Summa: dairy (April 11-17, 2026)

April 11 (Saturday).

I’m thankful for being: Here. Now. Still.

Update. The above album, and its associated website and illustrations, are complete. The project will now be placed in the ‘freezer’ until the day of commemoration: October 21, 2026. Tracks from the other album, the 144 Variations, will begin release on May 30, and on each of the subsequent 143 days. I need some time and distance before returning to the theme of the Aberfan disaster, and preparing for public lectures and promotional interviews. The list of challenges under ‘Intellect & Creative Activities’ (March 26, Summa: diary (March 21-27, 2026)) beckons. It’ll be addressed during my period in South Wales, next week. There, I shall touch the earth and reorganise the furniture of my heart and mind.

7.30 am: An ambulation, in and out of rain showers travelling shoreward, and under the consoling sunlight. This morning, my heart was full. 9.00 am: Personal and work admin. Dreary but necessary matters.

April 12 (Sunday). While not a sabbatarian, my Sundays have (whenever possible) a different complexion to the other six days of the week. I stay out of my studio and study, and off computers and social media platforms (whenever possible). Religious duties aside the day is a space between the end of one week and the beginning of another, within which to draw breath, remember friends and family (past and present), correspond, read, go places, and reflect.

April 13 (Monday).

‘Behold, I will do a new thing.’

6.45 am: The day invited. 7.30 am: A communion. 8.15 am: Studiology. Writing, and a review of projects begun and awaiting. Which ones must be completed, as a matter of necessity? Which ones makes sense within the overall arc of my professional development? Which ones can be undertaken only by me? Which ones still hold my attention? Which ones do I relish re-engaging? Which ones present challenges that are sufficiently different to those of previous projects? Which ones present challenges that could defeat me if I don’t rise to meet them?

In this next period, there’ll be room for only one long-haul project. The others will need to be achievable within a few months, at the most. They’ll range across sound-based, visual, and textual outputs, manufactured in parallel. The sound-based commitments will include an exploration of improvisation, and the development of appropriate technologies and skills to this end.

11.00 am: I read again a number of entries in this blog, and its predecessors (the two diaries), to trace the roots of ideas and imperatives that have informed my recent work. The exercise also prepares me for a return to those towns and cities that, historically, have shaped my mindset, values, curiosity, and sense of self, and continue to do so.

Abertillery, my hometown and centre of the known universe, has been the place to which I’ve always returned and found, if not answers, then, more appropriate questions.

June 28, 2015, Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018) .

2.00 pm: A long-overdue video link with the late Stephen Chilton’s mother, Margaret, who is now in her 85th year. She’s a committed Roman Catholic and a candidate for living sainthood, in my books. A remarkable and inspiring woman. ‘I pray for you everyday, John!’

3.00 pm: I re-opened the folders for the Nothing is Without Sound book. Were it not for the interruption of the Aberfan project, the book would be finished. But one must always seize opportunities when they’re presented. And the two albums had an absolute deadline.

Donald Trump’s AI illustration, on his Truth Social site (following his rebuff of Pope Leo XIV for criticisms about war mongering) casts the President in the role of a Jesus-like healer. Unsurprisingly, the post has drawn opprobrium from not only Christians but also people of other faiths and of no faith. All can readily see the audacity, the idolatry, and the offence. I’ve published and spoken on visual blasphemy in the past. (See, for example: ‘The Iconography of Profanity: Visual Blasphemy’ in my The Bible as Visual Culture: When Text Becomes Image, The Bible in the Modern World, (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013) 143-57). Trump’s image is a potent exemplification of this disruptive tradition of Christian iconography. Not least because it was publicised by the President of the United States. This is the visual theology of White Christian Nationalism in a nutshell, sanctioned by a nutcase.

Trump’s Christ is in the mould of the blond-haired Aryan type of National Socialist propaganda imagery in the 1930s. American eagles hover above him like the Holy Spirit, in semblance of a dove, at Christ’s baptism. The image of sick or dead man — who bears more than a passing resemblance to photographs taken of Jeffrey Epstein taken while he was in prison — adapts the iconography of Christ’s healing of the paralytic man. The supporting cast are all white (of course) and Christian exclusively (presumably). No doubt historians of art history and visual culture will have much to say about this in the months to come. Trump removed the image later, in response to the outrage it had engendered. He believed that he’d been represented as a Red Cross doctor, rather than Jesus.

March 14 (Tuesday). 7.15 am: A communion. 8.15 am: Studiology. Having begun to reacclimatise to the book’s atmosphere, I reviewed my list of case studies (images and texts) to date, and waded through a great many (too many) bookmarks to relevant sites and articles, which I’d stored on Google. (In the background: Britten’s War Requiem, Op. 66 (1962). It continues to be ‘a child of our times’ (to quote the title of Michael Tippett’s oratorio (1939-41).)

11.00 am: A home visit from the artist Susan Forster, bearing homemade biscuits. They eased the passage of belly-achingly ineluctable political discourse, and touched the taste buds of sweetly savoured art talk. Much appreciated.

1.45 pm: I continued to reacquaint myself with preparatory notes for the book. It was rather like having a tutorial with myself, wherein we plumbed the depth and measured the relative virtues of different possibilities. I wasn’t the best tutee today, my inner-tutor judged. My attention was distracted by preparations for the week to come, in South Wales.

4.00 pm: An ambulation on a banal afternoon. I walked inside my own head. 7.30 pm: My mind confronted alternative sound-practice themes, some of which may fuel an improvisational approach to composition in the future. All my sound projects begin with a theme. Rarely do they commence, abstractly. I’m an interpreter, primarily.

March 15 (Wednesday). 7.00 am: Awake. The weather was changing for the worse, even as I opened the lounge curtains. 7.30 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Studyology. Writing, while listening to testimonies of Protestant conversions to Roman Catholicism. My interest is in varieties of conversion: from one conviction to another; one doctrine to another; one denomination to another; one church to another; one religion to another; and from faith to non-faith (and vis versa). These transitions can be prompted as often by inner-necessity as by intellectual evolution. ‘A change of heart’, as they say.

I observed (in the sense of witnessed) a Roman Catholic mass at St Fin Barres Cathedral, Cork, Ireland in 2007, where I was delivering a paper at a university conference. Prior to the service, one young woman in the pews began, spontaneously and quietly, to cry and sing or pray — the difference hardly seemed to matter — before leading the congregation in a recitation of the Ave Maria (Hail Mary). It felt authentically spiritual, and very moving.

I returned to my list of sound-practice alternatives, related research, and correspondence. 10.45 am: Back to the book — if indeed it is a book — and a re-organisation of all the material collected and drafts completed thus far. This included the book’s Preface. When a PhD supervisor, I would encourage my tutees to write one to explain who they were and why they’d been drawn to the topic of their thesis. A writer’s personal motivations fascinate me. It’s a mode of introduction which reminds the reader that there’s a living and breathing human being, with a history and passions, behind what’s coming next in the text.

8.30 pm: Eventide.

March 16 (Thursday). 8.30 am: Studyology. Writing, correspondence, and continued review. 11.15 am: Redrafting, in a draft entering through my Velux window, which needs to be kept partially open to permit builders to insert an electricity cable. (Sigh!) Facing the Preface, again. ‘At least its getting a tad better, John’, encouraged the inner-tutor, faint-praisedly. 1.45 pm: An ambulation. and shoppery.

2.15 pm: Re-prefacing. In the background, I listened to online discussions about speculative theology: guardian angels. I’ve a 19th century print representing a female angel overseeing two children at play. I bought it on holiday, because it reminded me of a similar image hung on the wall of the protagonist Laura Palmer’s bedroom in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992).

The Welsh artist Nicholas Evans once told me a story about an encounter he’d had with his guardian angel when a young boy. Evans had not long begun work as a collier, and was walking home at night from the colliery along railway lines traversed by coal trucks. On one occasion he was travelling alone, unaware that a convoy of trucks was hurtling towards him from behind. He felt a hand on his back forcibly thrust him off the track, moments before the trucks passed. Undoubtedly, he would otherwise have been killed. No one was visible in the immediate vicinity.

March 17 (Friday). 9.30 am: Haircut. (I swear my hair gets greyer after every appointment.) 10.15 am: Studyology. Prevaricating over Prefacing. There’s a pungent odour of spirit-based glue in the studio, emanating from the dormer window, above which a new roof section and lead flashing has been recently stuck down. The smell makes me woozy. For the same reason, I can’t use oil-based paint. The artist Paula Rego suffered the same condition, and was forced to work with water-based mediums only. That restriction, she explained to me, influenced the development of her painting style, significantly. What we cannot do shapes our development as signally as what we can. Thus, we should be thankful for our limitations. I decanted to the remote-studio on the second floor of the house, and fresh air, to continued to write and practice what I preach.

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