Mizpah
6.15 am: ‘Good morning, John!’ Ablutions:
7.30 am: A communion. 8.15 am: Pressing on! All three of the final compositions for ‘The Talking Bible’ were now in progress. I returned to ‘One Day’ to finalise the process of word/phrase extraction before the collaging phase could begin. The current high pollen count presents a challenge that I could well do without. First, I played ‘hunt the minor prophet’. Looking for Amos:
10.20 am: The extraction was complete. I’d accrued a great many words.
Discouragements come like wasps through an open window in the summer: they can’t be either stopped or ignored. To a large part, what determines our response to the curved-balls that life throws at us is our experience of, and reaction to, difficulties in the past. With hindsight, some discouragements were mere phantoms of problems, others were genuinely headaches but taught us a great deal about either ourselves or the nature of problem solving. Few were insuperable. And hardly any did us lasting harm.
10.45 am: Before returning to ‘Write Up the Vision …’ I wanted to experience the outcome of assembling the words that I’d extracted to form Martin Luther King Jr’s most famous dictum: ‘I have a dream’:
I was hooked. However, the construction of the sequences was problematic. Some words at source elide with one another to such an extent that its impossible to remove, say, an ‘an’ from a phrase and for it to be still intelligible in isolation. Single syllable words are best harvested from the beginning of sentences. The discontinuities in the vocal inflexion and dynamics, due to the words having been assembled together outside of their original context, enhanced the musicality and strangeness of Scourby’s delivery. This was a bonus. I’d noticed a similar phenomenon in relation to automated train announcements:
By 5.00 pm, I’d constructed the principal quotations by King using Scourby:
7.30 pm: Ironing kit put away, I regularised the word sequences, equalised sample volumes, and adjusted overall EQ. I’d got further with this than I’d expected, today. How these would be used in the context of a composition was anyone’s guess. Which is how I liked it. I couldn’t, then, lean upon a past model. New solutions were required.
