A door of utterance (Col. 4.3).

8.00 am. An early morning email cull and blog broadcast, before a period of reflection and utterance prior to the challenges of the day. An hour later, I continued where I’d left off last night — updating the general website, as well as my professional presence on sites such as Academia and LinkedIn. The texts needed sharpening and my histories, brought up-to-date.

At 12.30 pm, I made ready to attend Bill Williams’s funeral at Holy Trinity Church, which is near the Edward Davies Building. There he’d worked tirelessly until his retirement in the 1980s. The eulogies revealed a humble man of private faith who’d excelled as a husband and widower, a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather, a chemist, an educationalist, and a musician. There are so many perspectives to be had on a person’s life. As individuals, we can know another only ‘in part’. The complete portrait of Bill (and today we fitted together just a few more — albeit important — pieces) comprises, at the very least, the witness and testimony of everyone with whom he’d ever had meaningful contact during the course of nearly ten decades. But now he’s fully known, even as he, now, fully knows (1 Cor. 13.12):

At the entrance to the reception, following the church service, there were photographs of Bill as a young man — here, in his role as an RAF training pilot during World War Two:

A year ago, Bill informed me that he wanted to arrange a lunch at Llety Parc (where the reception was being held) for all his friends. He was intending to be present. Today, he fulfilled his ambition, in absentia. ‘Dad’s projects always came to pass’, one of his daughters told me. And this one was his last.

At evening:

I returned to the necessary mundanities of personal website updates. Ah! Too much of me, me, me. What I’ve attained professionally appears to get fainter and less fulfilling with every passing year. What was momentous becomes momentary. The things we make and say are mere shadows cast upon the wall, and then only until the sun goes down.

Maxim: Some friendships can be experienced in principle only, rather than in practice also.

9.00 am. To do: medical appointment; cable order; postgraduate monitoring update; tutorial time revisions; and appointments for next week. Then, down to the meat of the day: the sound projects (present and forthcoming). In respect to the latter, I must move forward, even though the realisation of the Port Talbot Steelworks piece may be stymied by the TATA Steel’s (understandable) delay in granting copyright approval to use the glass-plates and their surrogates:

Postcard: The Morgan Works, Port Talbot (c.1930s)

The original Port Talbot steelworks was named after Christopher Rice Mansell Talbot (1803-90). He was a relative of William Fox Talbot, the photographer and pioneer of the salted paper and calotype processes. Thus, the steelworks has had a link to photography beyond that of being being a subject before the lens. The industrial site was constructed between 1901 and 1905. The final two years of its inception coincided with the period of the Welsh Religious Revival. (I cannot let that connection go unreferenced in the sound composition.) The works were closed in 1961, and demolished two years later.

Towards the end of my first year BA Fine Art studies, I made several small landscape pieces informed by the Ebbw Vale steelworks (which lay in the valley parallel to my home town). It’s curious how, often, the germ of the present has been planted decades before it comes to fruition. The past abides:

John Harvey, Industrial Landscape No. 1 (1979), mixed media, 26.5 × 11.5 cm.

Afternoon. Before lunch, I headed for the School to conduct a second supervisor’s annual review interview with one of our current PhD Fine Art students:

After a late lunch, I turned again to the text of the CD booklet and prepared to write the final paragraph. Eventually, there’ll an exhibition booklet (related to the 23 works that made up The Pictorial Bible III: Bible in Translation, exhibited in 2015) and two websites associated with the album. The first website was completed last year, and embodies a 57-part composition, seven hours long, entitled The Floating Bible: Miracle of the Risen Word. (I played the suite during most of the afternoon.) The second website will provide an extended description of those concepts, processes, and techniques that have determined the character of the sound works on the new release.

Evening. I wrote up my report of the afternoon’s interview and proceeded further with my general website updates.

8.15 am. En route to the Old College to hold an early morning PhD Fine Art tutorial. In the West Classroom, the residue of the finalists’ last battles with painting and rallying cries still stained the screens:

The room now has additional ‘ghosts’. A memorial to absence:

At 10.00 am, I engaged one of the MA Fine Art students, now proceeding to their second and final exhibition. This has to be completed between now and September, and it’s a tough call by anyone’s standards. The challenge is to better one’s best.

This has been a day for conversations. Some have been conducted face-to-face, others by email. All were of a very different complexion. They entailed expressions of, variously, joy and uncertainty, vision and conviction, determination and clarity, frustration and disappointment, and exasperation and betrayal.

I enjoyed a coffee with a ‘retiring’ finalist at 11.00 am, and a working lunch with my colleague, Dr Roberts, at Tree House. Our business topics covered research collaborations, enhancements to the Art/Sound module, and funding possibilities for the upcoming SteelWorks project.

Afternoon. I finalised some incoming Postgraduate Monitoring admin, and conducted an interview, as second supervisor, in connection with the same. 5.20 pm. Homeward:

Evening. I reviewed the submission of a postgraduate thesis that had required a few amendments before it could be accepted. Rarely does any thesis pass without some changes, these days. Standards! Standards! Thereafter, it was back to updating my CV and website, and responding to related emails. Consistency! Consistency!