Summa: diary (October 19-25, 2024)

I’ve a friend I’ve never seen (Neil Young, ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ (1970)).

October 19 (Saturday). An ambulation, in the world and in my head simultaneously. The tide was high; the waves stretched skyward. And with them, my heart. I’m consciously storing up memories against the day when I may have to leave this place. Fair weather will yield to storm clouds, just as surely as great joy is the harbinger of much sorrow and despair.

4.00 pm: A comment upon Andrew Leslie Hooker’s TheWorldSplitOpen|IntoTheHeartOfTerror (2016/24):

A tender terror. A beautiful nightmare. A soundtrack to Dante’s descent into hell. All hope is lost. (And yet … .) A composition that resonates with this present era far more than the period in which it was first conceived, perhaps. It has found its time.

October 21 (Monday). 7.15 am: A communion. On October 19, someone form Ukraine accessed the John Harvey website. This was a first. (There would be one further visit from that country this week.) I don’t know who they are, how they found the site, and what (if anything) they took away from it. They read in a context that’s dramatically different to the one in which I write. Most of the hits registered to that site, and to this blog, come from the UK and USA, followed by China (curiously), Canada, Finland, German, France, Singapore, and Ireland. During the last few months I’ve received an occasional look-in from Botswana, Mexico, India, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil, Croatia, UAE, and Luxenbourg. Some readers are loyal ‘fans’; others are window-shoppers; all are welcome.

John Harvey, Dark Valley (1983) pencil on paper, 11.5 × 11.5 cm.

9.15 am: I paused, as on Armistice Day, to remember the Aberfan disaster (9.15 am, October 21, 1966). This entirely avoidable tragedy took place in Taff Vale, two valleys west of my own (back then) — the Ebbw Fach. Coal mining had visited death upon communities in South Wales many times before. Six years earlier, in 1960, an ignition of firedamp at Six Bells Colliery, in my home town of Abertillery, had killed 45 men. Historically, children as young as 9 years of age had perished as a consequence of accidents underground. But never in such numbers as at Aberfan. Children who weren’t working at the coal mine but at school. 116 of them, along with 28 adults. The appalling statistic of an estimated 11,000 children murdered in Gaza during the past 12 months, and nearly 550 in Ukraine since the beginning of the war (the equivalent of 95 and over 4 Aberfan disasters, respectively) doesn’t diminish the horror, sorrow, and incalculable loss for the families of Aberfan and the people of Wales.

Spoil heaps post-disaster, Aberfan (1967) (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

While I’ve written about the disaster in my art historical studies on the visual representation of coal mining, it has never been addressed in either my visual or sound art practices. Perhaps, hither, the event was, for me, still too particular, raw, and ‘sacred’. As a 6 year old, I remember watching on a black and white TV the BBC’s outside broadcast coverage of the scene of rescue. I recall also the my parents’ expressions of dismay and sadness. Those televisual images remain for me as memorable as those of the first moon landing, three years later. If ever I did respond to this disaster, it would be through that TV. Of course, as soon as I become conscious of that possibility, the seed of an idea is planted.

10.30 am: Wristwatch repair and hospital consultation follow-up. 11.00 am: ‘Small-rig’ tests: component by component, strand by strand. All passed. Once again, I’m learning how much potential just one component can be made to yield. These are solemn and unnerving sounds indeed.

October 22 (Tuesday). Late last night, reports of a train collision on the Aberystwyth to Shrewsbury line that evening began to emerge. I travel that stretch often. Presently, the cause of the incident either isn’t known or hasn’t been made public. There was one fatality.

9.00 am: Studiology. A seed begins to germinate. In August 1989, I visited one of the senior women from my, then, church in Aberystwyth to record her reminiscences about the Aberfan disaster. At the time of the tragedy she was living in Barry, and had travelled by train to Aberfan to render assistance. I listened again to the recording, which is in my Aural Diary archive. I wanted to understand what had taken place from the perspective of a witness to the events that had unfolded in the days which followed. At the time of the interview, I was completing a PhD in art history. Part of my research entailed a study of the history of Welsh coal-mining disasters.

She recalled an analogy for the dreadful noise made by that avalanche of coal slurry as it slid like cold black lava through Pantglas Junior School:

But the people who lived at the place where it happened – it happened in an open place where the rubble was coming down – they said, “it was just like a washing machine”.

Interview with E Thomas, Aberystwyth (August 4, 1989).

I remember my parent’s Hotpoint twin-tub: it rumbled and vibrated so fiercely and loudly in spin mode that we feared it might shake itself apart. This is the sort of earthy and imaginable sound that can serve as a starting point for a sound project.

4.00 pm: An ambulation on a warm Autumn late afternoon, and an evening of research into music inspired by the disaster.

October 23 (Wednesday). 7.45 am: A communion. 9.00 am: A haircut and discussion with my hairdresser about the irrefutable virtues of beans and peanut butter on toast.

10.00 am: Studiology. An extraction of the interviewee’s remarks from the recording. I’m searching for salient and encapsulating phrases. This would take all day. Ruthless selection and editing ensued.

1.00 pm: A prince among lunches (beans and peanut butter on toast), followed by further editing, followed by an appointment, at 3.30 pm, with the dental hygienist. He regaled me with advice on the latest tooth brushing methods, and research on the pH of saliva. 4.30 pm: Back to the edit.

7.30 pm: I looked into the historical background to Aberfan prior to the disaster, and started to type out the names of the dead — to move beyond the tragedy of the many to the identity and loss of individuals.

October 24 (Thursday). 6.00 am: I awoke from dream about the nature of virtuosity. 6.45 am: A communion. 7.30 am: Writing. 8.00 am: ‘I heard her call my name’ (to quote Lou Reed) from the landing below my study. But no one was there.

Much of my research has, since 1983, has taken place within this thematic triangle:

Some projects are are situated at one of the vertices, others join two vertices along one of the edges, while yet others join all three vertices along all the edges. The (tentative) Aberfan project is an example of the latter. A coal-mining catastrophe was met by the practical assistance and consolation given by chapels and churches in the community, and anticipated by strange premonitions. Notably, one received by 10-year old Eryl Mai Jones in a dream she had on the day before she perished:

I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it!’

Eryl Mai Jones (1956-1966)

9.00 am: Studiology. A second-phase edit of the 39 interviewee samples; mastering; and titling. 11.00 am: A lubricated tête-à-tête at the Arts Centre with the artist and educator Saiorse Morgan. Family histories was one topic on our discussion agenda. My latest ancestral DNA report suggests that I’m 60% Welsh, 2% Irish, and 38% English and Northwestern European (French, especially.) 12.30 pm: Back to work. 1.30 pm: I worked towards completing the sample masters. 4.00 pm: Filing.

7.30 pm: As I continued to type out the names of the dead, my visual mind recalled the monochrome blue-black and blue-white tonalities of the TV screen on which I’d seen the live coverage of the rescue on the morning of Saturday October 22, 1966. Strangely, and for the first time in nearly a decade, pictorial images present themselves forcibly to my inner-eye. I’ve no doubt that they’ve remained dormant for over half a century. Perhaps their time has come, too.

October 25 (Friday). 8.00 am:

Writing. 9.00 am: Filing project material to date. 10.15 am: A review of case studies of premonitions related to the Aberfan disaster collected by J C Barker, a psychiatrist and parapsychologist who lived near Aberfan.

I suspect that my journey to Aberfan began at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (which commemorates the events of August 6, 1945, when the US exploded the first nuclear weapon above the city), during my visit to Japan in March and April of this year. (See: Notes on Japan I (March 16-28, 2024) and Notes on Japan II (March 29-April 9, 2024).) I wrote:

There was a wall clock that had stopped at the moment the bomb detonated. There’s a clock in the National Museum Wales that, likewise, had stopped the moment the coal tip slipped down and buried Pantglas Junior School, Aberfan, Wales, at 9.13 am on October 21, 1966.

12.00 pm: I hastily drew a grid (which as been my conceptual starting-point since 1999) 12 cells by 12 cells to visualize the 144 fatalities at Aberfan. I needed to see extent of that number and individuate the integers. This, too, was a point of departure. Curiously, ‘144’ is the final number school pupils were expected to learn on their times tables (or multiplication tables). It is also the seventh angel’s measure in cubits of the city of the New Jerusalem’s outer wall (Revelation 21.17). 12 is the square root of 144, and has considerable importances in the numerology of the the Old and New Testaments. (For example, the twelve tribes of Israel and twelve disciples of Christ.)

2.00 pm: The start of a trawl of reports from the tribunal inquiring into the Aberfan disaster. 3.45 pm: An ambulation, in order to clear my head of death, darkness, and the disreputable behaviour of the National Coal Board.

See also: Intersections (archive);  Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021)Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: SoundFacebook: The Noises of ArtXInstagramArchive of Visual Practice

2 Comments. Leave new

  • Hi John,
    I may account for one of your “curious” visitors from China. I’m based at UCA’s Institute for Creativity and Innovation at Xiamen University, Fujian. Across the straight from Taiwan. I’ve been telling other people here about your summa pages and how your diary was a welcome source possibilities during my own phd work. It’s great to visit your recent pages after some time away.
    Best wishes
    Gareth

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Fill out this field
Fill out this field
Please enter a valid email address.
You need to agree with the terms to proceed

Discover more from John Harvey: Intersections

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading