March 18, 2015

8.10 am. On my walk up Trinity Road: the rear of the east window of Holy Trinity Church. I’m intrigued by to the backs of stained-glass windows. The individual panes appear incarcerated by the leading. Through them, darkness (rather than light) pours. As such, the windows summon an inverse spiritual metaphor — an ‘alteria’ expression of a distressing dimension of religious experience (the acknowledgement of which is too often suppressed): a sense of doubt, abandonment, lifelessness, soul loss, and hopelessness, and the suspicion of self-delusion:

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9.00 am. Back to the SIP Report and to the more interesting questions regarding futures and potentials. One significant realization that has emerged from my time at the NSSAW, in respect to the relationship between recorded sound and  notions of memory and history. (The archive is a kind of brain; its deposits, sonic recollections.) I’ve also been drawn to recordings associated with coal mining in South Wales during the 20th century. (This returns me to a preoccupation with which I was engaged at the beginning of my academic career.) In some way, I need to encourage a confluence of these two concerns in the next few years. 12.30 pm. My part of the report form is now complete. Now the NSSAW must do its bit.

12.45 pm. An earlier lunch before returning to the School. 1.30 pm. A telephone tutorial with a PhD Fine Art student who is curating a forthcoming show at the School as part of their practice-based research:

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3.00 pm. A visit to the exhibition from Dr Catrin Williams and Professor Martin O’Kane of The School of Theology, Religion, and Islamic Studies, University of Wales, Trinity St David’s. Now, these folk really know their Bible. Martin (a Hebrew Bible scholar) and I collaborated on several conferences between 2005 and 2007 in the ‘Bible & Visual Culture’ series:

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4.00 pm. Back at homebase, I press on with research admin related The Bible in Translation CD, resolving website sub-domains (yawn!), completing class registers (yaaaawn!), and the mandatory tidy up of loose ends that attends the end of term (yaaaaaaawwwnnn!)

6.20 pm. Practise session 1: making the most of a single note, and moving from one note to another with great deliberateness and attentiveness. 7.20 pm. I’m moving towards the finalisation of the Supporting Report for the SIP project. In tandem, I reviewed the content of several tracks that’ll be included on The Bible in Translation CD, and sought scholarly help in translating the first clause of the second commandment in William Morgan’s Welsh Bible of 1588 into English: ‘Na wnait ddelw gerfiedic’. This is in preparation for the coming compositional event at the National Library of Wales:

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The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1937 (courtesy of Wales On-Line)

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