed on a high hillside with poor soil, a human character is the plastic put into the mould of the environment him/her is thrown into.

Yes, a human can change their predicament, they can make the best of what lies in hand to shape themselves into where and what they wish to be, but this is very different to the prevailing pre-austerity-measures (and still popular) philosophy, that everyone is surrounded by infinite opportunity, that he/she can be what he/she wants to be, “if only they try“.

Opportunities are more like slivers of light, eventually appearing through cracks in what for a long time seemed to be a dead end, rather than an horizon, seen from a hilltop, of opportunities just waiting for us to go out get them. The cracks appear because, most of the time, a human being finds a way out of what appears to them, for a long to time, to be a dead end. But sometimes they don’t find a way out.

Just as it would be foolish to use this writing as an argument that those born into comparative privilege in today’s world aren’t unwillingly moulded by their own environment (despite the gaping discrepancies in opportunity that separate them from the less privileged), it would also be foolish to argue that this inability to move on in life is specific to myself.

True, the stalemates I reach in my mind often seem too strange to be normal, yet I would argue that in our current state of permanent crisis under global capitalism (which includes the slow domino-effect it is playing out with the earth’s ecosystem’s) that obsessive disorders and depression are widespread.

People feel trapped. Even amongst the more light-hearted, talk about the future world is usually saturated by dread. Obsessive disorders are an attempt to stave off the drop into depressive states: obsessive disorders are fanatical rituals that allow the person to forget he has reached a dead end; depression is being face to face with the dead end.

The problem is the advice each of us receive, no matter how well-intended, makes us feel alone. Yes, we know we are not the only people suffering from depression/obsessive disorders, but are led to feel that we are in total control of our ability to pull ourselves out of it. In life-lived rather than advice-given, this is true. But the assertion that one is in total control of their destiny positions us alone, where the only option is to deny the causations of our predicament or be forever-blamed when ruing our inability to move forward.

This makes people less likely to reveal their feelings of being unable to move on, because it becomes a sign of weakness, and of failure. When the world looks like a giant cruel game where we are all pitted against one another, who dares confide in their failures?

However, the confusion comes now as I realise that nothing good is going to come from allowing my thoughts to expand to a global situation, when it is clear I become obsessive about these things to the point that I cannot even gain better knowledge of them because it makes me so dis-functionally miserable. I need to prevent it reaching this stage from where it all backfires resulting self-destruction.

So….

When did ‘all that is solid melt into thin air’?

Spending most of my school days day-dreaming, all I ever really wanted was a lover (somebody to spend my life with) and maybe, one day, a family. But as I write this down the sheer embarrassment I feel in admitting this reveals how far removed I have become from these day-dreams.

I don’t day-dream any more. I just stare away, and look around me all the time, still waiting for the dreams to be replaced; trying to figure out where something of substance to replenish me with optimism, hope and enjoyment for life can possibly come from. Whilst it may a blessing that the old day-dreams fell away, I have been left in limbo with no new ideas of how I would best like to live my life. And I certainly haven’t had any luck searching within myself.

It is clear that I haven’t got over losing the old dreams that guided me. I cannot find substance so I run round and round in circles to tire myself out everyday, so that this emptiness isn’t staring me in the face.

Writing on his K-Punk blog, Mark Fisher describes the band Joy Division and the suicide of their singer Ian Curtis as a Nihil Rebound: an inability to overcome the empty feelings and erosion of hopes and beliefs by the horrors and collective madness of the 20th century and to use nihilism as a powerful tool. That this made “the slow, quiet hell[.] in which most of the proletariat endure their working lives” Unendurable for the incredibly psychologically-trapped Ian Curtis, and all that he found he could do was to make his “…case against the world, against life, [my italics] that is so overwhelming, so general, that to appeal to any particular instance seems superfluous”. Fisher explains that “Depression is…a theory about the world, about life”, and it is the fate for those who find themselves overcome with nihilism, but who cannot (for numerous reasons) begin to use it has a tool to rebuild their life from their ‘zero-hour’.

I have friends who champion the power that nihilism can offer the individual. To me, this ‘world set-free’ still feels hollow, meaningless, and with nothing there to counter the suffering and destruction in our world today.

I am haunted by the ghosts of the past. Whilst enjoyment and meaning don’t amount to anything in the present. I remain in constant orbit around myself. As a means of keeping myself afloat.

It’s quite calm right now. No one can escape the anesthetization of the Christmas period whether they like it or not. And I need to do some calm thinking, not get lost too quickly again.

Yet, all this musing as I sit here and stare is rather different from the anxiety one feels when these very questions bother one’s mind whilst in the fragile position of being half-asleep. At these moments the real worth of the anxiety is revealed.

And one  cannot escape the misery that spreads like a fog from the attack of more or less everything by the neoliberal system. Walking into 2013 is certainly like walking into the wilderness.

My recent move to London was much needed for disparate reasons, but more than any, because the course my life has taken during the past 10-12 years has served its time, and has run out of energy. As I say in the previous post, life is just a series of shimmies away from the pits/total dead ends, and it seemed to be reaching that point on the previous course. Obviously there is an element of wishful thinking to all of this, yet if I stick it out down here it is a change that must surely force difference and paths away from any dead ends in the narration of life that one must make. However, it was certainly wishful thinking to convince myself that my past wouldn’t follow me down here, and it did, exercising many of the issues I talk about in this blog http://johnledger.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/past-returning-to-haunt-and-all-roads.html. Once in a depressive spell, it is pointless to convince oneself (and certainly for others to convince you!) to see sense becauseit saturates everything, creating an objective despair. It is like one has dropped into their own underworld, where everything is the same, yet seems utterly different to how it did on their surface world. As a concept, to move to a metropolis, where everything that I write and make art about is literally on my doorstep, seems amazing. The reality of it can be so, yes, but when everything is happening all of time, a sample of everything from the world (positive and negative) is seemingly on the street outside, it can eventually be so much that everything begins to have a sense of meaningless to it, especially when you’re new to a place, haven’t got many friends yet, so have no anchor of familiarity from it all. So I had to return north. At the time, my mind, in its underworld, said it was for good. But as soon as I would be out of it I knew I would have to return south. Whilst I was up in the north I felt that I needed to head to an area that I hadn’t had chance to before I came to London. This area is the Pennine hills to the west of my home town. Not so much the moors, but the spacious and bleak roads and hills that separate the moorland heath from the more lush and green areas further down the hills towards town. I wouldn’t regard myself as somebody who’s life is mapped out by the symbolic, but perhaps I am, or perhaps I need to be. The founding issue of all that has been in the past 10-12 years has been the loss of narrative, a feeling of emptiness, yet despair that nothing seems to be accountable or be able to stop (what I saw as) the immense suffering of the human race unfolding before my eyes in the 21st century. This concoction also gave a leg up for dormant personal disorders in order for them to become active, as they did. This area became a important locus in the mind map, and narrative that I developed inspite of the larger sense of the loss of narrative; a self-defensive narrative. During this period, after walking up to these hills to the point that my anxieties about the world down there were drained of care, the emptiness of these hills seemed to resonate and give landscape to how I was feeling about life in general. The few objects on these hills, because of their loneliness, become powerfully present in the mind, have a monolithic presence (most notably, the cluster of wind turbines, which already embody some kind of hope for the future). They absorb the meaning which is generated by this wider landscape as one finds it resonates with their feelings of meaningless/emptiness generated from the world at large. Thus they fix themselves in my mind, especially when I listen to the music that soundtracks this past decade and a bit. I felt that I needed to visit this place to try to help put a closure on a stage of my life. It may not work, may never work, but yet I feel an oath to visit this landscape whenever there is at least a glimpse of a departure from a part of my life which (despite of all the good points – mostly that the art I have made during this period is perhaps what I am most pleased with in my life) I do desire to leave now.