Summa: diary (March 1-5, 2025)

Feel!

March 1 (Saturday). St David’s Day. The anticipation of Spring. 7.15 am: An ambulation.

There’s been a great deal happening to me below the surface of action and words over these has few weeks. I speak of: memories refocused; conversations revivified; the tenderness and generosity of friends; looking beyond another’s eyes; the unspeakable and the unspoken; rejoicing in the creativity of others; and the consolations of art, music, and writing (which, while they cannot return our love, never disappoint us). The uncanny confluence of intuitions, dreams, circumstances, and the counsel of others lately, regarding this or that course of action, present challenges I can no longer choose to ignore.

At the interstice of, for example, wanting and not wanting, or being able and not being able, to do something, there’s an energy that fuels the momentum of a dilemma. Neither the positive nor the negative principle dominates for long, because their natural state is equilibrium. The irreconcilability of opposites can lead to either productivity or paralysis.

March 2 (Sunday). Quinquagesima Sunday (50 days before Easter.) 7.30 am: Glorious light! ‘The bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.’ An ambulation and shoppery, before returning home for breakfast and Wayne Summers’s delicious homemade marmalade (‘with bits in it!!’).

My old/renewed friend from the far-distant past sent me several photographs from our time together in the British School’s infants, junior girls, and junior boys schools. In junior school, the sexes were segregated. An appalling educational policy, in my opinion. Not least because it ill-prepared us for reintegration at secondary-school level, and the shock of realising how far ahead of us boys many of the girls were in terms of maturity and academic attainment. My friend had included a class photograph. My attempt at identifying the girls in it was found wanting.

Response Letter: How we looked and were dressed like miniature versions of our parents, back then. … The girl, second from the left, in the centre row, played Mary to my Joseph in the Infants’ School Nativity play. I think she was called D___. She asked to go out with me, and I turned her down. (Thus began my reputation as ‘heartbreaker Harvey’.) The girl, second from the left, in the front row, was J___. She had a brother who died not many years after my own class photograph was taken.

We lost several friends in junior and secondary schools to illnesses (exacerbated by poverty, in some cases) that, today, can be either inoculated against or palliated.

British School, Abertillery, Wales (1987).

3.30 pm: A longer ambulation in the sunshine along the Promenade, which was as busy today as on a Bank Holiday.

March 3 (Monday).

And a time to gather stones (Ecclesiastes 3.5).

9.00 am: Studiology. Over dinner (and I do this only when eating alone) I watched a documentary about criminology, with the captions setting on. The descriptions of the audible sounds and music that accompany the images intrigue me. Phrases such as:

ominous sound
eerie whoosh
suspenseful music
sinister string music
morose music
brooding music
hopeful music
music rises, fades
music peaks, stops

When I watch programmes with the sound off (and place myself in the position of the profoundly-deaf viewer), these descriptions are transformed into instructions. I have to either draw upon my prior auditory experience of cognate types of sound and music, or mentally compose a response (a mode of participatory and spontaneous improvisation, if you will), or else conceptualise, abstractly, the emotions and forms they evoke. It struck me that the phrases could also serve as instructions and limiting conditions for solo and group improvisations. ‘Now this is something interesting to think about’ (as the character of Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks would say).

10.30 am: On to the small rig to explore low-tone, square-wave oscillations in concert. I cannot think, only feel, my way through the sounds, presently. I don’t know what I’m searching for, and can only hope that something within this morass of equipment is searching for me.

2.00 pm: An hour’s online conversation (long overdue) with Margaret (Stephen Chilton’s mum). I’d wish her on anyone. She has extraordinary resilience, having lost two sons and two husbands in her lifetime. Bitterness has no root in her disposition. Margaret is a spiritual giant and a colossus of a matriarch.

March 4 (Tuesday). Shrove Tuesday. 8.00 am: An ambulation, via the charity shop, across the Promenade in a northerly direction towards Constitution Hill. 8.45 am: Writing and correspondence. 9.15 am: Studiology. I dug deeper into the lower tones. They may have either no part in a composition or little significance apart from themselves. The objective is, rather, to leave my prejudices, assumptions, plans, and expectations outside the studio door, to attend with open ears, and trust the process.

Our creative practice — whatever form it takes — may seem utterly trivial in these perilous times. But art is an act of affirmation, and of resistance — an unwillingness to succumb to crippling fear and inertia even ‘though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea’, as the psalmist wrote. The tectonic shifts in the world order have sent shock waves throughout the globe. On several occasions during this past week, my mind has turned to G F Watts’ Hope (1886). The year before the first version was painted, he wrote in terms that chime with the spirit of our present age:

I see nothing but uncertainty, contention, conflict, beliefs unsettled and nothing established in place of them.

Blind Hope sits upon the globe plucking a lyre with only one unbroken string remaining. In his interpretive description, Watts explained:

She is trying to get all the music possible, listening with all her might to the little sound.

G F Watts, *Hope* (1886) oil on canvas, Tate Britain (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

Politics and institutional religion (as distinct from personal religious faith) are failing. Art is that final string, perhaps. We must pluck it with all our might and attention. That is our compact with a better future … which will come.

The critic Clement Greenberg, in his advocacy of the concept of the avant-garde, believed that modern artists were pioneering exemplars at the frontline of what we all could aspire to be. He was writing about the Abstract Expressionists, principally, in the period shortly after the Second World War, after atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan, and after the full horror of the Holocaust had been revealed. Yet he remained optimistic. ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’, wrote the poet Alexander Pope in An Essay on Man (1733).

Today, in my own work, I’m ‘listening … to the little sound’:

*TestStrip 1*: single square-wave oscillation with incremental modulation (March 4, 2014).

March 5 (Wednesday). Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. 8.00 am: A short ambulation around the neighourhood, passed the house that was my first marital home (a rented flat on the ground floor), up to the hospital, passed the room where both my children were born, and down through the hospital’s center, where procurement vans had arrived and doctors and nurses (who’ve my unalloyed respect) were beginning their 12-hour shift. I have not moved very far from where I live presently. My first house was just a third of a mile away. (I can see it from my studio window.) In neither residences was I more than an eight-minute walk away from the School of Art, the National Library of Wales (which I can see from my study window), and university campus. The ideal commute for an academic and avowed pedestrian.

8.45 am: Writing and correspondence. 9.30 am: Studiology. ‘More tea, John!’ I returned to the small rig, and continued to explore its potential in simple terms. Sounds associated with industry, and like a trickling subterranean stream, ensued. 10.30 am: A review of the capture thus far. At this juncture, I need know only that the sounds are moving in right direction … which they are. 11.00 am: Much holding on the line waiting for travel insurance advice. At least they played jazz while I held. 12.15 pm: I continued the review. There are not a few examples of what the TV caption descriptors might call ‘darkly foreboding music’.

4.00 pm: I’ve manufactured enough ‘bricks’ to begin building some small part of one wall, when I return to composition next week.