Summa: diary (May 23-30, 2026)
May 23 (Saturday).
I’ll miss the sea, but a person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken (David Lynch, Dune (1984)).
May 24 (Sunday). 7.00 am: But wherever I go next, there’ll always be a road back to the sea. Change and relocation aren’t inevitable; sometimes, you have to force a decision. Our comfortable familiarity with where we live and the type of work we do may, overtime, induce a creeping torpor. Gradually, we lose the aspiration to evolve and move on. Complacency becomes our comfort blanket, and the age of achievement ends.
A little sleep, a little slumber,
Proverbs 24.33
a little folding of the hands to rest—
and poverty will come on you like a thief
and scarcity like an armed man.
Several of my heroes have embraced change throughout their careers. It has kept them awake and active in their creative fields well into their 70s and 80s. And, they’re still pushing the envelop. I keep their example before me. I am without excuse.
May 25 (Monday). I took the Bank Holiday Monday off. The first time in a longtime. But I remained indoors. My hypothalamus goes haywire when the temperature rises above 25°C. A low heatstroke threshold, the doctors tell me. I should live in the far north of the UK, they advise. In the Summer, Cardigan Bay (at the centre of which sits Aberystwyth) on the west coast of Wales, is about 2°C cooler than it is a few miles inland. In the Winter, it’s about 2°C warmer. We benefit from the tail end of the Gulf Stream.
May 27 (Wednesday). On the study’s desk for these last few days, has been book-writing, a grant application, an ethics questionnaire (about the Darkness Covered the Whole Land CD release), research correspondence, and battles with a VPN app and my university-account password — for which a trip to the Hugh Owen Library on campus was required. 9.00 am: Having described my problems at some length to the first person I encountered on the Information Desk, they replied: ‘You’ll need my colleague at the end; I don’t deal with IT issues’. (Sigh!)
12.00 pm: Now that the book’s proposal was in the hands of an informal peer reviewer (whose opinion I trust implicitly), and the grant application was waiting to being signed off before submission, I returned to correspondence, and followed-up threads of ideas that I’d begun to pursue some months ago. These days, I find, artists and writers need to be the driving seat constantly; they have to push, push, push to keep their project before the eyes of facilitators and potential reviewers. Making things … now, that’s the easy part.
Glitches effecting the research ethics submission form hampered finalisation. I can’t even begin to interpret the cause, let alone a solution.
The form’s ethical interrogation is designed for the sciences and social sciences, rather than the humanities:
Will the project involve the use of ionising radiation?
Does your research have the potential to cause stress and discomfort?
That’ll be a ‘No’, then, to the first question (although, I do wonder whether I’ve missed a methodological trick here), and a resounding ‘YES’ (or ‘I SERIOUSLY HOPE SO’) to the second.
‘Stress and discomfort’ are part and parcel of professional-level creative endeavour. There are times when I want to kick the wall and yell, and wonder why the work is still so hard to do after all these years, and why I always fall short of my ambitions (at least initially). The beginning and end of a project are particularly vulnerable times, in these respects. It’s not that I’m concerned about how the work will be received. My disquiet arises, rather, from the prospect of not being able to live with either the work or myself, once it has gone public. I acknowledge that some of the sound compositions in my repertoire are deeply unsettling for the audience. (I’ve been told as much.) They’re designed that way.
May 28 (Thursday). 7.45 am: An opportunity to generate some publicity-copy to inform a review of the 144 Variations project — which will be published on the Internet at the same time as the first 144th of the album is released — presented itself. There are times when you have to go at text with hammer and tongs, to enable a journalist to compose the article on time.
1.30 pm: An ambulation and shoppery.
2.00 pm: An afternoon checking the track files against the name listing of the 144 victims. The only dimension of this project that I’ve no control over is the sound site on which the album will be released. Can it sustain and album of 144 tracks? I’ve no way of testing it in advance.
May 29 (Friday). 5.00 am: I awoke, dishevelled from tossing and turning in the heat of the night, and caught up with another early bird and pilgrim on the Road to Completion. 5.30 am: Many small tasks still lay before me. Studyology: writing and correspondence. 12.00 pm: An ambulation in search of white sourdough bread. On the town square (in reality, the shape is irregular), two young musicians busked. They were competent, engaging, and used the minimum of means. I stopped, listened, and learnt much about quality, economy, and fearlessness.
May 30 (Saturday). 6.00 am: I took my initial step on the road to October 21 (the 60th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster), by releasing the first of 144 compositions dedicated to the victims: ‘Carol Anderson’. She was 9 years of age, and had a sister who was one year older and also died in the disaster.
I’m grateful to Stephen Price of Nation.Cymru for his timely and supportive review of the album.
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