Summa: diary (May 17-22, 2025)

Numquam obliviscar
This is me; that is me. I acknowledge both.

May 17 (Saturday). 7.00 am: An Aberystwyth morning.

7.30 am: An ambulation along the Promenade, watching the dolphins play in the bay; taking a medium, white hot chocolate drink at one of my favourite watering holes; and looking out towards the horizon, gratefully. This is happiness.

9.30 am: At home … administrations, for the remainder of the day (with John Martyn’s Solid Air (1973) playing in the background).

May 18 (Sunday). 9.00 am: An ambulation, through the cemetery on the outward and return journey, and up and down the quiet Avenue — attending to the shadows cast on my path by the branches and leaves above — in between. One grave is 3-feet away from its neighbour. However, between them, lie 30 years. 11.00 am: Morning Eucharist: ‘Come down, O Love divine / Seek thou this soul of mine’. 12.15 pm: Domestics. 12.15 pm: Good ol’ Thomas (or Tomos, because he’s Polish) delivered my parcel. 1.30 pm: DIY. The installation of a new security chain on the front door (with my late father whispering encouragements in my ear). 2.45 pm: Admin, before the new working week begins.

In the evening I watched Small Things Like These (2024) — a well acted and understated film about the appalling treatment of young women in an Irish town’s convent, and a complicity of silence on the part of the locals. It was filmed in New Ross, County Wexford and locations in County Kilkenny. The story is set in the 1980s. Towns in those areas have retained the ambience and features of that period. When I first visited Cork, in 2007, it was as though my journey had taken me back in time 30 years.

May 19 (Monday). ‘It’s Monday’, as Bowie sang on ‘Joe the Lion’ (1977). 7.30 am: A review of the week ahead, and image research. 8.15 am: Studiology. Before returning to the second composition from the Six Bells [working title] suite, I listened again to my roll call of lost miners.

9.15 am: The insertion of the disarticulated and modified version of the roll call was effortless — as though the composition had been awaiting its arrival. 10.15 am: Time to set this aside, for now, and return to the Aberfan [working title] suite. Compositions move forward, second-by-second. To what am I not attending, sufficiently? By far, pace and metre are the most difficult dimensions to resolve.

11.00 am: The voices and hollers of children at a nearby school playground drifted in through my window on the wind. They lived. They shrived. In the context of the present project, this was a great consolation to hear. One of my neighbours (who is a gift to the neighbourhood) sometimes apologises for the noise her children and their friends make in the garden. I assure her that no complaint will ever issue from my lips. Their sounds herald the onset of Summer. Moreover, they’re playing outdoors and communally, rather than being mesmerised by a screen in their bedrooms, on their own. What’s not to like?, as they say.

When I was a child, I played as a child: kicked a ball up the steep terrace, where I lived at the bottom; climbed with others to the top of the mountain overlooking the town, picked wimberries (the european blueberry), and followed the sheep tracks, while avoiding the fissures filled with abandoned fridges and dead horses; watched my father practice woodwork, in his shed at the end of the garden; played ‘let’s-pretend’, as characters from popular TV series; walked the streets of the neighbourhood with a candle in a jam jar, during periods of blackout; and ‘fished’ for tadpoles at a local colliery’s feeder pond. These were experiences that shaped my adult life.

May 20 (Tuesday). 6.30 am: Writing. 8.15 am: Domestics, followed by studiology. Before generating new compositions, I wanted to assure myself that the current work-in-progress was, if not well on the way to resolution, then, eminently fixable. There are times when what’s wanting in a piece is not due to the sounds that I hear but, rather, those I don’t. Thus, something is not so much amiss as missing.

Prior to the death of the 116 children at Aberfan on October 21, 1966, six boys below the age of 18 were killed underground at Merthyr Vale Colliery — which was responsible for the tip that fell on Pantglas Junior School — as a result of accidents that were all too common in the UK coalfields at that time:

George Thomas (aged 14) Assistant Wasteman, roof fall (Nov. 6, 1890);
William Haskell (aged 14) Collier Boy, roof fall (May 21, 1892);
David Davies (aged 14) Collier, in shaft incident (Jan. 7, 1885);
David Rees (aged 12) Door Boy, crushed by trams (Jan. 7, 1885);
Charles Massey (aged 16) Collier, roof fall (Mar. 17, 1885);
John Jones (aged 12) Door Boy, crushed by trams (Dec. 31, 1885).

They are part of the story of the Aberfan tragedy and, likewise, victims of industry. A compositional memorial to them would be appropriate, I decided.

1.30 pm: Following lunch, I spoke and recorded the details of the six boys’ deaths, and began processing the file. 4.00 am: An ambulation through town, passed the Old College — now looking for all the world like something Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano (the two principal architects of the Centre Pompidou, Paris) would have conceived.

May 21 (Wednesday). 6.00 am: Awake. 6.30 am: Correspondence. News of a friend’s recovery, following fierce treatment for an aggressive cancer that very very few survive. And the sun shined too. 8.30 am: Studiology. I made further versions of the roll call for the six children, in preparation for processing on the large rig. 10.00 am: A mop-mow and my local hairdressers.

Last night in my further reading about John Cozens’ ‘blot’ method of drawing, I was reminded of the Plato’s allegory of the cave (380 BCE). In the arbitrary flickering shadows cast upon the rear wall of the cave, those imprisoned within interpreted the shapes as representing their incarcerators. Because this was the only reality they knew. The theory is at the root of the Rorschach test, and the phenomenon of pareidolia (visual and auditory). In short, we make sense and see patterns where there are none to be found. Plato also wrote much of the cave’s sound and reverberation. (I must return to this aspect at a later date.)

In the abstract noises that I produce in the course of my work, my imagination hears, for example, the falling of rocks, an explosion, thunder, machinery, and colliers at work — that’s to say, the figural evocation of the source. This principle is fundamental to my working process.

11.00 am: I proceeded with modulation. 3.00 pm: A fruitful few hours’ work. In my ‘cave’, I perceived the operations of Beynons Colliery, Blaina, Wales, as heard from the bottom of ‘The Ballers’ (where I played as a child), close to the railway lines that took the coal down to Newport and Cardiff. Other samples resembled loud, aggressive, industrial-like noise, such as I’d not achieved previously. And yet others suggested subterranean sounds, such as might’ve been heard had you put your ear to colliery ground.

May 22 (Thursday). 7.00 am: Writing. I hear a bee, outside at my window. 8.30 am: Studiology. I continued processing the roll call of the six boys — turning their names, ages, and the causes and dates of their deaths into the sounds of the very industry that took away their lives. Where are their graves? In one of the eight cemeteries in and around Merthyr Tydfil, no doubt. And, no doubt, none were ever photographed during their short lifetime.

Before the advent of leisure photography in the 1920s, few of the working class had the disposal income to commission a commercial photographer. My maternal grandparents had two such photographs taken, both when they were in their early 20s. My grandfather was a reasonably well-paid collier, already aspiring to management at Beynons Colliery. My paternal grandfather was a colliery engineer at Cwmtillery Colliery, Abertillery. The only extant photograph of him in his milieu was taken by a workmate, probably on a Kodak Brownie, in the 1930s.

Having labeled the samples that had been extracted yesterday, I applied some of them to a composition entitled ‘A Model of Catastrophe’. The parts fell into place within a few hours. 1.00 pm: I set this aside, and moved on to construct a response to the six boys. Today, I’m content to lay foundations — to create starting-points or backdrops for — two further compositions. These will be worked-up after the Bank Holiday weekend (which I’m taking on this occasion).

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; Bluesky; Instagram; Archive of Visual Practice