7.00 am: I awoke to a downpour. ‘Focus. Fulfil the routine. Concentrate on what you’re doing rather than feeling. Your days are numbered; they’ll pass more swiftly than you can imagine.’ 8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: I made adjustments to the morning’s schedule in order to fit in a medical appointment. 9.00 am: I reviewed yesterday’s studio work during the first part of the morning while dealing with admin in parallel. This would be a day of fits and starts, bits and pieces – like a meal made from leftovers.
In my mind’s-eye, I saw an old imperial-sized family Bible. A solid slab of hundreds of pages overlaid and tightly pressed together: sculptural and monolithic:
This visual image would be the solution to the sonic image of ‘All Scripture’. I stacked the various modulation passes that I’d made yesterday one on top of the other, like pages. The combined effect sounded like that of a thick slab of reinforced industrial-grade concrete. It was curious to think that after all this time of dealing with the Bible as a set of vinyl records it should, in the last composition, return to the status as a book. Thereafter each layer was examined and enhanced, so as to clarify its timbre and highlight artefacts that’d been beclouded by the low-frequency resonances.
This ‘wet’ (treated) representation of the whole would be accompanied by the ‘dry’ (untreated) version of the combined overlay of the spoken text. The task, then, was to balance each of the contributing elements. 10.50 am: An emergency appointment with my GP to discuss an infected finger.
A delay, there, made for a delay in the day’s tutorial regime. 11.30 am: An MA fine art tutorial. ‘Failure is like this: You are in a round room with a great many doors. Only one of them opens onto a solution. But you don’t know which. All you can do is knock on each one to see which will open. Each failure is a door that won’t open’. Thus considered, ‘failure’ is a process of discovering success.
2.00 pm: I took on one of Dr Forster’s tutees. What’s it all about – this making of things? I’m inclined to think that, for some of us, making = searching. And searching = yearning. And we yearn for an encounter with ourselves (a realisation) at the deepest level. I’ve known such epiphanies, but only a few times, and with many years intervening. Which makes them all the more precious.
As I came to a conclusion of another tutorial, storm Gareth hit the shoreline. The seasons appeared to move from bleakest winter to high summer and back again in swift succession. It reminded me of a sequence about swiftly-passing time in the 1960s movie of H G Well’s The Time Machine.
At 4.30 pm, following several more tutorials, I talked through preparations for tomorrow’s Postgraduate Fayre with one of our sterling secretaries.
7.00 am: I worked on ‘All Scripture’ while glued to iPlayer as the Government falls into disarray once again. 7.45 pm: A pastoral discussion with a student.
