My Blog: A 10th-Anniversary Overview (2014 – 2024)
On July 16, 2014, I published the first of 1,813 blogs (including this one). The vast majority are diaristic; the others (including this one), devoted to specific themes associated with my research, art education, upbringing, travels, losses, and endeavours. They are bracketed within three websites: Diary (July 16, 2014 — September 4, 2018); Diary (September 18, 2018 — July 30, 2021); and Intersections of Sound, Image, Word, and Life (that’s to say, this one), which began publication in 2013 (a year prior to the first diary). Apart from a number of short sabbaticals (wherein to take breath, and decide whether I should continue publishing), blogging has continued unabated for the past decade.
I’d maintained an analogue and private diary, periodically, between 1981 and 2011. The initial impetus for returning to diarism three years later (in an online and public form) was to create a glass wall through which readers could observe the operations of the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, Wales, as seen from the perspective on one academic who worked there. Inevitably, I became transparent too. (The professional and the private are inseparable.) The first and second diaries’ entries were written daily during a 6-day working week. They grew at my elbow in between tutorial appointments, administrative tasks, bursts of research, and the affairs of life, and were polished late at night before Morpheus overwhelmed me.
The account of my teaching gradually assumed the form of ‘principles and observations’ (which first appeared in October 2014). They distilled my anonymised interactions with individual students into sometimes aphoristic bullet points that were made available for the benefit of the School’s community. I later discovered the material was also read by artists beyond the School’s walls, potential applicants, and the parents and carers of current students. The blogs also document School of Art events, including inductions, open days, private views, and the installation of student and museum and gallery exhibitions. The description of my various administrations is probably as tiresome to read as they were to acquit. My research activities in sonic and visual practice and history were written-up to enable me to keep track on, and explain to myself, what I was doing, as well as present a digestible description of the projects’ themes, aims, processes, methodologies, and outcomes to a broad audience. There are, too, glimpses into my clockwork routine, habits of mind, and ecclesiastical and faith-based activities and perspectives.
The start of ’Summa: diary’ series coincided with the beginning of early retirement, in August 2021. I realised that, in the absence of teaching engagements, a good part of the material which had fed the daily entries was no longer available to me. These publications take the form of a weekly digest outlining my commitments and ventures, usually. Uncharacteristic of the earlier diaries, ‘Summa’ reaches out into the wider world of politics and food.
The blogs encourage personal accountability, often on an hourly-basis: ‘What have I done? What am I about to do? What have I achieved? Is this the best use of my time?’ I desire to live an examined life (to adapt Socrates’ maxim) and leave a testament to that living for my children and their progeny to read. Insomuch as the writing also presents a history of my familial predecessors and place of origin, it enables them to connect with those who’d left this world before they were born.
The most poignant period in the blog is undoubtedly the COVID-19 pandemic and the succession of lockdowns and restrictions in Wales (March 2020 — March 2021). Staff and students at Aberystwyth University (like every other) taught and learnt at home. It was a remarkable time for developing new methods of meaningful communication and support, and innovative approaches to delivery. Teaching was never so hard and fulfilling as then. And, we continued to maintain the standards for which the School and the university are renowned.
The photographs that accompany the text variously either illustrate what’s described or are a tangential and an abstract evocation of moods and states of mind summoned by events and circumstances. There are myriad visual images of tutorial and seminar rooms, lecture theatres, my office, galleries, visiting days, and conferences. Gradually, sound ‘images’ were introduced to accompany both the text and the photographs. Because the dairies are pre-eminently an account of personal experiences, there are quite a number of self-portraits. They document a decade of ageing. Quite alarming, in its own way.
I don’t know for how much longer blogs will be written. Unless either personal calamity intervenes, or I lose all sense of interest in myself and the blogs’ significance, or a better mode of articulation presents itself, I may press on to the 2,000th publication — which would (if I’m spared) be released in around three and a half years’ time.
On re-reading a cross-section of the blogs, I’m struck forcibly by a number realisations regarding: first, my conspicuous flaws as a human being — in particular, a capacity to repeat the same mistakes; secondly, the failure of so many endeavours to reach the mark I’d set for them; thirdly, a restlessness in all departments of life that is never quieted; fourthly, how important blogging has been to comprehending, and manoeuvering through, the issues of life; and finally, the inestimable value and influence of family and friends. Blogging has helped me to know my own mind, check my memory, understand, repent and regret, lament missed opportunities and misjudgements, berate myself, acknowledge my limitations and dysfunctions, make decisions and commitments, assess my efforts, formulate convictions and resolutions, and plan and envision.
I revisit the pages of my blog, periodically. There’s solace to be had in retrieving the past and making it present once more, if only as a temporary abstraction. It’s a mode of conditional time travel, in this respect. ‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing’, they say. And foresight, so much the more. Extrapolation: past and present knowns focused upon an unknown future. What I can know with some surety is that the future will be shaped, in no small measure, by what I’m doing presently and what I’ve done previously. Experience has taught me this. My blog is the evidence.
Time present and time past
T S Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets (1941–42).
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Instagram.