Summa: diary (March 14-20, 2026)

That was so long ago; it might just as well have been an incident in someone else’s life.

March 14 (Saturday).

I came across John Keats’s sonnet ‘To a Lady Seen for a Few Moments at Vauxhall’ (1818), only recently. It’s about the memory of the momentary; a love at first (and last) sight, which the poet experienced in 1815. At the time, Keats was an 18-year old medical student making his first visit to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, London. By all accounts, this was a heady place to be seen. There, the poet was suddenly and intensely affected by the sight of a woman whom he’d never before seen, and would never see again. They neither met nor spoke. Likely, she didn’t even notice his admiring gaze.

The passing of years didn’t dull his infatuation. On the contrary, it grew stronger. Keats experienced what psychologists call limerence – a powerful and an unshakable feeling of love that’s as ecstatic as it is distracting. Many suffer from it. Three years after his encounter, when he composed the sonnet, Keats was still in her thrall — ‘tangled’ and ‘snared’ like an insect and animal. This love was as disabling as it was confusing, but — like other types of addiction — too necessary and sustaining to abandon, in his view. Keats’s senses were in disarray. The night sky, a rose, and a budding flower, each in turn triggered an emotional memory of her eyes, complexion, and lips. She remained more vivid and potent in his memory than any experience or emotion he knew presently.

Keats was enraptured by her external beauty and his own fantasies. The ‘ungloving … hand’ represented a disrobing in miniature – an erotic anticipation, perhaps. His inamorata’s in-ear ‘love-sound’ (such a resonant phrase), was, perhaps, either her involuntary sigh in the depth of intimacy or a whispered declaration of love reciprocated. Keats knew nothing about her: neither her name, nor age, nor availability. This was love not tested by reality – an ideal. As such, it wouldn’t fade, fail, or disappoint. Quite possibly she was the love of his short life. (He succumbed to tuberculosis just seven years after he saw her, at the age of 25.) The sonnet was written not only about but also to her. Did the ‘lady’ read it 29 years later — when it was first published, posthumously, in 1844 — not realising that she was its inspiration?

There may be people — either best friends, or soul mates, or lovers — whom we knew intimately for a brief season only. Afterwards, they left our lives forever. Nevertheless, they remain in our hearts and memories. Like ministering angels, some awakened in us that which had remained dormant for many years, others healed and consoled, and yet others pointed us in the direction of a better way of living.

7.15 am: An ambulation into town and across the Promenade, before returning home to continue image-making for the album and writing. ‘At even, ere the sun was set’.

March 15 (Sunday). Mothering Sunday.

March 16 (Monday). 7.15 am: Breakfast. 7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 am: A review of the week ahead. Studylogy. Writing. 9.15 am: Studiology. I began the final stage mix of the Darkness Covered the Whole Land album. This involves listening to each track on several pairs of headphones and monitor speakers, and making adjustments to the recording accordingly. This will be my last contact with this aspect of the project. Headphones and hearing aids don’t mix. Listening to an electronic device through another electronic device is too removed from reality. My practice is to finalise the positioning, tonal value, and loudness of all the samples within the session framework using headphones and, afterwards, hear the results over monitor speakers through my hearing aids. Where there’s a will … . My ears were jaded. I’d listened to this material for too long. Soon, I’ll not be able to see any virtue in it. Or worse … I’ll start to undo the good that I’ve done.

Returning to the subject of primitive stereophony (March 10, Summa: diary (March 6-13, 2026)), it struck me how few people listened to music on headphones in the 1960s. Unless someone owned a stereo Hi-Fi system, it was unlikely that their record player had a headphone output. Moreover, most domestic units owned by non-audiophiles were monaural. (I had my mono Dansette Bermuda record deck that was clumsily converted into stereo. Thereafter, it emitted a 50 MHz hum, caused by an unresolved earth-loop.) I strongly suspect that early stereo records were mixed with little if any consideration for headphone audition.

10.15 am: I arrived at the School of Art to enjoy an hour’s walkabout Wayne Summers’s PhD exhibition with the artist. It was good to be back in the building again. We recorded our conversation, as I had my discussion with Elizabeth Lloyd, when we toured her doctoral show some months ago (January 5, Summa diary (January 10-16, 2026)). You can never tell when light will shine. So, best to be prepared.

1.45 pm: On with monitoring the mix. It’s astonishing: hearing the same material on different sets of speakers and monitors is like being told the same thing by different voices. 7.30 pm: An evening of admin and website construction.

March 17 (Tuesday). St Patrick’s Day.

I’m seeking a straight path.

7.30 am: Breakfast. 8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Studyology. Writing. This morning, for the first time in a long while, I glimpsed a possible way ahead, with respect to future projects. These are things that need to be done, and that I want to do. Where and when they’ll be undertaken, well, that’s another matter. Thus, I advance with clarity, courage, determination, and open hands.

9.00 am: Studiology. Back under the ‘cans’, for a morning of micro-managing small samples within the stereo-field. Any shift of above +40%, either left or right of centre, reduces the perceived loudness of a sample noticeably. Compensation is required.

A curious synchronicity (as Carl Jung would call it). Today, a former student and friend of mine, whom I’d not spoken to in a long time, talked with her mother about me, and how much she’d missed our conversations. Shortly after, out of the blue, she received from me an invitation to an online conversation.

It’s 35 years since Dad died suddenly, at 62 years of age. The track entitled ‘John’ on the Spirit Communication (2023) album is dedicated to his passing, and the strange circumstances that accompanied it. An earlier synchronicity.

March 18 (Wednesday).

The heart can be so deformed as to require a wrecking-ball to knock it into shape.

Barmy Spring has returned. (By noon, Aberystwyth’s temperature had reached 20°C (68°F), making it the hottest place in the UK.) 7.45 am: Writing and a communion. 8.45 am: Studiology. On with mixing. 12.00 pm: An ambulation through the town and down the Avenue, where I sat on a bench and let the sunlight caress my face. I vividly remember, when I was 6 years old, lying on my back on the beach at Weston-super-Mare with a thin, loose-weave towel over my face, feeling the sun’s warmth and light penetrate the cloth. Seven years later, while breakfasting at The Albert Hotel, in the same resort, I noticed a girl. She was slender, and appeared to be the same age as me. Her shoulder length, strawberry-blond hair and a pale freckled complexion, was set-off by a bright emerald green tee-shirt. My first breakfast at the hotel was her last. Like Keats, I never saw her again. Where is she now, I wonder?

At every stage of the mixing process there has been far more to do than I’d anticipated. Active listening is tiring. There’ll come at time when, having completed the album to the best of my ability, the compositions will sound as though they had been made by someone else. Only then, will I listen passively and with enjoyment (possibly). 4.15 pm: I gave my poor ears a rest from polishing samples, and listened to the stereophonic mix of several late Beatles tracks. 7.30 pm: On with constructing websites.

March 19 (Thursday). 6.30 am: I went downstairs, having lain in bed several hours, unable to return to sleep. I slouched in an armchair, to reflect … and promptly fell soundly asleep until 8.00 am. 8.15 am: From out of the depths to ambulation too hastily, I feared. Disorientation ensued. I moved through the streets, as though between reality and a dream-state. The ambient light appeared polarised. The town looked familiar, but felt like somewhere I’d never been before. The accompanying mild euphoria dispelled by the time I’d reached the hairdressers.

10.00 am: Studiology. Back on track for the remainder of the morning and afternoon. This was the last-chance saloon for changes to the compositions. I walk a thin line between restraint and recklessness. ‘Ask much of yourself, John!’, the inner-tutor entreated. 7.30 pm: Correspondence and reference writing.

March 20 (Friday). 7.00 am: I dreamt that my mother and I bumped into and hugged one another under a Victorian railway arch in London. We were both in our late 20s. This is the first time she has appeared in a dream since her death, 39 years ago.

8.00 am: Studyology. Writing. 9.30 am: Studiology. Track 12: ‘The Silence was So … So, So Perfect (October 27, 1966)’.  There’s a newsreel of the mass funeral at Aberfan Cemetery made by British Pathé in 1967. It comprises short soundless scenes from the funeral. Rather incongruously, at the close of the film, there are several seconds of footage related to the exhibition Hommage a Pablo Picasso Peintures, held at Galeries National Du Grand Palais, Paris (November 18, 1966 – February 12, 1967). Presumably, this was the next event filmed on that reel, following the camera-operator’s work at Aberfan. I acknowledged the anomaly by inserting a 5-second composit of noise-based samples at the end of the composition. These were manufactured using a data-bending technique for converting images (taken from newsreel screenshots, in this case) into sounds.

4.15 pm: All sixteen tracks had been mixed. I shall review them again next week, to tweak any remaining glitches that I can’t hear presently. Along the way, I’ve mixed-down proofs of the set. The album ends with the interview, which was my point of embarkation for the project.

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; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice