This is the last Edgelands post - for now. More at the bottom on future posts and where we're going next - and thanks for joining me here and giving my work your time. I hope you've found something that gave you joy in these pieces. There is more to come though...
We are edging into the evening now, shuffling slowly into a lovely blurry sunset, the last shards of light leaving the windburnt brick wall as the sun moves downwards. It is 3.42pm, and the liminal space of late spring/early summer, between seasons, just before the clocks change.
I always think things look different, slower almost, and moving feels like dreaming, at this time of year. When I run in my actual dreams I don't get anywhere fast - it's like wading through treacle. Similarly, in waking life, at any time of year, when I walk the edgelands it can feel the same - but then it is because I have switched myself off and away from the usual constant rush, left my mobile at home. Seconds last minutes, and minutes last hours. I just walk. If I don't do this regularly, I go a bit mad. But as I write this first part I am also in relapse with a chronic condition I have, and when I am ill I feel the absence of my boots hitting tarmac, mud and wasteland keenly. That said, my favourite time of year to be ill is late spring, because it feels like I have permission from the slow, muggy air to take longer to get better. I also think my dreams are more visceral and more colourful between spring and summer. But my body is slow, and heavy, and misses the edgelands.
Being ill makes me think about how bodies, like edgelands, are eventually always built on and swallowed by others or the earth. Nothing ever stays the same, and yet we are so often terrified of change.
I will die.
You will die.
The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us.
What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.From Figuring, by Maria Popova
To be attached to reality I must be grounded; able to build a sense of control by situating myself in my surroundings and particular context. Edgelands of the geographical 'place' sort are interesting to me for this reason - being usually unfit for habitation, they don’t often necessitate the need for a sense of control by the minds and bodies travelling through them, because those minds and bodies don’t stay for long. People don't really care all that much about disused railway tracks, industrial estates, alleyways, brownfield sites, underpasses, hostels. Therefore, when these spaces are inhabited, it is usually by minds and bodies that also themselves function as edgelands, and thus live and understand them - homeless people, teenagers from abusive homes, people with addictions, mentally ill people, grieving people, travellers, hermits, witches, pilgrims, animals that humans have decided are vermin. The list goes on (and is explored in the previous five installments). So it is my need to not dissociate that causes my need to control my understanding of the edgelands. Because they balance me out, anchor me in. This is why I’m always walking them.
My body belongs to the edgelands. This series was about the ways in which our bodies move through them, how non-normative bodies navigate non-normative time and unwanted, unnavigable space. Essentially, bodies that people are afraid of, moving through the parts of the landscape that people are afraid of. It was about how by meeting each other in edgelands, both of the geographical sort and the metaphorical 'space between experiences' sort, where two or more people stretch out our hands across no-mans-land to learn about each others lives, we can heal together in those edgelands. Neutral territory - land that belongs to both no-one and everyone. The Edgelands was about reaching out to you and saying 'I am here to heal, maybe you are too; I am here to be held accountable, and to hold you accountable; but always from a place of radical love and forgiveness. And when I have no more love to give, when I am empty and can no longer love you without resentment or the expectation of love in return, I will retreat into aloneness again till I have built up reserves - but! - don't forget me while I'm gone, because I need to be wanted, I need to belong. I want to make you feel the same way too. Because we all belong, but we’ve been told for so long that we don’t.'
It was also about listening to others - really listening, shutting up and hearing them, and not just waiting for my turn to talk. And then really, underneath that, it was about rising through shame and loving myself, and in doing that, becoming better at loving others. Or maybe it's the latter that comes first, then the former. Or, maybe, it's an endless symbiotic process - a constant exchange of love and accountability.
Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face… Love your mouth… This is flesh… Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms… Love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver — love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts… love your heart. For this is the prize.
Toni Morrison
I am the bare bones of original data, a constantly moving bank of numbers that suffuses everything within and without me. My body is not a building or a geographical location in the usual sense of an edgeland but an idea, one that changes depending on the perceiver. It is also not particularly fancy or exciting, no more fancy or exciting than yours is, anyway. It just is. It knows pleasure and pain, greed and generosity, hate and love, and then all the things in between.
It is very old, my body. It is dilapidated old country houses standing in ruins, once owned by 'great' men, a house that escaped their greedy grasps. It is rubble after an earthquake. It is abandoned train stations with peeling paint and rusting tracks and broken windows. It is moss-covered rocks that people make love on; crumbling sea walls in forgotten coastal towns; seaweed masquerading as jellyfish and giggling at the screams.
It is bleeding hands; sick-soaked throats; sticky, hairy legs; bare, angry tits covered in red hand marks. Coarse, calloused hands, touching faces, scraping skin. Cracked lips, ruddied faces, soil packed under fingernails.
My body is the chest bones that people rest their heads on, those from other edgelands. These bones are solidarity walking, grinding, presenting themselves up for service and labour, the labour of love. Bare and unprotected from the elements they cook in the summer and crack in the winter, sounding like branches being walked on, breaking then rotting back down into the earth again - circularity in motion, so maybe this is what the Whole Foods hipsters mean when they talk about sustainability.
Body and earth are the same but we are so distant from each other. I miss Her, always, these bones ache for Her, always.
My edgeland body stands between abuser and abused, in that liminal, unnavigable, and terrifying space, covered in stitch strips, self harm scars and sweat. My fingers, for writing and pleasure and flipping off dickheads - delirious fuck you's bellowed out in a landscape of British policies and borders that brutalise, marginalise, and 'other' others. Edgelands that look loving, with the same haze of comfort that heroin promises hovering around their borders, that fold us into them and away from the mainstream that wants us to perform our labels for their entertainment and charity (“we need to see proof of entitlement - dance for us please”).
I am the one - one of many - who refuses to be violent with my words but then say: well, at least I'm not punching you in the face; like how the state will take your confidence and security and say: well, at least this isn't the Victorian times, the workhouses are gone, be grateful and stop begging - you are not in need.
We are.
I am folded for years, spine cracking on each extension, each stretch, neck somehow both heavy and hovering at once, hollering to be witnessed. Wind blows through my derelict building, breeze whispering up and down my arms, between my legs, caressing my throat. I feel like I want to open up my neck skin gently, lovingly, reach carefully past the trachea and oesophagus and through to the white bone behind - my spine, stripped of all meat, ground down by the weight of my head - and ease out the lump within till my throat no longer feels wider than my head. I’ll stitch it back together with delicate fingers, in the pattern of the cross-stitch wolf I once bought in Yorkshire - a wolf at my throat.
I am an edgeland.
Hail the body's own geography, what Foucault calls 'the anatomical atlas'. Latitude tendons, longitude veins. The textured terrain: soft rind of skin, rope hair, sandpaper stubble.
Extract from Constellations, by Sinéad Gleeson
Simone Weil writes the following of physical pain - a beautiful sentiment that holds and honours two seemingly opposite realities at once and makes both possible. Powerlessness can sometimes be a state we are forced into accepting for lack of an alternative, but paradoxically is not always a negative state as surrender can mean the end of the battle, and feel like bliss, like finally you are right-sized:
When suffering no matter what degree of pain, when almost the entire soul is inwardly crying “Make it stop, I can bear no more,” a part of the soul, even though it be an infinitesimally small part, should say: “I consent that this should continue throughout the whole of time, if the divine wisdom so ordains.” The soul is then split in two. For the physically sentient part of the soul is — at least sometimes — unable to consent to pain. This splitting in two of the soul is a second pain, a spiritual one, and even sharper than the physical pain that causes it.
Simone Weil, quoted in The Marginalian
Below is a photograph of an artwork by Ana Mendieta, a breathtaking Cuban-American artist. The Earthworks series it came from now remains only in photographs, all pieces having been reclaimed by nature. A writer called Jennifer Brough explores this series in an unbelievably beautiful piece of writing on her chronic illness fibromyalgia, one of the conditions I also have. It speaks softly to me about our bodies as landscapes, and about liminal spaces as a) the space between visible and invisible disabilities (and thus medical and societal acceptance of, and belief in, our pain), and b) places that we can find more of ourselves in, if we explore them.
Mendieta’s earthworks occupy a liminal space between presence and absence ... before my diagnosis, I lived in a liminal space between what Susan Sontag called the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. I repeatedly Googled “pins and needles,” “burning,” and “fatigue” in order to decipher what was happening inside my body (an unquantifiable absence), which outwardly appeared able (a presence). ... The temporality and intensity of the “Siluetas” encouraged me to explore states of anger, isolation, desire, and longing that fibromyalgia has imprinted on my body’s landscape.
Extracts from This Artwork Changed My Life, by Jennifer Brough
I am in love with the process of constantly placing my body in edgelands - both physical and metaphorical - as a way of opening up to others and to myself, and as a way of exploring, healing, and accepting physical (and emotional) pain. As a way of sitting on, and with, the soil. Not separate from the earth but joined to Her. As a way of allowing my heart to be broken, allowing myself to feel things and take risks. Sometimes I walk not in spite of pain, but because of it - in order to meet myself.
Finally, some Cameron Awkward-Rich for you.
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.
Meditations in an Emergency, by Cameron Awkward-Rich
The End. Thanks for reading! So. For many reasons, the first shot at The Edgelands changed from a ten-part series to a six-part. I merged several pieces into each other which lost a few, added some more, and deleted others. Some have gone onto a back burner and others are much larger than I originally thought they'd be, which I'm following (my pieces often feel like they have their own life, as if I am just the conduit between them and the page) - they are what will follow this 'last' post. What comes next will be as part of a writers residency I am about to begin at the House of Annetta, and will not have any particular regularity attached to them.
There will be pieces on: m/otherhoods; allotments and 'eating the edgelands', one looking at 'beating the bounds'; one on mental maps, counter-mapping, radical mapping, anti-mapping, indigenous maps, and big tech company mapping; one on spatial justice and social spaces; something on the queer body and visibility/cruising in rurality/urbanity (you might get a bit of filth in that one, oi oi); something on the ages and meaning of trees and time (including what will probably be a rant about the ones councils set into concrete so they cannot stretch out and inhabit space that a) rightfully belongs to them before it belongs to us, and b) we forced them into); pieces on queer and female bodies specifically as edgeland; and one on the history of housing justice. And maybe more. Or less. Who knows. I don't.
However, most of you signed up expecting a brief burst of once-weekly pieces over a set ten-week period with an end date in sight, rather than an ongoing sporadic newsletter, as that is what I originally planned. So please know that I will still love the very bones of you if you unsubscribe - inboxes are an absolute bitch to manage at the best of times so I get it. But if you do decide to remain on the list, thank you, and I'll see you soon. And if this is the first time you've come across my work and you like it, please consider subscribing.
Lastly, it feels important to note that during this series at around the post 4 mark, I was faced with a personal situation which was a) serious, b) unexpected, and c) distressing. In some ways it interrupted this series, in other ways it refined it. It was interesting (and upsetting) to observe how retraumatisation can not just halt, but feel like it has permanently removed, all my creative impulse. When the processing of a circumstance becomes the primary survival priority and everything else - even eating or resting - is secondary, it becomes unbelievably difficult to try and produce art, even though paradoxically that can often be a part of the healing process. Which reinforces my belief that if I can write (or create any art in any form), and I am thriving not just surviving (there's a wider link to housing justice and social security again here), then I should. Because in darker times it is the work of other writers and artists that brings me back to life. Really, I am always nodding to other artists in my work, always grateful for them, and always intimidated by the beauty they produce.
Watch this space.
xxx