8.30 am. I broadcast emails setting-up, confirming, and re-arranging tutorial times, meetings, and Skype calls. Tugging at my elbow was the imperative: ‘Make this week count!’ If that ambition is to be realised, then each day (this day) must count. And, if that ambition is to be realised, then each hour (this hour) must count. 9.30 am. Back to, and on with, The Floating Bible file processing. Matt. 19.8 was the verse of the morning. The operation is mechanistic but not mindless. One needs to be constantly vigilant about the omission and duplication of words which, when stretched, are hard to differentiate one from another, and bear no visual relationship to their source.

One of Friday’s eager painting and Art/Sound students re-emerged. We’d begun a discussion about synchronicity and synaesthesia. I reflected:

It struck me that synaesthesia could be classed as a mode or variety of synchronicity, insomuch as two normally disparate phenomena are related meaningfully. However, the main different between the two ideas is that synaesthetics would claim a causal relationship between the two phenomena, whereas synchronics (?) would not. Perhaps it’s the difference, rather than the likeness, between those ideas that is illuminating. 

11.40 pm. Verse complete. Now … a forage in my plan (aptly called) chest  to uncover schemes and stratagems for paintings that I’d set in motion several years ago. Their progress had been postponed when I developed an acute intolerance/allergic reaction to turpentine and other petroleum-based derivatives and additives:

Alpha-numerical texts, in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, were awaiting conversion. Now, I have to identify all the bits and put them all together, before scaling and commissioning the supports. It’s all coming back to me:

Mid afternoon, I began Matt. 19.9 and completed the process by 5.00 pm. I ticked off words as I proceeded, like an inmate, the days of their incarceration:

6.20 pm. Practise session 1. 7.20 pm. At the eleventh hour, I finally managed to track down an audio recording of Morris’ Box with the Sound of its Own Making. (I’ll deliver a lecture with that title tomorrow morning.) I formatted and prepared its text and PowerPoint. It’s very difficult to gauge how effective my presentations are. My enthusiasm for them waxes hot and cold. I wish they had greater gravitas. But too much material and too deep analysis is often impenetrable in a lecture context, and alienates the audience. In the end, all one can reasonably hope to do is prepare the soil for the students’ own learning (which is of far greater importance than anything I can teach them). I’m tired of myself today.

9.40 pm. Practise session 2.