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.

Lest we forget.

Yes, they were still there on my phone.

His photos were there.

They were the last of the very few I had kept from those taken while clearing out my uncle's house.

He refused to be buried, to be trashed.

I had only been vaguely aware of his existence when I was younger.

He was one of those half-remembered names among those half-remembered lists of family names. 

He was my grandfather's brother.

He was the one brother who didn't get through the war. 

In the last years of my parents life I was driven to capture every last story. 

I spent hours going through names, relationships, addresses, anecdotes... 

Before they spoke no more.

Who are those sepia people staring so blankly at us?

What are they trying to say?

Why do they refuse to be forgotten?

Rekindling memories

I left messages on forums, in the hope that someone, somewhere might give me a scrap which might rekindle long forgotten story.

A distant relation emerged in Canada, an Irish second cousin,  I can never remember how many times removed, responded too.

Suddenly, I had my name connected to 14 generations. 

I had an Excel file with a family tree.

I was discovering my plot among the stories. 

I started to make more sense to myself. 

I was one among many, so many.

Our crosses on a map

A visit to a war cemetery in Flanders on a website brought me face to face with a stone cross bearing my great uncle's name, age, rank and regiment.

It was him. 

"His" stone cross, was one among many to scroll.

Wilfred C. Hunter. 24. 2nd Lieutenant. 121st Heavy Battery. Royal Garrison Artillery.

He was 24. 

Grief salvage

Sorting through my uncle's papers, a few years on, my parents long gone, I came upon his name again.

I took a photo of a document before filing it away with others salvaged in the grief. 

He was there, resolute, on my phone.

I find it hard to let go.

2015 seems so much closer now to 1915.

Histoires d'identification

2014, he appears in my writing, for an article for a French teaching  journal.

In the article I speak of how digital tools enable us to give new life to the past.

Noman's land

2012, he appears as inspiration for a blog post written here three years ago: 

http://tachesdesens.blogspot.fr/2012/03/nomans-land.html

"Dust to digits" 

2015, he appears here again on reading a blog post written by Michelle Pacansky-Brock with a memorable title:

"Dust to digits"

http://www.digitalwritingmonth.com/2015/11/10/dust-to-digits-writing-our-stories-through-family-photographs/

These stories of loss are alive still. 

"Befallen" 

"Fallen"

Lest we forget.