8.00 am: A reaffirmation:

This is the foundation: the three domains of discipline – body, mind, and spirit. The discipline of the body: exercise, diet, health, hygiene, appearance, and rest. The discipline of the mind: focus, learning, understanding, imagination, judgement, and reasoning. The discipline of the spirit: morality, spirituality, humanity, and well-being. In this present life, these domains are distinguishable but inseparable.

On these three, the virtues are founded: vision, tenacity, charity, consideration, generosity, mercy, forgiveness, patience, selflessness, loyalty, nobility, hopefulness, joyfulness, honour, decency, probity, honesty, industry, diligence, conscientiousness, dignity, temperance, balance, courage, justice, prudence, good humour, gravity, integrity, righteousness, devotion, and piety. They must be consciously and constantly cultivated through critical practice. They are achievable, but only with assistance.

The virtues determine our way of life; habits of action, thought, and feeling; world view; ambitions; priorities; and attitude to others and ourselves.

These things, in turn, inform our vocation and the work that we undertake.

8.30 am: A preparation. 9.00 am: I addressed emails requiring immediate attention, reviewed and annotated a postgraduate submission, and laid out my objectives for the week ahead:

12.00 pm: Over the weekend, I became conscious of the centrality of the blindness theme to ‘The Talking Bible’ project. This would delimit the scope of my intervention therein. Quite how the contextual topics, related to the time of the recording, would dovetail with this is yet to be determined. It’s rarely possible to address all the problems that beset a work simultaneously. However, with each individual solution, the answers to the remainder becomes increasingly straightforward. The Epistle of James project for two DJ decks etc, will, therefore, be abandoned. In its place, I’ll deploy two narratives taken from the Gospel of Matthew, each describing two blind men’s encounters with Christ (Matt. 9.27–31; 20. 30–34). These texts preserve the concept of  ‘the double’ that had first drawn me to the Epistle of James:

1.45 pm: Studiology. To begin – a putting away of the weekend’s sound recording equipment. Then, onto a partial reconfiguration of the sound system supporting the project, with the introduction of a new manual looper. This fulfils the systemic lack that I’d identified on July 18, 2017. The Power Supply Unit of every piece of equipment gets its own Dymo ID on arrival. Electro-Christening:

Then, into the instruction manual, and the painful slog to relate it to the device. There’s usually a reality gap to overcome.

7.45 pm: Onto the learning curve. Once I’d resolved a rather strange cable issue, the device (like a bucking bronco) began to yield to my control. Play is the only way to learn. Text book knowledge is never enough. Indeed, sometimes it gets in the way. True, experiential knowledge comes with the practical implementation of intuition:

…

I have an occasional, recurrent nightmare. I’m disembodied, but incarcerated within a sealed, claustrophobic, and airless square black box, floating in starless and remote space. There’s no one out there with whom I might communicate. Nor is their the prospect of anyone for all eternity.