Summa: diary (September 14-20, 2024)

It’s their warmth I miss most.
‘It’s a strange world, isn’t it!’
Afterwards, I felt more human.

September 14 (Saturday). 7.30 am: Ambulation and WhatsApp exchange of views and news with my daughters-in-law. These days I feel like some blessed Old Testament patriarch surrounded by his extended family.

Luxenbourg remains for me — along with Hilversum, Sundsvall, Havana, Belgrade, and others — first and foremost a short-wave radio station that, as a child, I would alight upon when turning the dial from one end of the frequency band to another, while hidden under the blanket when I should’ve been asleep. I could travel the whole world, from Australia to Alaska, in a minute on that radio. Signals from Radio Luxemburg reached the UK only after dark, and faded in and out like the flow and ebb of the tide.

11.30 am: Notes towards a way of thinking about thinking, and a foray into the ‘small-rig’ challenge.

September 16 (Monday). 7.30 am: Writing. I’m reading Elizabeth Oldfields’s Fully Alive (2024). My interest in her work began on X [formerly Twitter], where she advertises her online series of interviews, The Sacred. In the book, she discussed how daily, private religious ritual develops concentration or, more precisely, provides a mechanism for countering distraction. Her own approach is not unlike that which I’ve cultivated for the ‘a communion’ period of the day. (This is sometimes, rather than always, referred to in the text of this blog.)

9.00 am: Studiology. Hunting for a power supply. Essentially, the ‘small-rig’ is a compression of the larger one. 10.30 am: I recommenced running (gently). In the past, I’ve been dogged by Achilles tendon problems. Presently, I’m clear of them. First, speed walking, then running, then speed walking again, and then running again, for the 2 miles to Llanbadarn Fawr village, via the church, and beyond. I’d been invited to a ‘tea-orgy’ with with one of my former PhD students. (So called, because we indulge a drinking revelry during our discussions; at least four cups before we part.)

1.45 am: Studyology and studiology, book writing and equipment selection, in alternation. Schematizing the latter into the beginnings of a portable versatile network — the ‘small-rig’. A portable turntable has been introduced.

September 17 (Tuesday). 7.30 am: That horse chestnut I stole from the wedding venue’s garden has now opened. ‘For everything there is a season.’

8.30 am: Studiology. The implementation of yesterday’s schematic.I rifled through my 45-rpm singles for something to play on the turntable while developing the ‘small-rig’. Among the meagre collection was the Sex Pistol’s Pretty Vacant (1977). I bought it in the summer of that year, in the interstice between leaving an appalling comprehensive-school education and beginning my Foundation Studies in art. The later proved to be the most significant experience in my training and subsequent development as an artist. Music can memorialize moments and periods in our lives, as well as serve to both embody and trigger powerful emotions associated with them. Music can preserve the heartache of love’s longing and loss, the sense of a place, and a nostalgia for times past.

September 18 (Wednesday). 7.30 am: Writing. While travelling the world has broadened my mind, it’s the years in my home towns, study, and studio and relative isolation for significant periods that have deepened it. In this respect lockdown was, for some artists, a period of considerable creative development and growth in self-cognition. For others, its restrictions were utterly stultifying. For some, chronic ill-health inscribed a tight circle around their activities. For example, the poet Emily Dickinson, during the 1860s and for the remainder of her life, lived a life of almost perpetual seclusion at her homestead (possibly due to agoraphobia and epilepsy). The world came to her instead, and she travelled unfettered within the boundless landscape of her imagination.

Some years ago, I knew a woman who was, due to a debilitating illness which she’d suffered since birth, confined to a small room in a terraced house close to the harbour in Aberystwyth. She managed to attend Sunday morning services at her local chapel in a wheelchair until a few years before she died. I often pass her grave at the Municipal Cemetery on my ambulations. The headstone is small (as was she), and isolated in an otherwise ‘uninhabited’ section of the grounds. In death as in life, she remains apart. She embodied extraordinary wisdom, discernment, and spirituality. Many made an appointment to sit at her feet and discuss their problems. She sent them away with a new perspective, rather than a trite Bible verse. Life was messy; people were complicated; and solutions were often contingent on many shifting factors, she believed.

10.00 am: I looked over the database of Bible & Sound, with a view to categorization the type, character, and function of acoustic phenomena described therein. At the same time, I’m mindful of how a practice-based articulation of this source could be developed.

1.45 pm: Off into the autumnal-Summer light for an overdue-conversation with my colleague Dr Dafydd Roberts at the Arts Centre. Our tradition is to talk about family and university, before indulging our mutual passion for sound composition, improvisation, and performance, and the equipment required to facilitate these practices. (‘Boys and their toys’.)

3.15 pm: Before returning home, I viewed the artist Saoirse Morgan’s window installation at the front of the building. The sunshine at that time of the day was reflecting directly off the glass. Consequently, the artwork couldn’t be photographed unless the camera was pressed against the window, and then only frame-by-frame.

The subject of her work is the home terrain of West Wales: the landscape, the coast, the ecology. … Saoirse describes her process as driven by both her surroundings and internal world. A sense of place interleaved with memories and associations in the studio.

Her installation uses the space well. It breathes within the shallow box, like a fish inside a tank. The artwork’s stretch of payne’s-grey and indanthrene blue coastline, traversed by birds in flight and overlaid by handwriting in Welsh, runs parallel to the Irish sea, the sky, and the horizon, which can be seen when you turn your back to the window. Art confronts its own reality.

September 19 (Thursday). 6.00 am: Arise.

7.30 am: Writing: notes towards a preface. The endeavour is to trace the origins of my interest in sound and the Bible. Even before I read the scriptures, I’d been exposed to their narratives through Cecil B DeMille’s biblical epics, such as The Ten Commandments (1923/1956), The King of Kings (1927), and Samson and Delilah (1946). Thus, my first experience of the bible was visual, kinetic, and auditory: the clamour of battles, the screams of the oppressed, roaring thunder, and the voice of God (always loud, reverberant, and spoken with an educated English accent).

There a moment in Samson and Delilah when the protagonist, chained between two of the pillars holding up the Temple of Dagon, in Gaza, calls out: ‘I pray thee, strengthen me O God’. He pushes against the pillars, while mocked by the Philistine crowd. Over their laughter a dispiriting, grating ‘crunch’ can be heard emanating from the base of one pillar, as Samson shifts its position. The crowd is quieted. ‘Crunch’, again. This time, it’s plainly audible against a tense silence. ‘Look! It moved!’, two shout. Finally, the pillar is wholly undermined and the temple comes crashing down killing everyone (Judges 16.23-30). That second ‘crunch’, against the silence, has remained with me all my life.

3.45 pm: I tried to encourage a X [formerly Twitter] correspondent who was exercised at the prospect of having to declare a change of view on a matter, on social media. Understandably so, because she’s already being bamboozled by trolls for expressing perfectly sensible and challenging ideas, as well as for being a woman:

In visual art practice there’s a term called ‘pentimento’. It refers to initial shapes and drawing that have, over time, become visible through top layers of a painting and were subsequently changed. They indicate that the artist ‘repented’ of their previous composition in favour of something better. Thus, changing opinion is essential to creative development in art and, I suggest, life too.

Four hours later than the predicted ETA, Elton an Albanian removal man arrived to pick up a bed and table. They’ll be at their new home in London sometime tomorrow.

September 19 (Friday). 6.30 am: Writing. Trying to improve. Trying to be more dissatisfied with my efforts. Listening to the voices of my tutors and the inner-tutor. Often, I start writing a Preface with little idea about what I’m going to say. The process of composition is one of progressive self-revelation. By the end, I need to realize both why I’m fascinated by the topic and how I can justify publishing a book on it. There is a glory in discovering connections between ordinarily un-associated concepts, interests, and experiences in one’s life history.

12.45 pm: On way way to the hairdressers, I (first) heard and (then) saw a leaf being blown along the path before me. I recalled a verse from Leviticus, Chapter 26 and verse 36, which includes one of the the most exquisite and subtle sound metaphors in the Bible:

And as for those of you who survive, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; the sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall though no one pursues.

I shamelessly showed the hairdresser photographs taken of my boys at the recent family wedding. ‘Oh, they’re just like you … so hansom’. Which was a more than generous appraisal. But I suspect the unspoken (and unspeakable) critique, closer to the truth, ought to have been: ‘How can someone who looks like him have such beautiful boys’.

2.45 pm: Back at the desk for the afternoon for a re-reading, a refining, a sifting and a rejecting of the morning’s ‘scribbling and bibbling’, to quote Mozart in Miloš Foreman and Peter Shaffers’ Amadeus (1984).

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