Friday, May 7. 8.00 am: A communion-walk. I recalled Richard Long‘s work:

8.30 am: This day, too, would be punctuated by impromptu consultations and verifications with and about students and their submissions. In and around this, I’d be engaged in research admin and the ongoing task of uploading art history modules to the ‘Spoken Word’ website. It was the turn of Art/Sound: practice, theory, and history 1800-2010 (which ended this year) next. The recordings are those made in 2018, largely. This year’s delivery was online; the video captures sounded too much like a series of radio broadcasts: flat and without ambience; read to myself in isolation, rather than to an audience in a lecture theatre. Having listened-in on my ‘real-world’ delivery, as I’ve supervised the uploads of lectures for other modules, I’ve become more acutely aware of the contrasts between the two modes. There’s a ‘theatricality’ and aliveness to the lecture-theatre presentations of the Art/Sound sessions that’s wholly absent from the Teams-based version of the same. In the former, I hear myself responding to the space and reaching out with my voice to those who’re assembled there. The audience is not making any response, but their silent presence contributes significantly to my performance. Lectures are always collaborative endeavours, in this sense. The prospect of university and conference presentations being delivered largely online in the future isn’t something for which I’ve any appetite, either as a presenter or an audient.

1.30 pm: Art/Sound complete, I returned to the incoming PowerPoint draft submissions once more. There are many other hours of recordings in my archive. But these are just for me; not for now. There was one other addition to upload, for now: my part of a talk that Dr Forster and I gave to our painting students, entitled ‘In Our Day’: what we did when we were undergraduates:

This talk is the second of two given, in sequence, at a workshop for second and third year painters. The first was presented by Dr June Forster. The aim was to share with our student the experiences that we’d had as undergraduates in Fine Art painting. This was in order, in part, to affirm that their challenges and struggles weren’t so different to our own back then. The recorded contribution explored my years at the art school in Newport, from 1977 to 1981.

6.30 pm: Practise session. 7.30 pm: I’d had enough of myself, my voice, my words, and my past. Too much self-interest is limiting and indulgent. There’re far more important things to consider in the world at large, presently. An evening of file-foldering, and reviewing incoming postgraduate and undergraduate submissions.

Saturday, May 8. 8.00 am: There were further submissions in Teams to review and sign off. Thereafter, I returned to reviewing and updating my websites focussing, to begin, on the original online Diary (July 16, 2014–September 4, 2018), which ran for 1,000 posts. (By the conclusion of this present diary (September 15, 2018 to date), a further 650+ will have been added.) I moved to the first date on the present diary and made small adjustments to the punctuation as I went, as well making notes about ideas that may have future relevance. I’ve made a compact with myself: not to accept invitations to speak on research themes that are no longer present and developing. One must continually break with the past while, simultaneously, building upon it. A resolution rediscovered:

To engage only those pursuits that are worth doing. To take as much responsibility for curating my past as for creating my future. To explore new technologies, processes, and ideas in order to escape the tyranny of the old.

diary (December 31, 2018)

I read, and received council from myself. Diaries provide a much needed perspective on the present from the past. I decided against regularising conventions for quotations and captions throughout the diary. They’d evolved overtime. And those changes are as much a part of the pages as the writing and images thereon. I shall not succumb to an addiction to consistency without necessity. Some titles of works, too, have altered over the course of their development. I must honour that. It’s part of the works’ history.

Dismal weather prevailed; but the garden needed the rain and its mood was oddly comforting and apposite.

The online diaries have been fed as much by my engagement with the students whom I’ve taught as my own research. When my teaching duties are over (for the most part), the rationale for the diary will end with them. I’ve said enough, in any case. I’d not anticipated that this diary would track the course of one of the most devastating global catastrophes of the past 70 or more years. That said, more people have died from AIDS/HIV since the beginning of the epidemic: some 37 million. But that’s no longer news; and it never was a catastrophe for those whose lives weren’t under threat. Like the problems of racism, poverty, and prejudice — they’re ignorable, if you’re white, wealthy, and ‘normal’.

diary extracts:

That’s one of the benefits of blogging: it encourages the writer to reflect upon their experience, and to realise how much of what seemed insignificant is, with hindsight, resonant with meaning.

diary (May 20, 2019)

Whatever significance these writings have had for others, for me the discipline of maintaining a more-or-less daily account of my activities, thoughts, and the affairs of heart and spirit has been a means of keeping a grip on life. In my scheme of things, diaries and journals are secondary activities, dependent upon, and interpretive of, ‘the main event’. Although, there’ve been times when I’ve wondered whether my life was being lived in order to be written up.

dairy (June 12, 2019)

It’s possible to leave the past behind honourably, acknowledging the good and enriching aspects even while you bemoan the folly and hurt. The past, like the future will no doubt be, is an amalgam of virtue and vice, triumph and shame, and joy and great sadness. The best and the worst of it has made you who you are. I don’t wish to either forget or deny any part. 

diary (July 2, 2019)

There’re now pressures and dangers within the job that appear to be actively encouraging me to move beyond it in the next few years.

diary (July 12, 2019)

I watched a documentary on the opera singer Dame Janet Baker. Controversially, she retired – in the opinion of her fans and other professionals in the field – relatively early in her career. She, however, was of the view that it was better to quit too soon rather than too late. There’s great wisdom in that conviction. Baker was at the height of her powers. But the work had become a burden; it demanded too much of her. Everyone had had a slice of her, and she feared that there’d be nothing left for herself if she continued in the profession. 

diary (August 29, 2019)

5.00 pm: I closed the book.