While you can never go back, nevertheless you may yet go forward to another place, person, or time that’s very much like the one you’d left.
Saturday, June 13.
Thanksgiving. Observation. Remembrance. ‘To begin at the beginning’. I’d assembled an album dedicated to me after my parents had died, using photographs from my mum’s ‘archive’ (Two shoeboxes.) Over the years, I’ve become fascinated by the things which lie in the backgrounds of the photographs: for example, wall paper, curtains, ornaments, flower arrangements, reflections of things that are beyond the picture frame, and views through windows. My instinct is to re-photograph those parts of the originals and enlarge them, so that they become the focal subject. I want to return in time and enter and act within that world again. I see these photographs not only with my eyes but also through my memory. ‘You would not believe what lies before you, young man!’:
Sunday. June 14. A reflection on departures:
Having completed the weekly vacuuming and dusting, and taken a walk before the rain came, I lay in the lounge beneath the window, as the grey clouds drew-in, and played vinyls. In my mid to late teens, wet Sunday afternoons were likewise dedicated to listening, while I sat in an armchair staring out through the net curtains of the front room window of our terrace house in Abertillery. The last time I’d played some of those vinyls this afternoon was back there and then. How strange:
It was sad to hear of Keith Tippett’s death, at 72 years of age. He was one of the greatest and most distinctive jazz pianists of his generation. I first came across his work on several King Crimson albums from the early 1970s. Oddly, his solo album Mujician (1981) was in my hands just moments before I read the news. ‘All Time, All Time’ is a Herculean feat of imaginative and physical stamina.
In the evening, I watched Bill Morrison’s and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s The Miners’ Hymns (2011). The film is a collage of archive footage recording the mining communities around Durham set to music. The instrumentation includes a church organ and brass band, along with electronic sounds. While those miners weren’t from my country, nevertheless they were my people. My sense of class and industrial heritage has always been stronger than my consciousness of national identity. For all the hardships and dangers of coal extraction, I never met a miner who regretted being one.
Monday, June 15. WFH: DAY 68. 7.45 am: I continued in a ruminative vein while attending to my inbox and clearing the desk for the day’s work. Over the weekend, certain determinations regarding a possible future began to clarify. Resolution will be one of the governing principles. On, then, with PhD student monitoring reports (while I was still in the best of moods.) (In the background: The Keith Tippett Group’s You are Here … I am There (1970).)
A reflection on the inevitable:
Having got into my stride, I pushed forward after lunch. Words, words, words. Too many words. (In the background, King Crimson’s Lizard (1971), to which Tippett contributed some exemplary playing.)
4.15 pm: Enough! I headed into the open air, sunlight, and warmth for my daily constitutional, taking in the Promenade on my return. The sand, which had blown onto the pathway as a result of storms and tidal surges earlier in the year, had been removed. Signs of the times:
7.15 am: Back to reports. I needed to keep up the pace. So far my new system for initiating the monitoring process was operating within acceptable parameters, as they say.
A reflection on The Fall:
