Odds & Ends (April 6-10, 2026)
Sweet Talk. Saturday. She was talking with the shopkeeper while finalising her purchase, when I entered the shop. They were discussing their respective Easter-weekend plans. The man behind the counter was going out for Sunday lunch the following day. ‘[Something, something, something] … for a lady of my years’, she replied, while I perused the shelves for chocolates, marzipan, and fruit pastels. ‘Would you like to come to the cinema with me next week, to see [such and such a movie]?’, she pursued, with the faltering self-consciousness of a teenager trying to secure a first date. The shopkeeper promised to take a look at the cinema’s listing, and get back to her.
Handle with Care. Easter Sunday. When Peter entered the empty tomb, he saw not only the linen clothes in which Christ’s body had been wrapped, lying there, but also the napkin (Latin: sudarion) which had been bound around his head, ‘rolled up in a place by itself’ (John 20.7). (Other translations say, ‘folded’.) There’ve been various suggestions regarding the theological meaning of the napkin; none, to my mind, are entirely satisfactory. I’m intrigued by the napkin as an object of intent. Whether folded and relocated discretely by the risen Christ or the attending angels, these actions signified both presence of mind and deliberateness. Folding a piece of cloth wasn’t a spectacular event. Nevertheless, it underscored the enduring meaningfulness and wonder of small things, precise gestures, commonplace materials, and neatness — even in the immediate aftermath of the God-man’s resurrection.
‘Mary!’/Mask. Easter Sunday. Having explained to the angels that she was weeping because the body was no longer in the tomb, Mary turned around and saw, but didn’t recognise, Jesus. She mistook him for the gardener. Jesus, having been put to death two days earlier, was the last person Mary would’ve expected to see. Moreover, she was grief-stricken and anxious presently. Thus, her misidentification is entirely understandable. Rembrandt illustrates the scene from Mary’s perspective. The risen Jesus is portrayed carrying a spade, in workingman’s clothes, with a sheathed pruning knife attached to his belt, and wearing a large-brimmed hat that cast a shadow over much of his face. The iconography of Jesus here is unlike anything the artist used elsewhere. In the painting, he does indeed look like a gardener … like someone else. Mary recognised Jesus only when he called her by name.
But neither did Mary recognise his voice, when he’d asked: ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ (John 20.11-16). The account of Jesus’s post-resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus provides a plausible interpretation of these phenomena. Two disciples were walking together. Jesus drew near and walked with them, ‘but their eyes were kept from recognising him’. As in his encounter with Mary, Jesus asked a question: in essence ‘What are you talking about?’ (Their ears, too, were kept from recognising him.) The disciples deduced that he was a stranger to the area. They explained to Jesus who (in effect) he was, what he’d done, and what had happened to him. The disciples urged Jesus to stay the night with them. ‘When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognised him; and he vanished from their sight‘ (Luke 24.13-25).
Sixteen Pictures for Aberfan. Monday. Completed.
Kane and Keats (Revisited). Tuesday. (March 14, Summa: dairy (March 14-20, 2026).
There is a speech in Citizen Kane by Bernstein. He is talking about the past and memory and he says he saw a girl once, in 1896, a woman in white with a white parasol, on the ferry over to Jersey. He never spoke to her or saw her again, but ‘I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since, that I haven’t thought of that girl’.
David Thomson, How to Watch a Movie (2015).
Chasers (Red Flag). Tuesday. They need; they want; they get, without any consideration for the integrity or loyalties of others. They’re shamelessly predatory. They see; they pounce; they devour. Chasers are rarely attached to anyone or anything of value. Having had their fill, they walk away, silently, with a shrug of their shoulders, and never look back.
Deflection Disclosure. Wednesday. It had been a casual but nonetheless searching observation (delivered with delicacy) on their part, about something to which I’d been oblivious. It wasn’t what I’d said, but what I hadn’t. Because, these days, I prefer to listen rather than to talk.
Maralyn’s Diary. Thursday. A few days ago, I came across a BBC website article about a diary of news events written by Maralyn Minett. She was one of the 116 children killed in the Aberfan disaster just over a year (not weeks, as the journalist supposes) later. The article is illustrated by her page for October 1, 1965. The launch she describes may refer to an orbital rocket carrying a satellite payload that was sent into space on September 30, 1965. The eruption mentioned in the entry took place on Volcano Island, Lake Taal, Indonesia (September 28-30, 1965). There were around 200 fatalities. One ‘mountain’ exploded and another collapsed, approximately 6,918 miles (11,134 kilometres) and 388 days apart.
Touch the mountains, so that they smoke.
Psalm 144.5.
Roy. Thursday. This morning I had a dream about Roy Ascott, my undergraduate Fine Art tutor and Head of Department at Newport Art College, Gwent, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I’ve never dreamt about him before. (I checked that he hadn’t died overnight, when I awoke. Roy is now 91 years of age.) We had a gently but fruitfully combative relationship back then. I was still a valley boy: too conservative and limited in my perspectives. He was from another planet. Roy lauded an austere body of work (exemplified above) that I’d made in my third year of studies, but couldn’t appreciate myself. Subsequently, I’ve grown to understand and respect his position. Some years later, I published an article on spirit photography in his Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research. We discussed our respective beliefs in the paranormal and the afterlife. It was not a conversation that I could’ve imagined having with him as a student. In the dream we talked about our parents and children, curiously. When I was an undergraduate, students and staff rarely talked about their lives outside the doors of the college. Strictly business.
White Light. Friday. In the 1960s, when a cathode-ray tube TV was switched-off the picture would immediately contract to a blue-white dot. This was the result of the magnetic fields, produced by the focusing and deflecting coils, closing down in advance of the cathode gun. As a consequence, the electron beam it fired lost cohesion, shrank, and was concentrated as a bright point of light at the centre of the screen, before it too faded. It was like witnessing the ‘big bang’ in reverse; or (subsequently) Voyager 1’s last sight of Earth, as it left the Solar System; or the end of life, from the vantage point of the soul.
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