July 2, 2018

Sunday. A visit to Llanerchaeron with a friend of Holy Trinity Church, who’d recently been widowed:

Today. 7.45 am: A communion. I awoke tired. My water intake needed to be disciplined today. There’re days, and this was one, when the inclination to work is hard to summon. A lifetime spent acting against feelings and following the path of duty, helps under these circumstances. I switched on computer no. 3: no screen image and, likely, no boot up. (Sigh! I really don’t have time for this.) Never before have I had so many machines go down in such a short space of time. Is it the weather? I rummaged through YouTube for tutorial advice. 11.00 am: It woke up, like a sluggish teenager. My most elderly MacBook is the only one that hasn’t let me down. So, I booted it up and waited for the inevitable crash to ensue. (‘This isn’t optimistic thinking, John!’) In and around all this, I acquainted myself further with the new ‘Intersections’ subdomain of my website. Here will lie whatever is the successor to this Diary beyond the thousandth post. (As I descended into sleep last night, I saw myself appear in a short black and white video in which I answered only one question.) The migration from the original domain to the new one has caused a few glitches. ‘Nothing is ever straightforward’, so my webmaster assures me. Oh, for a simpler life.

11.30 pm: I set up the gear to record ‘Write the Vision …’, this afternoon. 12.00 pm: Off to School to check on my physical mail and the state of the nation. (In the absence of the Head of School, I’m the department’s babysitter.): The temperature is around 28°c. I wasn’t enjoying this at all:

2.30 pm: Having checked balances for the I. Nothing Lack. suite on two other sound systems, and completed a little admin, I turned again to record the ‘Write the Vision …’ samples:

Once the process was begun, the inscription of the individual verses took no longer than was required to copy them out. Once all the verses are assembled, their sonorities will be modified in order to remove the aggressive rasp. The heat below the Velux window was punishing, and the sun’s glare made it hard to see the computer screen. The task was tedious and repetitive. Needs must. I’m aiming to complete the recording and production, and have the files ‘in the post’ ready to be pressed into vinyl, by Thursday. The accrued inscription, which I made without looking – my eyes were on the printed text that I was following – reminded me of examples of ghostly automatic-writing:

7.20 pm: On with the inscription. I began chapter 2 of Habakkuk. One by one, that would be the only way I’d fell the trees in this forest.

*For Amy Seed

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