I awoke at 5.00 am and lay there, hoping in vain to drop-off again, until 7.00 am. ‘What dreams may come’ in that half-world between sleep and rousing. On the weekend, we’d watched A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Following his unconversion from an ass, Bottom speaks a soliloquy which includes the line: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen’. It recalls the Apostle Paul’s phrase: the ‘eye hath not seen, nor ear heard’ (1 Corinthians 6.9). (The bard was steeped in the Bible.) Shakespeare’s confusion of the senses, here, may have been an expression of the character’s disorientation, having recovered from his human-animal hybridisation. However, this mismatch is also suggestive of both a synaesthetic state and an apparent contradiction in terms that may yet speak of a deeper truth.

8.45 am: Emails posted, I returned to my paper and sound composition for the Goldsmith’s University symposium next month. Having never live-streamed a sound file over the internet, there was much to be learned by an active-listening experience at both the ‘send’ and ‘receive’ ends of the process. I suspected that the compression rate may unduly emphasise the upper frequencies. In parallel, I reacquainted myself with some of the suite’s other compositions. In the background: Outlook download ‘issues’. They that live by computers, die by them. When the means of work distract from the work … there’s pause for thought.

12.00 pm: The first of two pastoral tutorials:

1.30 pm: Then Teams didn’t open on my laptop. ‘What’s happening!?’ I’m going to be so expert in all things computery by the end of semester. I felt as though I was running, while rocks were being strewn in my way. 2.15 pm: ‘Pings’, ‘drings’, ‘bleeps’, and ‘bloops’ issued from computers on all sides of the studio, announcing uploads, downloads, incoming, and … (finally) functionality. Things were finally ticking-over in that department. And so I buried my head in sound, trying to shake-off thoughts of admin, teaching, and pastoral challenges. On with ‘Firey Stones’.

4.30 pm: Into the outside. 7.30 pm: I tackled Zoom/sound problems once again. As yet, I can’t broadcast the file at the requisite volume or quality. This is new territory for me; and I’ve no sense of what can actually be achieved using this means. ‘Crappy’ may be the best one can hope for.