6.00 am. My first circulations around the Vicarage Fields, off Llanbadarn Road, followed by muscle toning exercises. At that time in the morning, you can be alone with yourself and in the landscape (more or less). As I became progressively exhausted, my attention narrowed to the terrain of my physique. At that point, I became acutely aware of the body as a vessel that I inhabited — of a marked distinction between the two. I wanted to run further, but my frame refused. (‘The spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak’, as our Lord put it.)
Two poached eggs for breakfast were followed by a time of inner preparation in readiness for the working day. Back, then, to the second pass over the booklet. The focus, now, is upon establishing formatting consistency across all three sections of the booklet. Once this is complete, I’ll attend to text divisions and consistency within the text. Along the way, the writing was sharpened. I discovered a surprising number of paragraph spacing and font type anomalies, due to having imported text from external sources.
In the background, today, I played pieces by John Cage that I’d never before heard. (Its necessary to continually expand one’s repertoire of musical encounters. (Otherwise, you’ll repeat hearing the familiar and well loved only.) There was a very thoughtful response to his Six Melodies (1950) on the YouTube comments list:
What makes Cage so great, in my opinion, is how his music is reminiscent of very modest and (commonly) unimpressive experiences in life. it doesn’t sound like romance, at least not in the traditional Western sense. it doesn’t sound like falling in love or standing before a huge mountain or anything like that. it simply sounds like the undertones of life. it sounds like those moments when you’re sitting in a chair outside and you’re watching it all go by, life happening by itself, never stopping to wait for you to try and intervene. it’s very taoist.
The process amendments proceeded at a snail’s pace. (It’s in the nature of the activity.) I kept it up through the three working periods of the day. My check list of style features got longer and longer as I progressed:
In the late evening, the family and I watched the Proms concert celebration of David Bowie’s work. It was good to see John Cale — who heralds form the Amman valley in South Wales, and was once a member of the Velvet Underground — performing an arrangement of Sorrow against a vamping keyboard and drum beat that reminded me of the VU’s All Tomorrow’s Parties (1967).