Strange Ask…
I’ve lost an important (to me) drawing I was working on whilst was documenting the growth of a tree I planted almost 10 year ago, on the South/West Yorks border, as part of an art project. Sometimes it seems impossible to grasp at genuine optimism in the world we have molded (and sometimes it seems to off the mark to discuss such small things then such big things have happened just up the road!), but all the same the tree does as least serve as an totem for optimism in my life, whether empty, half empty, half full.
But my scatterbrain approach to task management meant that whilst I was taking this photo I almost certainly placed a creamed-coloured carrier bag on the ground with an A3 drawing in it that was very important to me. A drawing, which although dark, was darkly optimistic about how, as a species, we are ready for another stage, another type of society now – but ATM it’s blocked from us. It’s taken up much of my days already.
It may only seem minor in light of things, but I’d be unbelievably thankful to anyone who could end up finding it for me. Cheers
A Lifetime’s Worth of Staring at Train Announcement Boards
A semi-fictional broth of occurrences over the past few days.
A morning
I had a dream last night. Fuck knows what it was about. But to be honest, what it was about isn’t important anyway. What is important is that I had a dream, and judging my lack of anxiousness when I woke, it wasn’t a bad dream.
You henceforth feel like a balloon slowly losing air, as the components of your daily servitude to the system slide into place, like they’re literally replacing your organs and ligaments. You want to find somebody who will listen when you say “I’ve have enough: it shouldn’t be like this”, but most of them are too busy trying not to think of it to be enable to classify you as of this earth for suggesting such a thing. Better you forgot the dream in the first place.
A night
Under Invisible punches
In the waking hours before my dreaming I had failed to control my frustration again. But I was holding it together so well! Keeping The Noise in check. Channeling it onto better things. Or so I thought. Cumulative blows, that I’m all the more sensitive to because I’m constantly noticing them, especially when I see them landing on the far-less fortunate folk than myself, who meander amidst our blindspots on normally-familiar streets; who lacked my support system; who were destined to be “losers” 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 profit-seeking hiking of rail travel prices, to start a downward spiral that put the seal on the soundtrack of this day.
It all fell back on me: the injustices and fears of a world set into a motion I cannot often see a favourable end to. Cumulative computerised images of the “Epic Fail” culture came pouring 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. The way I felt her judgmental gaze on me for my surface-level unacceptable behaviour, like I was a paint-by-numbers pathetic person, gave me aimless and hopeless empathy for the hundreds of angry people who become “Epic fail virals” because of a surface-level idiocy that I can’t help but believe is due to an unmanageable deeper stress. What can I say? I’m a humanist.
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 the difficulties they may also have as the world becomes an harder and more fucked up place. Because, despite glimmers of the willing for a more compassionate world, we sense the dog eat dog nature of a lonely and competitive reality, and we respond accordingly.
Sometimes it seems as if the air around me is solidifying and compressing. An agitated persona follows suit – we can see it all around. And it is for this reason that, before I felt compelled to punch the seat, I moved from this no-doubt decent woman’s gaze, and found a seat on the next carriage.
A Day
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 I am.
I know the railway lines between the dysfunctional conurbations of SouthWest Yorks so well that there is barely enough room left to know anything else. The trousers I own, the shoes I wear, seem to be preprogrammed to march me to these destinations.
I stare at the train destination boards, like they’ll show me a way forward, or a way out – but with a 75% chance I’ll be seeking the substitute sedative of cider via a nearby pub after this hour of exhaustive indecision. No gap year trips when my wage packet can only stretch to the day in hand…for every day of my adult life. Although it isn’t an adult life at all – let’s be straight, I’m stunted…but at least I accept it.
Wise I bring the Gap Year up, I guess.
The deadlock I have usually skirted around with artistic focus for ten plus years 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). It certainly helps impound a sense of lacking a life. As long as I’ve got a piece of art or exhibition on the go, I have a life. As soon as they end I become a wandering ghost on these streets I speak so much of.
Class plays a large part. It really does. I would never underplay this issue of class. You veer close to losing friends when talking ‘class’; it’s one thing many feel so uncomfortable about. I’m quite honest about where I stand, precisely because I have never known where I stood.
I was born into a poor family. Mining, and mill stock. My parents were really struggling. My dad had no job, as the majority of the community, including many of my uncles, fought for theirs in the 1984 Miners strike – the year in which I was born. We had to rely on family and friends. If I’m honest I think most my clothes were second hand until the early 1990’s, by which time my dad had toiled to get a degree and a teaching job against all odds. It looked like our family were in the process of adding the generational improvement of livelihood.
Yet, esteem issues, likely formed in the days before I could speak, due to our family being reliant, and thus subservient to others, seemed to cling on, and on, until I realised they’d clung on way into an adult life where everybody seemed to be headed for some destination, high or low, except me.
My village was literally split (by one road) between a middle class commuter estate built around the same time as the motorway arrived, and the council estates built for people who worked in the local mines, and the not-too-distant sewing factories. The cul-de-sac I grew up on was neither, and I was neither. I came from one, went half-way to the other, and ended up nowhere. I felt bad around the kids from the estate, like a traitor, due to our adoption of a handful or more traditionally middle class values. I felt bad around the settled middle class kids on the other estate, because I felt too common, too clearly ‘thick’ (I was mildly illiterate for much of my teenage life). It was the mid 90’s and the carrot and stick of Blair-year aspiration had convinced us all in some way or another that the middle class lifestyle wasn’t just desirable it was compulsory.
It’s taken me until my 30’s to realise how important confidence is to getting on in life. Without some self-belief you are well and truly stuck. I never knew how to get along in the world I had to get along in because I didn’t know who I was in this world – I didn’t really like who I thought I was because on each side of the fence I felt like an fraud, and imposter. But, getting to the point, this in-between place also gives you clear insight into the strong relationship between class and confidence.
I was an very detached child. Daydreams were mandatory, and I despised any interference in them. I had ideas, desires, expectations. But I came to realise that none of them were practical. Art studies seemed like the only realistic thing I could do. It ensued that my way of finding new and inventive ways of saying ‘fuck you’ (and little else to be honest) to the larger scheme of things (that was increasingly beginning to frighten after the unofficial millennium inauguration of 9/11) would be a semi-sufficient confidence-builder for my fast-approaching 20’s.
My life, and art, became so wrapped up in the ominousness of climate change, relentless capitalism and social breakdown as the first decade of the millennium passed into the second, that I completely unanticipated that I would be 30 one day, and, as the things that concerned me so much unfolded (as they clearly are doing), I’d still have to deal with life as a man in his 30’s come-what-may. I came here totally unprepared.
So here I am, in a well-known train station, on a day off from work, anxiously thinking how I can break through an aimlessness, knowing that I no longer have the time to dwell. And I’m asking any potential reader to bear all the previous text in mind when reading the apparent sweeping judgmental outlook of the following story, as I waited, waited, and watched in station terminals in the 2 Week-period around the Christmas/New Year.
The view from the fault-line
You go to University. You make far-flung friends. Develop a full-student life (sometimes finding yourself a misplaced target of anger from confused and angry drunk old men, once employed in the long-gone heavy industries, from a time before ‘University’ became this city’s main industry). You leave for Xmas and go back to your home town. Showering glittery sprinkles of ‘elsewhere’ upon its dying night life that usually has to rely on underage drinkers and mid-life crisis drunks. (I am neither of these, but this is where I see you all the same).
You head back to university on the 29th/30th December for New Years’ celebrations with your new friends. Suitcases at railway stations (this is where I see you for the second time). You leave University, have a brief spell of indecision involving low pay, temp jobs, Gap Years and other temporary crutches (this is where I see you, and briefly humour you, for the 3rd time). Then you slowly evacuate ‘the building’ for the relatively-fast ascent to career-building and family life.
Yet it doesn’t always happen this way; some of us slip between the fault-lines of the perpetual ruptures of contemporary life, and some of us can’t quite figure out how we even managed to complete a fecking degree in the first place, because we have always felt stuck in a fault-line.
I never went to university. I’ve got a degree, yes, but I never did Uni. I mean, I tried twice, and failed twice. But I was in and out of both too fast to be remembered. I got my degree qualification in my home town. Whatever you think or say about Barnsley (of which I am qualified to do due to being umbilically tied to it), it was never a ‘university town’. Some of the tutors you have, some of people you meet, are great – but it was never a university town (nor should it have to be, I guess).
I don’t resent you. Course I don’t resent you, as part of me wants to be like you. And I’m not assuming you haven’t got heaps of shit weighing you down on a daily basis. But from the view from the fault line you are people, and that’s what I don’t feel like much of the time.
I just lack something.
You’re all grown up now….
Except you’re not. You’re like a bonsai tree, “a bud that never flowers”. I walk out of the station to a pub, cursing a pre-new year landscape that talks over your story in your head every time you justify your life, to the extent that you begin to curse everything in sight.
I try so hard not to be like this. Today was another day when I really wanted those avenues to open up in front of me, so that I didn’t end up staring at train destinations hoping my number would come up.
My truth comes back to me. I know I’m somehow in the right when I look around and see that this is a world that can now only persist through cynicism. A world where we treat the swaves of unhappy teenagers with condescending contempt, ascertaining the assertion that these mere teenage blues will die, that they will take their indie posters down and eventually find their ‘safety niche’ within the cynical superstructure.
I’m talking of the chasm, where compassion should rest, in a Britain that’s been Tory in spirit for decades now. A miserable middlemass that suffocate the unreabilitatable vulnerables. A pessimist is resigned to such a world. Me, a pessimist? No, I’m a damaged optimist, who like many opened his heart incautiously to a cynical world, and survived by becoming lost in another life, a life that has long since had any cause, but has lead to nowhere else either.
OneNationTory (2015)
The night is cold, revealing the stress scars on my face, as always. I accidently glare in at a fitness club just as its members appear to reach an endorphinated climax. 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, or “guides to take me by the hand”; no real understanding of how helplessly walking past another casualty of the homeless epidemic, and then seeing my gaunt face stare back at me from a ‘Tory screen’ telling me how they’re helping the working person, is going to engineer a need for alcoholic comfort.
None of this will be understood until we all come to an agreement that “it is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a five a day diet in Cameron’s Britain”. Until that point this is just another blog pissing into Digital Rain. You can bunk up the tax on drink all you like, because in ToryNation we’ll always find a way to pay.
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…
Unity Arts Launch Exhibition (upcoming exhibition)
I will be showing 3 of my works The Index of Child Well-being, The Place of Dead Ends, and Whilst We Were all In The Eternal Now… as part of Unity Arts’ Grand Opening Event, which will take place on Saturday 6th Sept 2014 at Unity Works, Wakefield. Please visit if you can.
The exhibition will run for 3 weeks and close on Sunday 28th September.
The day ‘the Torch’ came for us….
The old feudal identity of such nations as Britain clings on! Now, I am obviously not suggesting that the Olympics has anything Empirically to do with this feudal order, which openly continues in an opaque form, and secretly exists in a solid form, but all the events in such a country as ours exploit this feudalistic nature of this culture to demand interest form the population when push comes to shove regardless of their objective interests previously; old Europe, despite its superficial advancements is still pretty much the beast it was in medieval times. Of course, the best one can do is to ignore the entire spectacle; ignore the shouts for us to open our doors and run out onto our streets waving flags; don’t give it the power it gains from hype, be it positive or negative. But the media doesn’t allow this: it makes the hype so omnipresent that we cannot but help robotically repeat the latest gossip.I would argue that 2012 as been a year of great counterrevolutionary endeavours by the power structure of this nation especially: all attempt has been made by the state to pacify growing conscious/and pure reactionary dissent (such as the riots) that to an untrained gaze seemed to spring from nowhere in 2011 to oppose the entirety of the insanity of capitalism under the easy to grasp banner of opposition to the cuts . I think anybody who wants a better future for us all had good reason to be optimistic at the end of 2011 that awareness and distrust in the system was growing. But this growing and justly felt threat the nation state feels, as it tries to protect capitalist interests from the people it claims to protect, had a great chance to be eased this year with so many ‘events’ which it could exploit to both distract people and give them a false sense of belonging and happiness, in the hyperbole that precedes the climax of such events – from which the ensuing emptiness one should expect to feel has hopefully (for the state) lost track of any of the likely causations. So far this year, it looks like they have done a very good job at distracting us.
But there again, once all this dies down and we all wake up to a society even worse than before the hype set in, things could actually really kick off. But with weather patterns more dodgy by the year applying a background crescendo to the unavoidably obvious uncertainty about a century still in its infancy, what so scares me about all of this is also the source of what gives me most reason to get out of the bed in the morning and convince myself that I (with what little I actually do) may be part of a new human force to change things for the better.
I had to trawl through all the old household photo collection to find what I wanted; you know, photos from a time when they actually meant something, before images of everybody from every place at every time where splattered upon the social networking sites; you know, the times when it took a couple of weeks before you’d see the photos – not just the next morning when you check your online accounts to finds photos of your drunken self from only 6 hours previous.
These are images of Woolley Colliery in the 1990’s – before it was demolished and whilst it was being demolished. (apologies for their poor quality).
(Woolley Colliery – in the background – in the middle of being demolished by explosives, in 1993)
(Woolley colliery – the left of the picture – before it was demolished and before the factories were built in the foreground)
Within the valley (upper Dearne valley) I grew up in, these were the last traces of a landscape and meaning of the place I was born into disappearing and making way for something else. I’ve been interested in my family tree a little more of late also. It seems sensible enough to assume that I do this at times when I do not see much of a future, and if one takes into consideration the full scale of the ancestry websites, making money out of people also looking up their family roots, then one can see that as a society we don’t seem to be able to see much of a future at present.
For me, personally the expectation of already irreversible (to some degree) environmental problems is what drags a landslip over a doorway to a future which I once expected to walk into. But for many it may be a realisation that the liberal-democratic order has failed us, after it wiped out any suggestion that there may be another way to build a better life for us all. Whatever may be the case, there is most certainly a lot less optimism than there was even 8 or 9 years previous. Something has to change.
The landscape in which these photographs are situated is an interesting one to point to especially: as the old coal mining towns/villages themselves suffered incredibly from the destruction of the sole meaning for their existence in the first place, the landscape improved and greened over massively during that same period, and although much is being leveled off for housing developments, it is still a much greener place than it used to be. Now, I do not for one moment intend to suggest that this is compensation for the heartless economic decisions made which destroyed so many peoples’ way of life, but it is a good in its own right – if it stays that way, that is, and developers do not run amok (which seems likely under the ultra neoliberal capitalism the current government are bringing through).
However, more than anything, I am making NO real point here at all – I’d be lying to pretend that I have any over-positive thoughts up my sleeve to finish this blog off with, so I will just idly try to relive the past like everybody else seems to be doing.