The fact that I feel pressed to make disclaimers about what I do or don’t say on my own blog already reveals the presence of a dominant inner critic.
It thinks it is protecting me from damaging any reputation I may give off for having artistic ‘professionalism’. And indeed I feel I must impress the residual code-work that is at play here: that professionalism is code that stands against the act of being ‘too honest’, ‘too giving’ about ones own vulnerabilities, for fear of a loss of market value of the self-as-object.
Once I fathom a way to lessen this deep weight that has dragged down all ambitions I’ve had over the last couple of years, all future projects will not only see an ownership of my long struggles with mental illness, but also be a challenge to the dominant perceptions of professionalism, not least the one that equates being professional and ‘being good at what one does’ as the same thing.
Self-hatred is, in my experience, when self-criticism becomes deeply depressive as opposed to just merely anxious. It’s a horrid place when a state of circular reasoning sets in, through an overabundance of negative thoughts about both oneself and the world as it appears:
“I hate feeling so lowly and shameful, I deserve to feel better”
“Yeah, but look at how hopeless the world is at the moment. What hope is there for a little piece of shit like you?”
and so on…
And this goes on and on and on and on, until you literally have to sit down and close your eyes. Sometimes even simply sleep it off.
There is a physical reality that does seem very hard at the moment. Life in the United Kingdom for the average person has got worse, that cannot be denied, and there is a pervasive sense of deflation. Perhaps hopelessness.
Hopelessness without an ability to spare oneself the courage and faith to keep going, can be dangerous.
I guess this is what concerns me as I turn 40.
However this is partly self-hatred talking, loving as it does, to gorge on negative facts about my age, my career prospects, and what it sees as my lowly prospects of being able to find love/be loved.
I look in at characters on television screens, or walking down the street, and can only conclude by the breeze carrying their gait that they aren’t quite plagued by this. That they just live, and are not pushed to the margins of life by the narratives that say one is will never be capable of living ‘properly’.
All my life my inner critic has told me that I’m a wierdo, a freak, and that the only way I can succeed is by doing something extraordinary, because, for me (and me only) ‘ordinary’ would mean being insufficient, incapable, last in line, picking up the scraps of life.
Over the last few years it’s become more and more noticeable how damaging this story has been. It’s jeopardised so much, ruined moments that could have been substantial life experiences. All because in the midst of the everyday the ‘you’re worthless’ thoughts drop like monsoon rain drops.
A lot of these opportunities in life will never come again now.
The noise can get so heavy that I get snappy at people offering me advice. But they can’t hear the noise, they just see somebody who, I guess, from the outside, seems capable of so much more.
It would just be nice to wake up one day and never hear this self-hatred again. Wake up as if from waking up after the guns have stopped firing, and to be able to just do things in my life, without trying to walk through a solid wall of self-critical noise.
Here you will face mortality without actually being alive.
You will become a living ghost, watching other people live out their lives.
Acts of apparent self-destruction, reckless moments, are acts of desperation – having tried every other option to get out, but to no avail, destructiveness becomes instinctive.
Humans intuitively know the difference between existing and living. Our ego’s will try to deny it, but alienation clings to our every breath.
I am thinking of the philosopher Spinoza when he equates the fullest embrace of living with being in ones ‘true state of nature’. With our complex systems of cooperation with our multitudes, we inherently live by structures that push us out of our true state of nature.
Animals are always in their true state of nature, and by existing, fully immersed in living – unless they are brought into human social systems (the horror we encounter when we see the suffering in the shapes of battery farmed chicken is inter-species; we share a pain with our para-human companions, more than any primitive hunter gather, or any wild chicken could ever do).
None of this can explain away how those damned ‘other people’ manage to live out their lives, and achieve the one thing that I now believe is sacred to our sanity: passing through rites of passage.
Us pub bore ‘intellectuals’ are far too quick to denounce ‘illusions’ – social constructs that seem, to all intents and purposes, made up; grounded in nothing but convenient self con-tricks, to keep the peace, to keep social order.
2024
Since 2010, we’ve been living through a collective trauma. An economic system that to all intents and purposes failed and died in 2008, but has been aloud to continue, as an asset-feasting zombie, creating an end-game, nihilistic culture.
At the exact same time the total take-off of what Mark Fisher called ‘touch-screen capture’ technologies has soldered the collective trauma and nihilistic ‘go getting’ into something unprecedented for our emotional and cognitive capabilities to deal with.
All of this can make everything seem tainted with the same nihilism and alien-glaze CGI perfectionism.
The desire can be to quit everything – fuck everyone and everything off. A nihilistic attack on an overarching nihilism that smiles back as us, as if nothing is the matter: “what’s wrong with you? Don’t you like nice cafes and hand written chalk signs?”
Yet, what if it is no longer possible to reject society?
What if it is no longer possible to get get out, to drop out, be a true punk? What if they all end up street alcoholics, street ghosts in some Westcoast American city? Or Barnsley, South Yorkshire?
I’m not saying it is impossible, I’m saying what I’m feeling after years of ploughing my own furrow, trying, even if failing, to stay true to myself, only to feel washed up and washed out, watching generation after generation of temporary outcast adults, who momentarily sit in this waiting room with me, only to be routinely reified, re-dressed and ultimately reunited with conventional rites of passage. Whilst I remain stuck here.
I’ve seen myself in so many window reflections, which in turn becomes a reflection of the many lost souls I have seen every more desperately roaming our post-everything streets of Peaky Blinder haircunts (accidental typo, soz).
But I have felt locked behind a glass screen that mediates all messages for so long, I don’t know where it began, and I don’t know how to end it.
If one is a living ghost; the erotic body, the mortal body that finds its joy in the flowering processes of rites of passage, all seem impossible.
Over the past few years my behaviour has become more desperate and reckless, as any hope of getting to that stage where I am finally alive has become harder to be convinced about.
As a living ghost you see everything from the other side of life. You see what life is shored up to defend us against, in all its cold reptilian ambivalence.
Humans are fragile creates. We see ourselves as heroes, conquerers of universes. But more than anything we are deeply fragile and vulnerable. We need safe houses from the cold ambivalent reptilian suffering that surrounds us.
Rites of passage in a society like ours are far from ideal. But by god, a life without any is far worse.
Limbo will end. Limbo must end.
2024 WILL be better, because anything is better than being stuck in limbo.
When it comes to a life lived through formalities, and rites of passage, there has been no life to speak of.
Forgive me if this sounds like wallowing, it’s because Xmas time is really genuinely hard at the best of times. Seeing photos of couples, or families in xmas pyjamas, no matter the reality, compounds any suspicions I have that I’ve made a mess of my life.
For even if one has justifiable disdain to the conservative simulacra we’re encouraged to perform to show the wealth of our personal lives, if it’s the only boat one can sail on, then it must be boarded at the pain of having no boat at all – no life at all.
As I reach 40 I feel as trapped as ever behind a glass screen, which no matter how difficult I find to get past, how the frustration has nearly brought me to the brink so many times, it can cannot help but sound like “excuses, excuses” in any utterance made.
Social media has made life so profoundly worse that if it wasn’t so intentionally addictive, I wonder if those most responsible would be behind bars. Techniques that were once reserved for roadside billboards and TV commercial breaks are now employed to mediate relations between friends and associates.
You may say, ‘so what?’ – but once something so fundamental as a social animal connecting with others of its same species is captured and filtered by techniques that are designed to create a sense of lack, or envy, in the viewer, then there can be no doubt its impact on creating a society with a loneliness problem.
It’s embarrassing to say one may be lonely, and offensive to the many people who see me as a friend, but in all due respect this doesn’t prevent loneliness.
We all know xmas can be a lonely time. And it’s hitting me hard knowing I’m reaching one of the most important marker points of middle age in early January: turning 40.
I’ve seen so many manifestations of successive age groups, lost and found on the route to a full-bodied adulthood that paves way for a dignified death years down the line. Mortality isn’t mortality when no rites of passage are passed through, to you merely remain in limbo, shouting louder and louder, banging on the glass, but nobody can understand what your saying across a widening void of comprehension
The mute horror of seeing life’s landscapes inverted through the ghosts who, to everyone else, remain unnoticeable in the shadows, seeing your future reflection as they traipse between shoppers and revellers, trying not to be noticed by any judgemental, gossipy soul.
Sorry for this.
I admit I’m catastrophising.
But, historically, by the time my birthday comes around in early January, I’m psychologically on my knees. I’m feeling a lot of panic at the moment, about what kind of state I’ll be in come January.
I certainly don’t need any emotional auto-correct applied to my thoughts.
Life is hard at the moment. I do not mean for this to be self-indulgent, but I need to remind myself of what I’ve done in times like this.
This is a list of 20 things I have done that I feel most proud of during the last 20 years, including 20 of my favourite drawings at the end.
1.Ooon Badger(2006)
These aren’t the original recordings from the Ooon Badger CD I started handing out to my mates in Spring 2006. But it does contain some of them.
I’m specifically proud of ‘Ooon Badger’ as it was originally an alteration of my name on my school student planner, as a kind of piss-take I was on the receiving end of. But in 2006 I felt enough spring in my step to turn it on its head, and turn Ooon Badger into a zany alter ego.
I’d had a bad period of depression, which I dealt with by shaving my head, which oddly helped, and writing the most silly songs I’d ever written with the help of a cheap keyboard I bought off Barnsley market. I wrote all 10 songs in 10 days, and wrote the last song on this album in 10 minutes. Really proud of that.
I actually made friends with new people due to this album!
2. 2006 – Barnsley town hall and Emley Moor Mast Myspace profiles.
My middle year at the university centre in Barnsley was a bit of write off. Nobody was feeling the new building, and some of us sat discontent, wasting our academic hours on the learning centre computers.
Our ‘messing around’ would have been seen as a legitimate art project if we were Goldsmiths students, and not sat in Barnsley town centre, unaware that Goldsmiths even existed.
My friend created a Myspace account for the glamour model Jodie Marsh, which in-spite of contemporary ethical issues in doing so, was an act of genius, in the fact that he got all these random blokes from around Europe contacting him [her] asking her to come to their house(s). At which point my friend decided to change Jodie Marsh into ‘M Bison’, a character from the Street Fighter game. All Jodie’s admirers were massively confused.
I, on the other hand created Myspace profiles for both Barnsley town hall (male) and Emley Moor mast (female) who were in a ‘complicated’ relationship with each other.
3. 2004 – 2007.All the rest of the music
Between 2004 and 2008 I wrote probably 100’s of songs. At least 50 that I believe are still redeemable, if the day came to redevelop them.
People thought I was a joke, a bloke with a painted guitar, singing nasally, in an area in the grips of Libertines/Strokes-inspired indie bands – to the point that the NME described Yorkshire as the epicentre for these kind of bands.
I don’t know if this eventually got to me, along with the fact that my visual art was getting more attention, but in the autumn of 2008 I wrote around ten songs and then stopped, more or less indefinitely.
Some of these songs are from 2008, and some from an earlier period.
5. 2008 – Contrast, group show at Hive Gallery, Elsecar.
In November 2008 I did my first proper show, if that’s the right way of saying it, as in co-curated with a group of friends, and the owners of the now-gone Hive Gallery. Myself, and my friends Richard Kitson and Bradley Sharp opened this exhibition on the same night for an exhibition of works by the famous pop artist Peter Blake in the larger room.
Unfortunately I never really had the resources to take the sculptural element of the work I was developing further, although there may be another chance in the future.
I miss Hive Gallery.
6. (2008) ‘The Sprawl’
Drawing installation around my old bedroom door. The only reason I had such stamina for this work is because I was such a good spell, where I was in creative flow, largely because I felt at home in the time, and not chasing it, since ever after. I genuinely grieve for this part of my creative life.
The original sketch (3rd drawing along) was equally as memorable. Caffeine rush on the train home from Leeds (the composition is definitely Leeds-inspired), and just started scribbling down the composition in a manic manner that I would feel probably feel embarrassed to express in public now.
7. 2009 The Alpha Forest installation
I think I tried to upstage the aforementioned drawing, by making something even more ambitious. Unfortunately I began to lack the space and resources to work on such a scale there-on-after. My drawings remained big, but these drawings were huge – inspired by my first couple of years working front of house at the nearby sculpture park, but unaware how much room I’d actually need to make more of these.
This was also my first articulation of the struggles I was experiencing due to the competitive nature of our society. I was beginning to form a critique of a competitive individualism, which, as I saw, contradicted its own culture aims, by pushing people further towards conformity and mundanity.
8. 2010 The Tide of society
My first solo exhibition at the short-lived 433 gallery in Kelham Island in Sheffield, was a big thing in my little world. To exhibit in Sheffield may sound small fry to many, but I did my degree in my home town, my knowledge of the art world was expanding due to the working at the sculpture park, but it took until exhibiting Sheffield for people to actually start taking me even mildly seriously. The concept for this exhibition was an all-compassing show, which included an early naive attempt at self-publishing books.
9. 2011. Globalsapiens/Pandemic
In 2011 I was probably at the peak of a more ‘full-frontal’ kind of politicisation. 2011 was also a year of global political awaking, from uprisings in North Africa, to big large scale protest strategies around the most powerful financial cities. Despite the legacy of this period, at that time it felt like something big was just around the corner. It was terrifying and promising in equal measure. It was before the dual waves of gentrification and austerity turned our cities into Schizo-scapes of deep disassociation.
Maybe I strayed too far, severing my older creative needs; the fun in making that big serious projects often cannot tap into, and maybe I lost good friends in the process.
I was heavily involved in both Globalsapiens and Pandemic, two group shows in Sheffield that overlapped somewhat. The debates, arguments, ideas that were flung about in this period would perhaps be the most important to the work and larger projects I would go on to create thereon-after.
10. 2013 Now Then Publication
Now Then is a free city-wide independent magazine for culture in Sheffield (although I’m not certain it’s still physically distributed – not seen it for ages). In 2013 I was asked if I’d like my work to be featured in the magazine.
More people know about my work from seeing it in the May 2013 edition than for anything else I have ever done since.
11. 2015 – present. The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe.
From very early 2015 to the present, I have been involved in an artist collective, that at times has remained so true to its aims, that it has merely been spectrally present around the meat and potatoes of all things ‘art’.
Even though this may not have been the goal we consciously aimed for at the point of the collective’s inception, it certainly feels like the perfect artistic gesture, where manifestation of an idea often leads to its sanitisation under the spotlights of an age where artists must bend and contort themselves in order to do necessary box ticking, to the extent that the truth of their art becomes a lowly secondary afterthought.
Aside from all this, there were some great performative and participatory projects we undertook with the collective, which more than anything solidified close friendships, where we could rely on one another for necessary conversations in pubs and cafes that we felt nobody else would entertain.
12 ‘The Prisoners of reason’
In 2015 the academic writer S. M. Amadae, contacted me out of the blue telling me she was a big fan of my drawings and would like to use the drawing ‘The Logic of Neoliberalism’ for her upcoming book ‘Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy.
It was a real boost for my confidence, as by this point I was feeling tired from what felt like years of unsuccessfully trying to get shows/works in the ‘right kind of’ exhibitions – if you know you know.
13. 2016. Fighting for Crumbs
It’s taken me well over half a decade to be proud of this project.
It did me a lot of damage. I never took on any DIY project anything of this scale again. I could not understand how to apply what I did, what ideas I had to adhere to the available funding pots. So I did everything off my own back.
The project was a collective idea, but I took the lead with it, stretching it conceptually and geographically fit 2 cities; Wakefield and Sheffield (which wasn’t too difficult conceptually as both areas had similar industrial pasts and struggles). But then we were invited to take this exhibition to the upcoming ‘World Transformed’ event, held by Momentum, in Liverpool.
In hindsight, we did great, but I was so jaded and burn out by it all, and I never let my artistic ideas get that close to political projects ever again. I think art needs breathing space from political goals, no matter how urgent those goals may seem.
14. (2018 – 2020) Wall, I/A Eulogy for a lost decade
During the MA I was undertaking at Leeds, fortunately in the years preceding anything called ‘coronavirus’ I came to a realisation that I could adapt myself and work I made to the research structures that underpin life of all academics, including visual artists.
No matter how many books I read, how intellectualised my work could be, I could never reach a place where I could develop a ‘research focus’, from where I could use words such as ‘exploring themes of’, the language that oils the access routes into the arts.
It always felt like I was tying to the next stage but was blocked by some invisible wall, a sorted on inner wall that retarded my larger transcendental concepts back into self-consumed cries for an escape from myself.
Wall, I, was my response: a polite middle finger to what felt like an autocratic set of rules ofnhow to bean artist; to be interested in a research focus , yet simultaneously disintestered, seemingly, in their own truths, their own mortality, an awareness of such which is most surely the trigger for all artist impulses. I did this by scripting a film to 12 pop songs I co-wrote with an old school friend, Lee Garforth.
But, it wasn’t just a middle-finger exercise, it was probably the most important project I ever undertook. And I feel like it got its due in Doncaster, of all places, in a space run by ‘The New Fringe’. Surrounded by drawings from my last ten years, some which had never had any public exposure, this feels like the best presentation of my work in its totality to date.
15. (2020) The Bradgate Band
In March 2020 I started a job working with adults with learning disabilities, delivering art workshops. 2 weeks later the entire country was in its first ever lockdown since the days of the bubonic plague.
Nobody knew what the hell was going on. I ended up working temporarily in the residential house of a group of adult males who would usually have come to the day service.
Although i was expected to keep them entertained/help them cope with the bizarre circumstances, by doing art projects, I never expected to undertake what ended up being a make-shift album-making residency.
Writing songs about things these 4 residents liked/got up to, turning their favourite sayings into song lyrics, by the end of it we had an album!
I genuinely see it is not only one of the most fun projects I’ve been involved in, but one of the best!
16. (2020) “It’s War, then!
This video, using my own living self portrait as a locus for the internalisation of the divides caused by online culture wars, I ended up probably making one of the best one off works I’ve ever made.
17. (2020) Fundraiser for Barnsley Rough Sleepers project.
As winter and the second lockdown of 2020 creeped up, I decided to ask fellow artists from the Barnsley area to help me set up an art auction for a charity set up to help people experiencing really difficult lives in the town.
We raised over 2000 pounds in what felt a dual positive outcome, of helping some of the most vulnerable in our town, whilst also showcasing a good section of the town’s visual artists.
18. (2022/23)A Radical Redemption/Back to Normalism
These exhibitions left a lot to be desired; I was often working in solitude and could have really have used some critical support before the exhibitions were up and over in developmental sense.
However, some of the features, the elements where I used introspection to speak of some of the most problematic issues in contemporary society, as well as combining sculpture with my map-making, were big leaps forward for the future.
I just need to keep a level head on me at the moment, as despite all this progress, and projects in the next couple of years, I feel very lost and at risk of scrapping all the hard work I’ve put into everything along the way.
19. (2023)- Stories from the outside
Stories from the outside are a new series of texts I’ve been developing that link together some very important things about my life with the landscape that surrounds me, in a way I am actually really proud of. Fingers-crossed this is the start of something much bigger.
20. (2006- present) Drawings
And here is simply 20 of the all time favourite of my large scale drawings.
The late John Berger suggested that the body of work of an artist could only be completed by death. When talking about the 20th century artist Giacometti he suggested the artist’s ” …act of looking was like a form of prayer …a way of approaching but never being able to grasp an absolute”.
Giacometti’s sculptures, so painfully and inhumanly thin that their morose meditations are inescapable to any viewer, are, in every sense focussed on an increasingly refined line, that of a human body moving towards its total disappearance, the only wholeness, the only completeness.
The world of Giacometti may have preceded an age where eating disorders are commonplace, but they certainly elude to the anorexic’s compulsive objective to bring the body to a place delicately balanced between life and death – a line that aims to be so fine it constitutes the vanishing point of being.
In the wake of the pandemic life going forwards has ceased to feel like it is going forwards at all.
For many of us ‘imperfect’ pre-pandemic life has been left broken into unfixable pieces by the trauma of the total halt and stop/start of the machinic rhythms of contemporary life we were trained to live by.
Stagflation is experienced as much as a physical trauma as an economic situation, as a kind of continuation of lockdown brain fog. Even while it is mandatory to get up and running as an unending austerity creeps through the bedroom windows of those who thought they’d be safe forever, it just doesn’t feel possible to get going again, without breaking back down, again.
Consequently, in a way that reflects my younger adult self, edging sideways when anorexia could no longer sustain the balance between having to be something, and not being at all, I’ve found myself edging sideways once more.
It may seem like ‘running away’, going up onto these hills as the threads holding our advanced society together continue to slowly erode, but political engagement feels harder than ever. Such engagement requires us to attach our every inhalation and exhalation to a greater goal, but this requires a conviction that ones life can obtain forward direction and is a life worth fighting forwardly for.
A collective political will is a delicate thing, and since the pandemic it lay smashed into many pieces, in an incoherent rubble where the political and personal lay together, refracting stories that no longer captivate.
Edging sideways has always been a last resort for all life that has no choice but to find something else…
All landscapes that we carry in our hearts, for good and bad, begin to conflate the body and land into one. We emotionaly identify with the wounds and fissures in our home towns, and think through the hills around it.
The hills that hang, at the side-ways glance, above the area where I have lived my life, form a vanishing point that is one with the vanishing point of not knowing how to be, not knowing how to comply the body with the demands of the ‘down here’ without being fatally insufficient .
Anorexia is the pursuit of the minimal point of existence, as one tries to escape from ones own body in this world it occupies. Trying to miminise the presence and complicity of their body to a fine line that remains in perpetuity on the precipice between life and death.
But not death….
The desire was never NOT to be, just not to this physical self in the physical space of ‘down there’ where humiliation and insufficiency clung to every breath.
As I walk the roads that served as the gateways to the tops I rarely actually made it to, with music I once had on cassette tapes, memories are triggered of thumbing my many variants of the Nokia 3310 model, waiting for a young woman to text me, to ask if I am ‘out tonight’.
Alcohol replaced anorexia in a pattern that remained in place even as the texts and the hopeful encounters long since passed.
I was always, and admittedly still am, fixed on a sense that secure, guaranteed intimacy with another is a way out of escaping an incomplete self to find a completeness to my being.
It is a completeness that presumes death, all rites of passage do. But markers in life that remind us that mortality is only ever morbid if one remains stuck in limbo outside of life, until death finally takes them.
The wind turbines, which from their base, assume the same lunar-like quality of the distant stream of lights on the Woodhead pass, also assume the characteristic of a fleet of lighthouses, like Guardian guides. In this midpoint between both seas, there are oceanic qualities, and like looking out to sea, vision precedes all sound; an oddity on a land of noisy, anxious hurrying.
Escaping from becoming in a reality where there is nothing one can, or wants to become as defined my adult life.
Maybe this will never end, even as I roll into my home town for yet another chance to disgrace my anorexic angel, messaging disgust at the sweaty, messy fallibility of myself.
But rushing forwards isn’t going to work now, that’s why I’ll remain here, edging out sideways, like an ancient discoverer of this land, hoping that something unexpected can manifest out of nowhere, because nowhere is the only place it can come from now.
Look after yourself over the next 3 weeks of Xmas Grim.
In this post-covid quagmire of futureless hyperbole, ones inner void can be tested to the limit as the volume is set to 12, as we realise the smell of ammonia will never lead to its necessary post-mortem, but to the next zombie goosestep to the latest in-vogue bars.
The longing, that makes our cavernous interior feel endless, for the never realised promises of the self-denying metropolis we occupy, never ceases to question the surface of the world we must be within.
It’s been hard not to crave anything but quieteness since the pandemic threw us off the 200mph treadmill, only to expect us to get back on at 400mph.
For this reason, as we still stumble in the wake of the ruins of the 2010’s dreaming, I will try to be on the moors more than pubs.
I had a dream last night. I can’t even remember what it was about, but to be honest the fact I know I had a dream is rare enough. Once more, from I how felt upon waking, it wasn’t a bad dream, it was a dream about being alive.
Just the sensation of romance, for an object of desire or for the world at large, slowly deflates like a balloon slowly losing air, as the components that harden your chest slide into place within the day at hand.
You want to find somebody who will listen when you say “I’ve had enough: it shouldn’t be like this”, but most of them are too busy trying not to think about it to be enable to give you that empathy you need so much.
Better you forgot the dream in the first place.
A night
In the waking hours before my dreaming I had failed to control my frustration again.
I was holding it together so well! Keeping The Noise in check. Channeling it on to better things. Or so I thought. I can’t help noticing the invisible punches, and believe me, it’s better if you don’t. Especially when I see them landing on far-less fortunate folk than myself, who meander amidst our blindspots on normally-familiar streets; who lacked my support system; who were destined to lose in ‘the game’ before they even got started.
I’d kept my cool since the new year began, but it literally took one thing, the hiking of already high rail travel prices, to start a downward spiral that put the seal on the soundtrack of this day.
It all fell back on me like an poorly stacked supermarket aisle.
Cumulative computerised images of the “Epic Fail” culture came streaming back into my head, as the woman sat across from me on the train pointed out that an abandoned water bottle I pushed off the table in front of me in frustration was leaking onto the seat opposite.
I felt like a paint-by-numbers pathetic person her judgmental gaze easily took the moral high ground, and in a 100 variations of the scene she was correct in 99.9. But in that 0.1 variation I had so much aimless and hopeless empathy for the hundreds of angry people who become “Epic fail virals”.
We shout “get down, mate” as their morally-wayward actions slap them in the face in front of a camera phone. We don’t question anything else, literally everything that happened prior to that.
I moved from this no-doubt decent woman’s gaze, and found a seat on the next carriage.
I want to be wherever I am not. I want what they (seem to) have, but I don’t want to be them. I want to be myself but the not the self who I am.
I know the railway lines between the disjointed conurbations of urban Yorkshire so well that there is barely enough room left to know anything else.
I stare at the train destination boards, like they’ll show me a way forward, or a way out of this hour of exhaustive indecision, often because the only other way out available is in the nearby pub.
No gap year trips when my find need to get out is so immediate. I waste any savings on train tickets to nearby cities, trips that anyone else would see as pointless.
The deadlock I have usually becomes unavoidable within the Christmas/New Year burnout. Maybe it’s the sight of so many young rosy-faced adults with luggage (the clear indication of having purpose and of being wanted, by someone).
When I’ve got a project on the go, I can shout ‘I have a destination too!”, knowing that once the project fades to grey under the passing weeks, I’ll once more become a wandering ghost on these streets.
Class plays a large part, and as much as I get close to losing friends when I utter this unspeakable word, the reason I bring it up isn’t so straightforward. I’m quite honest about where I stand, precisely because I have never known where I stood.
It took me way too long to realise that those who humoured me in polite conversations held in jobs which were to them, mere stop gaps, had preordained destinations, high or low, before them.
I never knew how to get along in the world I had to get along in because I didn’t know how to be anything in this world.
The view from nowhere
So here I am in an overly-familiar train station, on a day off from work, anxiously thinking how I can break through the aimlessness, knowing that I no longer have the time to dwell.
You go to University. You make far-flung friends. Develop a full-student life. I see you when go back to your home town at xmas. Showering glittery sprinkles of ‘elsewhere’ upon its dying night life that usually has to rely on underage drinkers and those embroiled in slow battles with their own deaths of despair.
We cross paths agains as you head back to university on the 29th/30th December for New Years’ celebrations with your new friends. Suitcases at railway stations.
I see you one last time, when you leave University and have a brief spell of indecision in low pay, temp jobs.
Then you slowly evacuate ‘the building’ for goodto a relatively-fast ascent to career-building and family life-building in the appropriate community where people talk and think like you.
I try resent not you. And perhaps, if I do, it’s because part of me wants to be just like you, and find myself cheerfully nestled into those appropriate communities too.
I’m not even pretending you haven’t got heaps of shit weighing you down you as well.
It’s just that from this view from Nowhere, you are people, and that’s what I don’t feel like much of the time.
You’re all grown up now….
Except you’re not. You’re a human bonsai tree.
I walk out of the station to find a pub that I already know the location of. I do a round walk through empty December streets, cursing a pre-new year urban landscape that talks over you every time you justify your life.
I try so hard not to be like this, genuinely.
Today was another day when I really wanted the streets to open up and welcome me, so that I didn’t end up staring at train destinations hoping my number would come up.
I have longed to see the cold city streets warm with compassion, warm with a knowledge that if I were to fall on harder times on this street, people wouldn’t walk past me as they race to sustain their position within the miserable middlemass that suffocates the unreabilitatable vulnerables.
A pessimist is resigned to such a world.
I’m a damaged optimist, who like many opened his heart incautiously to a world that fortifies emotions behind closed doors, of fear, with spite for anybody who believed they could flower out in the open. I survived by becoming lost in another life, a life that has long since had any cause, but has lead to nowhere else either.
The night is cold, revealing the stress scars on my face.. I accidentally glare in at a female only fitness club just as its members appear to reach their endorphin climax. I turn away quickly, trying not to look like a creep.
I see a Guardian newspaper headline telling me to cut down my drinking to no more than a pint a day. But there’s no Guardians here for me now, as I try to avoid my need for alcoholic comfort.
It is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a five a day diet in a sick society, or something or other.
As I get to pub, I’ve caught a strange lull and there is spare seats for a lone drinker. I’m smiling in the pub I enter because a barman error lands me with a free pint, and somebody plays Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive, a paint pallette for perpetual pop invention, on the jukebox. Little things make the here and now manageable. I just wish it could last…
I admit it surprised me recently to hear Keir Starmer speak about the ‘collective trauma’ of the recent decade, and of a society of people who no longer feel like they have a future’.
I know that nothing coming from the mouth piece for a mere electioneering PR exercise should surprise me. But I wasn’t so much surprised because it was such a jarring statement alongside his recent ones, such as his praise for Thatcher. It was the fact that it was deemed relevant in the focus groups he speaks to for him to speak of a collective hopelessness..
It felt like the moment when a murdered body dumped into the river with rocks tied to it finally breaks free and rises to the surface one cold winter morning.
Why? Because it reminded me of a rare moment when mental illness began to be seen as a political issue.
Because for me, to speak of a lack of a belief in a better future, and thus of collective hopelessness is to perhaps accidentally speak of mental illness as being a political issue. Hopelessness by its very meaning is the inability to believe that life can get any better, and in fact can only get worse, or at least continue in a situation already experienced as painful.
As somebody who admits to being ill-equipped to deal with academic life, I have leant ignorantly heavily on the work of the late Mark Fisher for more than a decade. But there’s a reason for this.
Two chapters through Capitalist Realism in the summer of 2010, I was excited in a way I’ve never been whilst reading non-fiction: it was there, in a way that had never been explained to me before. I almost instantly recognised my own struggles with mental illness as political issues.
True, passive liberal commentary, made by self-policing gatekeepers, too scared to say anything too overt that may make them lose their slot on a weekly chat show, would keep the ball rolling by saying things like “skinny people in adverts put pressure of people to be unrealistically thin”. But it would never go as far as was necessary to understand how emotional suffering may have its roots in how our society and economy is organised.
Fisher spelled it out, whether when talking about stress in the workplace, teenage apathy, or the nihilism in the music of Nirvana and Joy Division.
Hopelessness is normally experienced as a personal failing. But this was Fisher’s point; no matter the horror of the world, we internalise it, because any genuine sense of collectivity, a sense we can actually emotionally experience this, has all but disappeared for many. This is his argument, and I agree, that there that been a political strategy in countries like UK since the 1980s to privatise people, and in turn prevent them having political consciousness.
The fact that we all privately know that so many of us feel the same merely impounds the hopelessness unless there is a tangle sense that things can change, a tangible horizon beyond which things can genuinely be different.
This is why, with the failing of the genuinely progressive political energies of the 2010s, came the return of an endemic privatised hopelessness. We don’t just live in the failure of a left wing Labour Party, we also live under the failure of the politicisation of mental illness.
In a world of so much mediated horror and sadness I imagine I’m not alone in experiencing hopelessness about the world and myself in a kind of closed circuit: “I can’t see any hope for things to get better in the world” becomes “I can’t see any hope for myself because I’m a useless piece of shit”.
On a personal level, my way of measuring the general collective emotional state is through looking at male friends who, 8 years ago were fully behind the Corbyn Labour Project, only now to be full of the politics of resent fuelled by reactionary content creators, as their hearts fill up with hopelessness about their lives getting better.
To understand where this energy has gone, we don’t just need to look at the formal political defeats of progressive movements, we need to look what I see as the two main forces for change on social media platforms: political justice and self-help/improvement.
Some self-help content creators (by which I mean anything from therapists with a social media presence, life coach content creators, deemed toxic or non-toxic, all the way down to people who just use their profile to create self-help content) may have a visible political conscience, and feel a moral obligation to speak out on situations such as the current Palestine slaughter. But as a collective force, especially since the traumatically isolating period of the Covid lockdowns, it is about the private self, and how one can improve the emotional and physical well-being of their private self.
This stands in total opposition to the force of political and social justice, which, split from a genuine connection to simultaneously looking after oneself, becomes hostile to this, hostile to our desire to simply feel OK one night, when we know something bloody horrific is going off elsewhere in world, yet feel powerless to intervene.
Ultimately, self-help and self-improvement, in this kind of climate, requires a hell of a lot energy spent on dissociating ourselves from things we see with our own eyes (such as the army of homeless that has been building over the last decade). It makes our geo-political situations, even our national situation, seem insurmountable, especially once one gets trapped in the ‘hopeless world/hopeless me’ circuit.
Fundamentally something new needs to emerge, and nobody knows when or if, because like the movement of the 2010s, it has to emerge almost as if out of nowhere.
Neither the crucial role walking has had in my adult life, nor my acute psychogeographical knowledge of a certain clump of land in Northern England are things I instantly associate with pride and personal qualities.
None of my walking has ever required metal sticks, flasks or waterproofs, the kind of walking you organise beforehand, nor has it assumed the look of a more fashionable idea of a metropolitan pyschogeographer, pleasurably assuming a role of a wanderer.
Mostly, I’ve craved anomnyous, often impossibly so.
My walking is intrinsically bound up with the reasons I spend way too much time trying to remain anonymous in town centre cafes, spend way too much time making short distance train journeys, and have spent a regrettable amount of time staring at LED railway notice boards, quasi-religiously praying for a clue about a destination where I may find some kind inner resolve.
These writings in this book are about both landscape and mental illness in equal measure.
admittedly self-indulgent,
I’m talking about walking as an affirmation of the will to keep going…
…that wherever these forward footsteps lead must surely be better than where I am walking from.
In our contemporary lives, the pressure to ‘be something’, whatever that may be is airborne, and indeed experienced as a physical force.
Anorexia, as a state of being, is a meeting place of many felt-pressures, indeed, one could morbidly call it an artistic expression; a body twisted into poetry by many invisible violent hands.
Anorexia is an extreme expression of an age of extreme demands.
It is a state of flight from the very demand to make something and do something with one’s flesh. It staves it off as long as possible.
It is the flagship reaction to not knowing any live in this world, whilst remaining alive.
But there are numerous expressions of this reaction. Many that provoke far less sympathy.
Why did I act in ways to avoid becoming? Because I couldn’t see myself becoming in any form I could find bearable.
I ‘couldn’t do a normal job’, I told myself, as much as I secretly craved a normality that seemed to be so comfortably tolerated by so many, all I foresaw was a life bent into misery by a force far greater than myself.
I saw my future: an ugly useless bloated body, slipping into a hole where comfort eating was my only pleasure in a meaningless life.
I saw myself reduced to beast form, like Saddam Hussein, reduced to cave life, captured eating the comfort snacks of his captors.
I saw a horrible shape of a person, but I saw nothing that gave me any idea of anyway i could live with dignity, in a world that understood bodying only as a performative ritual to either attain or retain a decent income.
My walking began as a way of keeping this dread at bay.
But slowly, the act of walking began to define me.
I also ran, and along with walking, I began to be pointed out by random drinkers on nights out, some more friendly than others, in their exclamatory remark of “I see you everywhere!”.
As much as I tried to hide it, and make it look ‘normal’, I was everywhere.
Everywhere in a 1-10 mile radius of my home.
Anywhere but static, anywhere but sat with myself, a self that felt the pressure to do something in order to ‘be’ something!
I still experience the tight chested-ness, the icy breaths that inhale dread when I even imagine it.
Anywhere but here….
In some ways, nothing has happened in the 20 plus years of my adult life because I have been walking.
Walking around nearby cities, in all weathers. Increasingly caught in a blank space between the haves and the totally-have nots, as a more aggressively dissociative strain of Thatcherite individualism began to spread in the years following the Tory austerity program.
Like many who old deep regrets about wasted life, I often wish I could sit with my 20 year old self, and tell him not to panic. That what he is feeling right now, as he sits with himself after a drunken lapse into binge-eating, will pass.
But, here I am, more or less 40, and still panicking. Do I really want to rely on my 60 year old self to come and rescue me?
Like anorexia, walking has been a form of managing time and managing a body, but it has been so much more.
When I do my silly little 3 mile walk into my town centre, regardless of the same disheartened outcomes, long unfulfilled desires, the walk takes me forwards in my heart.
And every time I have done this walk for the last 20 years I see a better place infront of me than the one I am walking from.
As I begin my ascent up to the tops, I try to break free of my cyclical doings on the foothills, too close to the claustrophobic wrapping of the weekend – an intense atmosphere where I exercise the very best and worst in me. New depths of contempt and idealist manifestos crisscross in my thoughts, like currents formed by arms trying to swim to some sensical space.
“I always end up where I was, and who I was, before.”
The Woodhead pass looks like a river made of Mercury as I recognise it from the midpoint of my ascent, as the sun shines back from countless car roofs making it match with what still seems like a kind of pilgrimage.
And I’ve always wanted to reach the Metropolis on its other side, only to realise it’s no lost world, no place where things are done differently, after all.
I’m still climbing up to my horizon here to see if there is something beyond this reality. And I don’t care what more far-flung wanderers think of this, because this area, for me, sometimes contains an otherworldly essence, like a gateway to another celestial body.
Domestication kicks in and I turn back, perhaps still feeling the weekend pressure.
But Stocksbridge Bypass valley almost breaks me as the thirst and exhaustion kick in. I feel embarrassed by how weak I feel, as the eyes of drivers inevitably scrutinise all objects on this road. The road is weird to begin with, as if it transfers you into a different reality, once you break its brow from the other direction. My weariness and paranoia allow the road to take on an almost mythologised representation of itself, as the ravines, pylons and conifer plantations begin to make the land look consciously inhospitable
By the time I reach Sheffield I’m massively relieved. But not before long I feel estranged amidst the weekend endeavours.
Relief turns into shame, as clothes that seemed fine in my rucksack now form creases that look like the kind sad face that attracts unwanted attention. With these concerns occupying my thoughts every time I see a crowd of revellers, I look for the quieter roads.
Yet, diversion after diversion, as the city demolishes its post-war past, force me back onto the same roads as the revellers. At this point I decide that it’s safe to call it a night, and to start again tomorrow.
Sunday…
There’s strangely a peace to Sunday evenings, that reassures, quells anxieties revved up to max by mid Saturday afternoon.
…it means that our post-working-hour walk up onto the very tops of hills between Yorks and Manchester is going to work out OK today.
It’s September, so the day is still light enough, and the frantic white noise of August has receded.
These barren stretches up here seem to open up the melancholia that hides behind the 24/7 smile of life down below.
Perhaps its truth allows us to feel at ease, ridding ourselves of social status anxiety like removing the weight of a poorly-designed work uniform.
Even if one walked too far into this early autumn sunset, there would be no anxiety, not even in mortal danger– all you would have is clean fresh fear, a sensation that is somewhat different from the humiliating stink of anxiety that clings to us down below.
We look over to both Saddleworth Moor and Holme Moss.
A beginning. Or the ending?
Reaching land’s end, within the land.
This area is like a frontier, even if there turns out to be nothing beyond it.
Nothing more down there…
We look down to where the first few cluster-settlements start to draw out the beginnings of a Greater Manchester sprawl that changes from cobbled-stone to glass and concrete within our hazy horizon.
We then look at the point where the green farming land gives up to the desert-like tops. End and beginnings that illustrate how it all began, and then spread everywhere else.
Like the streams that flow down to form the necessary rivers of this ‘first’ industrial city, I think of the flows of people coming down from these hills, the upheavals, the Peterloo Massacre, the endless rows of workers crammed together, the hopes, aspirations for something better, which informed a pop music that in turn informed the world.
All for what? A single slot of competition in consumption? An Instagram App on an Iphone? An overpriced hovel overlooking other, lesser, hovels?
Surely this can’t be how it all ends?
The silence up here separates it from everywhere else below on this noisy land. As up here, like staring at the sea, or into space, you can see things move before you can hear them moving. In a noise-filled age this is almost non-existent.
What is the use of thought down there, when it seems reduced to shards of information in perpetual battle for dominance with one another? These monochrome colours and featureless plains help bleach that noise, opening our eyes like portals to a frontier out of which sprung our industrialisation, and into which we see a space waiting, waiting, and waiting, to be filled by a future.
John B Ledger 