We need to learn how to cope with the extra-ordinary and be ready all the time to keep moving (Rowan Williams, Being Human (2018))

WFM: DAY 44. 12.00 am: I stayed up to catch up on the School’s Creative Arts students’ 24-hour Freedom in Isolation online exhibition, which had been organised by Miranda Whall, the course co-ordinator:

I was particularly struck by the conference discussions: the candour, thoughtfulness, and mutual curiosity of the participants. They left me with other ways of reflecting upon my current transition, future ambitions, and the image of my humanity. One’s creative practice may be political, ecological, or social in its orientation, but it ought also reveal a fundamental truth about who we are and what we’ve become, for better or worse. Art shows me me.

6.15 am: From now on, I’m listening to Radio 3 instead of Radio 4 during my ablutions, in order to avoid the news. (I shaved to Beethoven this morning.) ‘It’s too early to tell; too early for me to hear with my heart’. The latest developments concerning Covid-19 loop and recycle throughout the day: an unceasing chatter of statement, retraction, denial, criticism, and commentary — repackaged, compressed, bacon-sliced, and corrupted in broadcasts and through social media. I’d catch up with it all latter when, like Legion, I was ‘dressed and in [my] right mind’.

House (detail) #23:

7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 am: I caught up on emails that had lain in my inbox, like food at the back of the fridge, for so long they’d grown mouldy. 9.45 pm: On with writing for a few hours. 12.15 pm: Bounce: ‘What are you going to do when you grow up, John?’ (In the background: Robert Fripp’s Exposure (1979).) The composition beckoned.

House (detail) #24:

1.30 pm: Having extracted small samples from my slowed-down recording, I began fitting them around the rhythmic spine of the second half of the composition. The cracks and clicks of the samples either can or may not be aligned with the percussive beats of the spine, either on or off them. However bizarre and calculated the sonic environment created, it has to sound plausibly natural.

4.30 pm: ‘Want to quit?’ Yes. Outdoors beckoned.