Summa: diary (August 24-30, 2024)

Some things must remain hidden.

August 24 (Saturday).

• There’s a particular quality of silence that I’ve experienced on an overcast Saturday; it evokes a faint and unspecific emotion that tends toward comforting melancholy. The feeling is infrequent, unexpected, fleeting, and difficult to keep in focus. I’ve known this throughout my life; but more so as I’ve got older. In that moment, past, present, future, and hope coalesce.
• If we behave like someone other than ourselves for long enough and consistently enough, would we become them eventually?
• Our richest and most enduring experiences of life invariably involved a confrontation with examples of great goodness, virtue, love, and self-sacrifice.
• My hope is that there may yet be transformations: significant and lasting shifts of outlook, comprehension, and aspect that will better align me with the path that leads beyond my present field of vision to a better place, which I’ve never before visited and yet firmly believe exists.

August 25 (Sunday).

• I lean my back against the wall and breath-in deeply. Is the wall supporting me, or am I stopping it from falling?
• Every return was that bit darker, deeper, and more hopeless, reckless, ambitious, and intractable.
• A tricolour unfurled; motionless, like the star-spangled banner on the surface of the Moon. ‘Sender Unknown’.
• A desperation so excruciating, it threatens to unseat whatever has been loved, cherished, wholesome, steadfast, and good.

August 26 (Bank Holiday Monday). 6.30 am: Arise. 7.30 am: Studyology. Research and writing. An examination of the restoration of Malchus’ ear in the context of Christ’s other miraculous healings of the deaf. I broadened the cultural scope too, beginning with a small sketch made by Dr Félix Rey (1867-1932). Rey had been painted by Vincent van Gogh, and treated the artist after he’d severed his own ear — entirely it seems, rather than partially as had been the thought previously.

I thought, too, of the severed human found ear in the grass by Jeffrey Beaumont, the protagonist in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), and Donald Trump’s bloody, wounded ear. Like Malchus’ ear, Trump’s had born the brunt of an assault. You can, I discovered, buy a realistic 3D model of a severed ear for under $20, online — no doubt to have delivered to your favourite prostitute at a nearby brothel (as had van Gogh, it’s supposed). Guaranteed to win-over any woman’s heart. It’s the type of oddball and niche purchase that would’ve been advertised on the penultimate page of the Exchange & Mart, in my youth. The newspaper was a precursor to eBay.

August 27 (Tuesday). 2.45 am: I started violently from a nightmare in which I wrestled with a demon, as had Jacob with the angel (Genesis 31.22-31). I recall reciting the Lord’s Prayer with great difficulty as I pinned it to the floor. But exhaustion threatened to overwhelm me. The context was a late summer’s evening with the sky filled with many pale moons. My wrestling match took place in a house several doors down from where I live. Thus, on awaking, I was still not far from the site of this dreadful engagement — which was profoundly disconcerting. Had dream world bled into waking world?

During the Welsh Religious Revival of 1904-5, one chapel member claimed he’d received a vision of an angel and a demon fighting above the village of Llanhilleth, Monmouthshire. It was, he interpreted, a visualization of the spiritual battle for the souls of the community during the revival.

7.00 am: Studyology. Writing. I edited what I’d written yesterday and made notes for further development. The ear as object: a landscape basin of convoluted furrows, ridges, and recesses, with a cavernous aperture that leads to the outer ear canal. 11.15 am: Studiology. I attached the power supply units for strand 3 ‘s effectors. 2.00 pm ‘Testing! Testing!’ I climbed the learning curve that arced towards a disciplined control of the strand.

• When, after a long time, your heart returns to something that you once found hugely enjoyable and sustaining, then, a sensation of completeness and fulfillment — that you’d entirely forgotten in the interim — accompanies it. For what we do is intimately meshed with who we are.
• The return may be beset by discouragements. At the outset, you’ll not be as proficient as when you left-off; the re-acquisition of control will be hard won (yet again); as, too, achieving consistency of quality at an appropriate level; and you’ll be tempted to find any excuse to throw-in the towel.
• On returning, that something may not seem as enjoyable as it once was. However, it will prove more deeply sustaining. But, now, enjoyment is neither a criterion and measure of success nor the principal motivation for persevering when you get discouraged.

9.00 pm: Eventide.

August 27 (Wednesday). 7.30 am: A communion. 9.00 am: Studiology. Back to strand 3. As it was said of the Mysterons in Captain Scarlet: ‘But first [I] must destroy’. Modifiers that didn’t contribute either sufficiently or appropriately to the overall output were stripped out and replaced. A wholesale rethink ensued. 10.30 am: ‘Testing! Testing!’. I’m felt the same frustration as I did when a young boy, having to spend what seemed like an inordinate length of time assembling my train set before being able to play with it. This project began with the objective of designing a simple and portable rig. It evolved into one of the most complex ever I’ve conceived. An object failure on that front, then. Nevertheless, it’s also one of the most effective and versatile. While designed around the sonorities of EVP, the table rig can accommodate a breadth of other input material besides.

The strand 3 test involved playing a 78-rpm record at around 16 rpm, in reverse. The resultant doleful and dispiriting sound is complete in itself, even before filters (other than EQ) and modifiers were applied.

In my teens, a veritable urban folklore grew-up around the dangers of playing records backwards (which had to be done manually, with the turntable’s motor disengaged). Some records had words and phrases embedded in them (a technique called back-masking) that were intelligible only in reverse. In the 1980s, fundamentalist and evangelical Christians suggested that some of these hidden messages promoted satanic worship and blasphemy. Which made the record player a peril to the soul second only to the Ouija board. However, there’s a quality about reverse speech and music that suggests a dark alterity. These submerged messages are vinyl culture’s equivalent of the EVP. I wondered whether there’s content on records for which no one claimed responsibility?

1.30 pm: A ruthless testing, modifying, rejecting, and rationalising continued.

August 29 (Thursday). 6.00 am: Arise. The first task of the day was to finalise a prayer of thanksgiving, which I’ll deliver at my younger son’s wedding breakfast in a week’s time. For this occasion, the text needs to be verbatim, succinct, to the point, and brief. By 4.30 pm, people will be baying for food. 7.00 am: Proof of presence.

8.30 am: Studyiology. A review of the Malchus’ ear section. The similarities between academic writing and sound-rig construction are conspicuous. In both, the goals are to achieve economy, clarity, order, rationale, and efficiency. Both are equally frustrating, and take me far too long to resolve. (‘He’s slow!’ as my school teachers used to say.) Today I was, metaphorically speaking, extending cables, changing the order of effectors, polishing contacts, and improving the signal flow, ‘line upon line’, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.

4.00 pm: To the memory of Hyla Converse and Sese:

August 30 (Friday). 5.30 am: Arise. I saw a lone star in dawn’s first light, flickering like a bulb about to expire. 6.00 am: Writing revision. 8.30 am: Studiology. To begin, I made a minor reassignment to an effector, in observance of the Golden Rule: NO DUPLICATION! ‘Testing Testing!’: both the equipment and myself. Back to strand 3. Some effectors didn’t operate as expected when attached to the mixer’s routing network. For example, the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi ( π) distortion pedal produces solid tones instead of its characteristic sizzle (like bacon frying in hot fat). These oscillations can be controlled by adjusting the device’s potentiometers, in the manner of the no-input technique. I heard shades of Keith Emerson stabbing and wielding a Hammond organ L100, which enabled him to significantly extend the range of sounds that the instrument was designed to make.

2.00 pm: Further explorations, swatting a 50 MHz hum that emerged in the system, and the re-ontroduction of effectors that had been cast-out over the last few days. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say. 3.30 pm: The table-rig’s construction was complete. It had passed at the quality bar and surpassed my original expectations. This set-up would be my improvisatory domain for the next months at least.

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; Archive of Visual Practice