Odds & Ends (May 9-15, 2026).

Ambulations. May 9 (Saturday). 7.15 am: An ambulation (part 1): Llanbadarn Road to Eastgate Street to Terrace Road, before a sudden and unexpected return home.

10.15 am: Try again. An ambulation (part 2): The Promenade to the Harbour (via The Hut).

Ambulations. May 10 (Sunday). Along the interior corridor of the Royal Pier.

Canaan in Wales. Seion, Baker Street, Aberystwyth is a Welsh Independent (Annibynwyr) place of worship, designed by Richard Owen of Liverpool — one of the best and most well-known Welsh architects of chapels. ‘Seion’ is the Welsh translation of ‘Zion’ — a place referred to in the Bible that had a specific geographical location in Jerusalem, but which also symbolised the City of God or the Heavenly Kingdom. (There is no letter ‘Z’ in Welsh). Many chapels in Wales had biblical place names. Across the road from Seion is Bethel. (See: Summa: diary (May 1-8, 2026). Bethesda, Nazareth, Beulah, and Soar, too, were popular names for chapels.

Some Welsh villages that grew up around these chapels took on their names. In the 19th century, Wales could be mistaken for a Holy Land in the West. This commonality was visualised more broadly by The Sunday School Union of Great Britain. It published Gwlad Canaan: Ar Gynllun Gogledd a Deheuir Cymru i Blant [ Land of Canaan: On the Plan of North and South Wales for Children]. I wrote:

It showed the geographical location of the twelve tribes of Israel in Old Testament times and the regions into which Palestine was divided in New Testament times, set with the boundary of Wales … . [The map] illustrated the disposition of each of Israel’s lands in relation in relation to the twelve counties that comprised mainland Wales. Each land connected with a county, for example, the land of Benjamin was twinned with Flintshire … . As far as possible the principle towns and cities in the Holy Land matched those towns and villages situated in roughly the same position. Thus Jerusalem corresponds to ‘Llandilo Fawr’ [Carmarthenshire].

John Harvey, Image of the Invisible: The Visualization of Religion in the Welsh Nonconformist Tradition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999) 97.

Believing in Seeing. Reading through my news and social-media feeds, I’m persuaded that there are many competing versions of reality in operation today. Arguably, most are — more or less — fantasies. Typically, they’re each represented by a welter of so-called visual ‘evidence’. Over the last few weeks, the US Department of War and Pentagon have dripped, teasingly (like a slow striptease), putative evidence of UFOs/UAPs, taken from ships’ radar and aerial-military reconnaissance cameras. The images are mostly low-definition black-and-white video clips showing dots and tiny orbs moving at phenomenal speed. Fascinating? Yes! Persuasive? No! Likewise the testimonies given at the US Congress, several years ago: too many examples of ‘I know someone who knows someone who’s seen something’. (How much credence would you afford anything coming out of the US Government, these day?) Elsewhere on the Internet, there are more digital images of ghosts than you can shake a planchette at. Videos claiming to show death-bed angels and the ascent of the soul from the departed are growing in popularity. Perhaps these fantasies are the ways by which some distract themselves from the tedious, tawdry awfulness of these days.

After the First World War, devious spiritualist photographers exploited the grief of parents who’d lost sons at the Front. Normal photographs of the parents were taken, on which it was claimed, a so-called spirit ‘extra’ of the deceased developed alongside of them. Using slight of hand and the rudimentary superimposition of two glass-plate negatives, the false assumption that ‘the camera never lies’ was exposed (in more senses than one).

In our present age of sophisticated high-altitude drones and digital-photographic manipulation, ‘seeing’ is no longer the arbiter of believing. Along time ago, so-called ‘Doubting Thomas’ offered a more reliable probative test: he needed to personally both see and touch the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion. The testimony of the other disciples (and, I imagine, video evidence, had it been available) simply wouldn’t do for him. Today, the ‘indexical link’ (to use Roland Barthes’s phrase) between reality and its photographic representation has been broken. Everything and anything can be fabricated now. At the same time, more and more people are entirely convinced by what they see and hear on social media. We are losing the ability to doubt and discern.

When the Italian Renaissance artist Massacio completed his Holy Trinity, I strongly suspect that (contrary to claims made by some old-school art historians), devotees didn’t believe that they were looking at the actual Crucifixion, as though through a portal in the wall. Granted, the artist’s striking deployment of linear perspective provided an unprecedented level of realism, in depth. However, the fresco remained, defiantly, an artefact of human origin. The painting would certainly not have been considered evidence of the historic event.

Now it’s Your Turn. My sons begged me not to interrogate their friends, when they first brought them home. ‘You’re not interviewing for a place on a degree scheme, Dad’. Perhaps I intimate. Here’s another scenario: I talk to someone whom I’ve never before met. I know nothing about them; and, so, I enquire. (I’m genuinely interested.) They answer all my questions, enthusiastically. Then … I wait … and wait. Nothing. ‘Aren’t they going to ask me anything in return?’, I think to myself. Clearly not. ‘Couldn’t they just reverse the direction of traffic, and ask me the same questions that I’d addressed to them?’, I think (again). But, no.

And another scenario: ‘What do you do?’, she asked, bravely. I have the speil off to a T:

I’m a practitioner and historian of sound art and visual art … My research field is the sonic and visual culture of religion. I explore the sonic articulations of the Christian religion by engaging visual, textual, and audible sources, theological and cultural ideas, and systemic and audiovisualogical processes. 

Blahdy-blah. ‘Oh!’, she responded, nervously. ‘I get it’ (as we hear too often these days): What I do, lies outside most people’s frame of reference. ‘So, if you can’t think of a follow-up question, then, ask me instead how I am, what I believe, about my hopes and griefs, and what makes my heart skip a beat’.

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