Ephemerments...aagh.

It is quite bizarre how things almost don't happen.

I wasn't supposed to be writing this.

It is Amy Burvall's fault.

Aagh..





I have work to do.

It might not have happened.
I might not have noticed.
I did.

Her blog post:

Ephemerments: Transient Beauty Spliced with Sound.

caught my eye and sparked my imagination...aagh.

She clearly has nothing better to do than to notice.

God damn it.

She noticed light dancing, passing clouds, palms swaying, kite surfers surfing and then went and filmed what she saw.

Not content with that, she then went and spliced the images together with music and then...

Aagh.

She went and shared them on her blog.

I shouldn't have noticed it this morning on Facebook.

I really have better things to do.

I have lost another couple of hours to play.

How many bloody hours do I "lose" to play?

Light playing on a kitchen wall and I am stuck for hours.

Light playing on the sea surface and I have to go and change my avatar.

It's inattention, that's what it is.

I do concentrate, but not on the right things!

I probably need some sort of medication to make me more productive...

If it had been just the pretty images that Amy posted, I might have resisted the temptation.

Unfortunately, it was the sound spliced with the video which got me.

I went and dug up some more or less frequently used sound apps.

AudioCopy which I use all the time for sound recording.

Figure and ThumbJam for beats and music making.

I uploaded a series of images (which I used for a recent Apehazard blog post) to iMovie which works pretty seamlessly with AudioCopy/Figure/ThumbJam.

I uploaded the resulting sound/music to Soundcloud if any wants to play with it.

If you have some tracks I can play with let me know :-)

Cello track made with ThumbJam


Beats/sound made with Figure


Beats/sound made with Figure

Version 1

Version 2

Version 3

Thanks to Amy, I shall now be wasting more time on not just collaging images but sound.

She has gone and created another hashtag: #ephemerment.

I shall resist this distraction.

I have work to do.

Aagh.

Shriek...

So those were my conference notes.

I had almost forgotten.

They appeared in disorder, on my desk.

"No matter how good you think you are at multitasking, you will not be truly focusing your attention on the speaker, who has no doubt spent hours preparing for this moment."

https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/aug/05/im-a-serious-academic-not-a-professional-instagrammer

I focused my attention on drawing escape.

No doubt.

He spent hours preparing for this moment.

How could he have planned?

HOW COULD HE HAVE PLANNED?

It appeared in the bottom right hand corner.

Shriek.

"No matter how good you think you are at multitasking, you will not be truly focusing your attention on the speaker, who has no doubt spent hours preparing for this moment."

Twitter wouldn't do.

Instagram wouldn't weigh it up.

Scratched pens captured some of its portent.

No close reading.
Only fragments.
A moment?
A collaged haphazard.

Shriek.

No serious argument would suffice.

Shriek.

For a moment it comes back to me.

Why now?

Why like this?

This is not what he meant.

No this is not what it meant at all.

Shriek.

For a moment I think of "my students".

A remark of Jesse Stommel came back to me.

"Every one of my students has a different cultural context. When we say 'My students are...', we reduce their complexity. @Jessifer #digped

— Sean Michael Morris (@slamteacher) July 14, 2016

"Student" reduces complexity.

"Context" reduces complexity.

"Culture" reduces complexity.

"Complexity" reduces complexity.

No, words just won't do...

Words will have to do.

There are so many of them - words - students...

Shriek.

Shriek says it better.

Are you truly focusing your attention now?

I, or at least "my" body is under water.

Attention switches...

from light to darkness,
from surface to depths
from fish shoals to urchin.

Attention fuses...

instinct,
unthinking flow,
imagined danger.

Shriek.

Water, waves, sunlight, clouds of bubbles, warmth, a snorkelled breath.

Are you truly focusing your attention?

We have spent hours preparing for this moment.

This is what it meant....

This is what he meant now.

WHY?

Is it so difficult to [under]stand?


Post Script.

"You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, not look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

The darkness.

Writing Lest we forget kept me awake at night.

In the morning I remembered that the story of my great uncle Wilfred C. Hunter, victim of the Great War, had moved me to create visual imagery in the past.

The image 'The darkness' was produced using Paper by 53 on iPad.


It was drawn after a photo taken in my garden in summer and then modified with filters.

I find rather scary and appropriate, considering the theme, how we can transform a beautiful summery day into a vision from hell.

I had used PicPlayPost  and Strip Designer to create collages which were then assembled in Steller here:

And here

I had used the much lamented defunct Zeega to mash up the images with a soundtrack here.

The Darkness on Zeega  http://zeega.com/167193

Finally, I was moved to read Wilfed Owen, war poetry. I chose one:

Dulce et Decorum Est and decided to record an interpretation of the poem. I uploaded to SoundCloud here:

After recording the first version, I realised that I had missed lines, the most terrifying lines.

On relistening, I felt that the second complete version missed something.

I prefer the first version with the missing lines...

I put that second version here for future reference.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST(1)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4)
Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind.
Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . .
Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,(11) choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12)
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13)
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.(15)

Wilfred Owen
Thought to have been written between 8 October 1917  and March, 1918

No maps for these territories.

 
Even nonsense once expressed is no longer nonsense.

No Maps for These Territories

I remember going by bus from New York to Las Vegas

 I had forgotten I wanted to write.

No Maps for These Territories

 I wanted to write nothing this morning,

  It's been a few days now, 

 I listened again to the remix,

 Words stole away from the page

No Maps for These Territories  

A stream of words spoke to me through the static.

 They needed to be slowed down.

 Then an image came to me...

No Maps for These Territories

They are here in the next room.

I have sort of ignored their call for help

I may or may not bother to go back

Maybe I will ...

I feel there is danger here.

I just have to ignore them.

What do you think?

a irhizo-collage of 

@dogtrax @telliowkuwp @sensor63