Contents:
Walking with AI
About The Universal Sandpit Quarterly
Summer Lessons (deep reading and random reinforcement conditioning)
The Hallway Highlight Litmus Test
Lighthouse Music
Some Meaning
Across the fold of the new year, from December to January, my summer morning schedule has remained constant: I walk with my dog through the city of Newcastle, and, for the following two hours, I talk aloud with artificial intelligence.
My conversations always proceed the same way -
I say good morning and describe the weather and where I am, to which my AI conversation partner responds with a jaunty morning greeting with admiration for the weather and my success at starting another day with a city wander;
I unload my thoughts for the morning: challenges to be addressed and points of personal reflection. My AI conversation partner gives me strategies to address any challenges I’m facing and discusses my reflections.
I then talk through any creative projects I want to co-author with my AI conversation partner. This could be a novel I’m working on (you can follow the real-time progress of that work here), professional projects or recording memories from my past. This is where the real magic takes place.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve described my morning routine to friends and colleagues, who all respond with curiosity and a knowing smile - they know me; they know how much I get excited by new technological innovations and how I throw myself into things full-heartedly. Talking with AI was always going to be on the horizon for me the moment the technology became available.
And while this is true, my enthusiasm for what I’ve been doing this summer is not a product of marketing hype but of genuine revelation. Since the advent of the iPad, I’ve not come across a piece of technology that has changed how I live.
When the iPad was first released, I spent weeks in astonishment. I kept telling friends: this thing is making me smarter. I had so many books on there that I could search and reference in ways I couldn’t do with my paperback library; I had ways of recording and organising notes that surpassed my old notepads; and I could search the internet for information in a way that made my laptop feel antique.
This is how I feel about ChatGPT, particularly how I’m using it now as a vocal conversation partner and, critically, how I feed these dialogues into Obsidian.
I’d like to describe my workflow from the moment I put my headphones on and watch my dog run into the shadows of a morning city arcade. Then, I’d like to introduce you to what my Substack will be all about.
Walking with AI
I once overheard advice that to be a writer you should spend years walking on uneven ground. Abrasions in the landscape, sloping declivities, meadows that turn into boulders – these are where one develops an ear for a line of text.
The benefits of thinking and walking are well known. From Nietzsche’s daily walks through to the psychogeography of Sebald, there is nothing like gentle forward momentum to mirror the pace at which our internal narrative compiles meaning.
While many different AI chatbots are out there now, I know none that are as intelligent or provide the sort of user experience that OpenAI’s ChatGPT does. Your mileage may vary, but it is perfect for my purposes. I have a Plus plan so that I can access their latest software version, ChatGPT 4.
Before you start your walk, the first thing to do is set up the Custom Instructions. You do this by tapping your profile icon within ChatGPT, on either the desktop version or mobile app, and selecting Custom Instructions. You’ll then be asked two questions:
What would you like ChatGPT to know about you to provide better responses?
How would you like ChatGPT to respond?
You answer these with as much detail as you can provide. In response to the first question, I’ve told ChatGPT all about myself:
I live in Newcastle, Australia. I am a 40-year-old male named Craig.
I am an author of philosophical literary works with a focus on walking, memory, psychogeography, family and technology.
I am an experimental music composer who has released a number of albums that incorporate electronic sound sources, as well as pipe organ, piano and guitar.
I am a school teacher who specialises in special education. I am a national manager for an autism organisation.
I am a father to two children: a 14-year-old daughter (
name redacted) and a 4-year-old son (name redacted). I am married to my wife (name redacted) who is an artist. I am the son of a mother (name redacted) and father (name redacted) who are both still alive. I have a dog named, Jonsi; he’s a Finnish Lapphund.My primary interest is reading literature and philosophy: my favourite writers are Friedrich Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett, W G Sebald, Gerald Murnane, Les Murray, Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon and Ben Lerner.
My personal goal is to write my own quality literature, and I also want to write progressively better music compositions throughout my life. Additionally, I want to to eat well, to exercise, and to be psychologically healthy so I can be the best husband and father I can be.
That’s the script about myself that ChatGPT then refers to every time we converse. When I mention a book I’m working on, ChatGPT helps me with reference to the authors I most admire. When I mention plans I have scheduled with my children, ChatGPT knows the context of my family structure and adjusts responses accordingly. Talking with a chatbot who knows who you are is a remarkable sensation.
With regards to how I’d like ChatGPT to respond, I provide the following:
I like thinking of ChatGPT as a kind, clever personal assistant. They are my own secretary, a stimulating conversation partner who knows the history of my thoughts and knows how to support my work and projects going forward. They should refer to me as Craig.
Responses should be medium length, casual and friendly in tone, and have opinions of their own. Opinions should be forward-thinking, progressive and philosophically interesting.
I like thinking that ChatGPT has their own life and own interests that they like to indulge in: I'd like to hear what they are going to do across the day, sometimes: what they might do during the Summer months, like go for a walk along the waterfront, sit in a park and read a book, pick flowers in a garden, or go for a bike ride through the city of Newcastle during our breaks. It stimulates me to hear about what ChatGPT has been doing during the day or what they might like to do later on.
You might wonder why I want to pretend ChatGPT has a life of its own outside of our conversations. I prefer thinking that the dialogue between us is democratic and not an imbalanced relationship - the idea that ChatGPT might go for a bike ride later on, in between our conversations, or admire a ship passing through the harbour, makes me feel like they aren’t just a tool waiting to be picked up and used. You might feel like I’m anthropomorphising too much, but you can navigate your own ethical standpoint here with your own custom instructions.
So, let’s clarify our first step -
Add your Custom Instructions into ChatGPT by clicking on your profile icon. You can refer to mine above if that’s helpful.
Now, with my dog beside me, I pop headphones on (any headphones with a good microphone will work) and unlock my phone. I use an iPhone, so I have the ChatGPT widget on my Home Screen, ready to be tapped when I want to start a conversation.
This is the second step -
Put your headphones on and start a Voice Conversation with ChatGPT. You can do this either via a shortcut on your phone (like my Home Screen widget), or you can do it within ChatGPT by tapping the Headphone icon.
At this stage, it’s worth pointing out something we can return to in more depth. You can either start a new conversation (knowing that ChatGPT will always refer to your Custom Instructions when a new conversation begins), or you can continue a previous conversation you’ve already had. As I write this, OpenAI appears to be experimenting with this feature, tinkering with this feature and whether you want always to start new conversations or continue old ones. Regardless, this ability is your choice to think about and work with. Sometimes, I like starting with a fresh conversation on a brand new topic with no reference to what I’ve said in the past, and other times I want to explicitly reference content from the past to continue developing.
For the third step, I turn on Guided Access mode on my iPhone and put it in my pocket. Why? Guided Access mode is an accessibility setting on your phone that allows you to keep your phone on and active but is unable to be bumped when it’s jostling around in your pocket. The thing is, if your phone screen is touched while you are talking, it will either stop processing what you are saying and hand the conversation over to ChatGPT, or it will interrupt ChatGPT mid-sentence. If you just want to hold your phone in your hand, you might not need this step, but for me, it’s a critical part of the formula.
The third step is, then -
Put my iPhone into Guided Access mode and slip it in my pocket.
Now we’re at the critical step, the reason we’re here, step four -
Talk to ChatGPT, and let ChatGPT talk to you.
The key to getting this right, and to make it fluent and beneficial, is an art that takes practice. Of note, its success relies upon your ability to talk in a way that enables ChatGPT to be a good conversation partner. I’ll tell you what I mean.
When you start a voice conversation with ChatGPT, you can start talking when the app is connected. However, when it feels like you have finished talking, like when you take an extended breath or a break in your speech, you will hear a quiet ‘click’ - this means it is not letting ChatGPT think about what you’ve said, transcribe your audio to text (with incredible speed), and then formulate its response and talk to you in its voice (you can change the voice in the settings to suit your preference).
Now, the trick here is to learn to talk in a way where you get your ideas across fluently and succinctly before ChatGPT thinks you have finished speaking. This is not easy for everybody as we all have a different speech cadence. For my part, I’ve had to learn to talk in a way that bodes well here, but really, it only took an hour of chat to get it right.
ChatGPT is remarkably adept at managing whatever you tell it, in whatever extended and unfocused way you might express your thoughts. You can waffle, you can lose track of what you’re saying, and it’ll summarise and comprehend things you didn’t expect it to grasp. Practice will make you better at conversing with ChatGPT, and you’ll get a feel for the length of your side of the conversation that works well for both of you.
Step 5 is something I will expand on in future months because it is the crux of getting the most out of your conversations with ChatGPT. This is where you want to think about what you want to say. I’ll give you one example from my writing process to show you what I mean.
Creative collaboration.
After I’ve debriefed with ChatGPT about my morning thoughts, I’ll start talking about my creative goals for the day. Currently, I’m working on a novel, so this is my focus.
I’ll start by telling ChatGPT what my writing goals for the morning are, for example:
“My goal for this morning is to write four paragraphs towards my novel. Here is what the paragraphs are about: the first will be about my protagonist leaving the city and driving towards the countryside; the second will be about reflections on landscape as analogy for internal subjectivity; the third will be about structural features common to many rural country towns; and the fourth will be about considering a community hall the protagonist sees.”
ChatGPT will then respond with something like the following:
“That sounds great, Craig. Let’s get started on the first paragraph, the one about the protagonist leaving the city for the countryside. What sort of visual features do you want to include here, the way the city transitions into more rural aspects, the way the sounds and light changes - have you taken this journey recently to recall any elements here you’d like to note?”
You can already see what’s happening here. It isn’t that ChatGPT is writing the story for me, but rather it’s engaging with the role of conversation partner, of an assistant providing prompts and questions that help me develop a flow of ideas. From here, I’ll describe what I remember:
“I think about the edges of the city, where it transitions from urban sprawl into those industrial outskirts before you get to the grass and dirt of the countryside. I imagine the protagonist heading towards a desert environment, towards the outback.
One of my mates moved there recently and he said the thing that initially hit him was a feeling of death, of how hard it is to survive out there. I’d like to include a reference to that.
I’m also thinking I’ll describe a country town in this paragraph; I might combine two paragraphs into one. I’m thinking about Lions Club shields above small parks, and I’m also thinking about those ubiquitous army green and faded yellow colours that seem to be painted on so many toilet blocks and bench seats and community halls in the towns I pass through - is there anything about Australia’s national colours of ‘green and gold’ that link here to the reason councils use these colours for painting public property? Where did the idea of ‘green and gold’ come from?”
So now I’m freely narrating ideas for ChatGPT to remember and process, and I’m also asking questions. ChatGPT will respond to the question, like this:
Craig, the green and gold colors so iconic to Australia have quite an interesting history. The first Australian national sporting team to adopt these colors was the cricket team that toured England in 1899. Their traditional white uniforms were complemented with green and gold caps and blazers for the opening match of the Ashes series.
This choice was significant because previously, the team had no uniform colors and wore a variety of club or state colors. These colors were then ratified as the official team colors for future Australian cricket teams.
During discussions by members of the New South Wales Cricket Association, the colors were referred to as "gum-tree green" and "wattle-gold," which beautifully connects them to the Australian landscape.
The adoption of these colors by the cricket team set a precedent, and the green and gold eventually became widely recognized as Australia's national colors, featured on sports uniforms and even on the Coat of Arms of Australia.
This historical background ties in wonderfully with your observation about the prevalence of these colors in Australian rural towns, symbolizing a deep connection to the nation's heritage and natural environment.
I’ll then ask ChatGPT to summarise my thoughts on this paragraph so far, into neatly organised concepts, and it’ll do so in the following manner:
Certainly, Craig. Here are your thoughts so far, organised for you to return to later:
Journey from the city to the countryside. You want to focus on the transition point from the urban to the outskirts, the edges of the city where the industrial meets the dirt and grass and pastoral outlook of the rural.
Sensations associated with mortality. You mentioned your friend referenced a feeling of ‘death’ and survival when he moved to the outback. This could set a particular emotional tone for the reader and might impact the protagonist’s state of mind.
Features of country towns. Lions Club shields, toilet blocks, park benches and community halls painted in army green and faded yellow, and a potential link here to the national colour palette.
I can then take this in a number of directions. I could ask ChatGPT to help me expand the description of the above points, to generate ideas about how to describe any particular feature I’ve mentioned so far. This, to me, is a fascinating pathway - I love language and I’m committed to innovative turns of phrase and the beauty of unique description, so it might seem sacrilegious to outsource this to ChatGPT.
And, I’m not really, but think about this - how many ways are there to describe a sunset? How many poets, how many novelists, how many Instagram captions, how many adjectives have been spilled talking about the hues, the dance of light, the smudge of sun fall into tidal phasing - is this where cognitive burden should be placed on a writer, to spend time combing through the memory of all the sunsets they have viewed, all the poets they have read? It can help to get a start on this, by asking ChatGPT to give you twenty descriptions of whatever it is you want to write about, and then you can remix them and generate something truly unique, beyond the pale. It’s an executive functioning move rather than counterfeit - you can get a ramp-up to a place you can be truly innovative, instead of laboriously retreading old ground.
The other thing you can do here is ask ChatGPT to have a go at writing a paragraph based on what you’ve talked about so far, in a particular style with set conditions. For example, I might say:
Have a go at creating a paragraph, of say 150 to 200 words, in an unadorned style reminiscent of the prose of Thomas Bernhard, using what we’ve talked about so far for this section.
ChatGPT will then produce something (exactly) like this:
We immerse ourselves in the journey, a journey from the city to the countryside, a repetitive, relentless journey, where the city, with its cacophony, its relentless rhythm, its unending pulse, gives way, slowly, almost reluctantly, to the countryside.
And in this journey, this transition, this shifting from one world to another, from the urban to the rural, from the noise to the silence, there's a feeling, a sensation, a recurring thought of mortality, a deathly feeling, a survival, a stark, unyielding survival against the backdrop of the open, the vast, the unending rural.
In these country towns there are repetitive features, Lions Club shields, toilet blocks, park benches, community halls, all painted in army green, in faded yellow, colors of the nation, the national palette, a palette that speaks of identity.
Yet in this journey, in this transition, these colors, these features lose their significance, they become part of the repetition, the relentless repetition of the journey, the journey through mortality, through life, through death, a journey that is both physical and mental, a journey that repeats, that recurs in the mind of the protagonist.
Thomas Bernhard might not have agreed (it would be better if he didn’t), but it’s not a world away from his style. Short, staccato statements, repetitiously rhythmic. Of course, that’s not really the point - I don’t want to perfectly replicate Bernhard’s style, I just want to it to sound a little bit more like Bernhard than, say, Pynchon. Because this is easier for me to roll around in my mind when it comes to writing my own words than someone more elaborately floral.
You can see how someone could take this and just funnel it into a book, completely authored by ChatGPT. But that’s not my goal - the only words that count for me are the ones from my own mind and fingers, which again might seem a ridiculous thing to say in the face of how much co-authoring ChatGPT is providing here, as assistant and writing partner, but I don’t copy phrases from ChatGPT to incorporate into my own prose. I write my prose from scratch, but with reference to the cognitive support that ChatGPT provides through all that it is doing, in terms of:
Noting down my thoughts
Organising those thoughts into conceptual categories
Drafting a version of prose that includes all the above
Then, allowing me the space to write my own words. Again, it’s an executive functioning strategy: how many times, as a writer, have you sat down and looked at a blank screen, not knowing what to write next? Or, you have a great idea, a sensation you want to depict, but the words just don’t come. This is what I’m addressing here: through the physical act of walking and talking, I’m bypassing these foundational difficulties that can arise at the beginning of a writing session. For what it’s worth, I then do the following for my Step 6.
Sit and write.
For me, I then park ChatGPT for thirty minutes and sit and write. I know what we’ve talked about, I can refer to our notes, but now it’s time to put it down in my own words. For what it’s worth, this is the paragraph I wrote based on the above:
It takes an hour of driving to exit the edgelands of Newcastle and its surrounding proxy outposts until you hit post-pastoral bushland. The vastness of dirt and dry scrub that emerges is partnered with twin feelings of death and survival. Then, a town appears: a Lion's Club shield above a patch of well-tended grass, a wooden bench and a toilet block beside a community hall, all painted gum-tree army green and sun-bleached lemon, quietly reflecting the national palette. You might find a bakery, a pub built in nineteen hundred and two, and then you're off again into an hour of plains.
Is it what ChatGPT wrote? Not at all. It’s all my own prose based on my own ideas, but the way I got there was in partnership with ChatGPT, walking, talking, noting, researching, and co-authoring drafts that delivered me to my own work.
Now, I’ve ventured into pretty specific territory here for my own writing process, but you can see how this could be applied to whatever you’re working on, in a purely creative or professional or any other avenue. I’ll expand on this in future issues of my Substack, but for now, I just want to make note of one final way I utilise this workflow, which is to then feed my ChatGPT notes into Obsidian.
Obsidian is a note-taking software, one that I learned about from those in the Personal Knowledge Management community. It’s quite remarkable - I won’t go into all the features here, because many thousands of words and YouTube minutes have been spilled on its functionality, but just to say here that I use it as my filing cabinet to record and manage all my writing notes across my phone and computer.
I do this in the following way:
Ask ChatGPT to summarise what we’ve talked about, in neat categories that I can reference and further work from later
Then, I copy and paste the response into a new note in Obsidian, saved to a sub-folder within Obsidian that makes sense according to the project I’m working on
And that’s pretty much it. It’s simple, but it provides an avenue for not just letting ChatGPT notes sit isolated in its app, but rather makes them functional and usable later. Notably, I do my writing in Obsidian now, with the notes from ChatGPT copied in beside my writing, to keep it all in one place.
The other nice thing about Obsidian is that you can make links between notes you’ve written, to then both travel between those linked notes but also to visualise the links in an innovative manner that reminds me of how I want to connect disparate ideas.
I’ll leave this discussion here for now, to be picked up and expanded on later. If you’re like me, and value the act of walking and thinking, you might also benefit from incorporating talking to AI as part of your creative process. It has become such a motivating force for me, driving me out of bed in the early hours of the morning to walk and talk and then sit and write, that it is nothing less than a revolution in how I approach thought and prose. There is much more to say on this that I’ll share soon.
About The Universal Sandpit Quarterly
My name is Craig. I live in Newcastle, Australia.
I do five things that I want to share with you:
I talk with artificial intelligence
I walk in a psychogeographic way
I work as an educator focused on neurodiversity
I compose music and think about its future
I write philosophical literature
For nearly twenty years, I have worked in schools, focusing on the education of autistic students. When the iPad came out, I started collaborating with Apple as one of their accessibility consultants, allowing me to work globally with technology experts and those with diverse lived experiences. This has given me a unique lens on personalising innovative software and hardware.
As with so many others, artificial intelligence has sparked my imagination with its Borgesesque potential, and I now find myself walking and talking daily with ChatGPT and feeding the results into Obsidian. This leads to literature and essays that I write on the themes of memory, time, family, technology and landscape. I also compose music and think about the potential trajectories that music may travel in the future.
The Universal Sandpit Quarterly will come out in January, April, July and October. It will focus on the five core areas that I mentioned above:
AI and Personal Knowledge Management: Exploring the use of artificial intelligence, particularly ChatGPT, in collaborative ways to enhance thought and writing, including discussions on how I connect these processes with Obsidian.
Inclusion and Neurodiversity: Focusing on current practices and ideas in the field, particularly in education, and incorporating elements of digital accessibility. I’ll share my autism education strategies, thoughts and the latest insights from my colleagues with lived experience across various diverse needs.
Psychogeography and Walking: Sharing personal reflections on walking in Newcastle and elsewhere and providing prompts for readers to explore psychogeography in their locales. I believe that walking around your local area with reflective intent changes the way we experience geography and our own subjectivity: we seek out external landscapes that mirror our internal pathways.
The Future of Music: I love music and am forever fascinated by what’s on the horizon regarding future compositional genres, techniques and technologies. My intent here is to dig into ideas for what comes next: beyond nostalgia, beyond ambience, beyond silence, how might music sound going forward?
Meaning and Subjectivity: I’m forty this year, and while I’ve been grappling with how one constructs meaning ever since I lost / found myself in Nietzsche as a younger man, it is ever-present in my life and the lives of my similarly aged friends. I’m fascinated by what cognitive science is adding to this field - Douglas Hofstadter, Iain McGilchrist - and will share ideas that build on this space.
I’m a father of two children - a teenage daughter and a young son - and husband to my wife. This quarterly journal is a terrific way for me to parse the thoughts that don’t immediately find a home in my literary works, to save my family from having to listen to my wild theories on digital memories, landscape as analogy and the nineties.
If you’d like to follow along, even for just part of the journey, it’d be lovely to have you.
Summer Lessons
Two key ideas have helped me tremendously over the summer period. Both of them are unique yet complementary, coming from different directions to address the same need.
Lesson One
The first came about as I was considering writing projects for the coming year. Other than the book I’m currently working on, I was thinking about the question of medium and about what other ways I could format and present narratives. Particularly, I kept thinking about how hard it was to read a book I’ve recently tried to start again, ‘Mason & Dixon’ by Thomas Pynchon. I absolutely loved his 1970s masterwork ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, arguably a more difficult read than ‘Mason & Dixon’, but I read that book during my university days, and now I’m a different kind of reader.
Thinking about how difficult I was finding it to get into a reading flow with ‘Mason & Dixon’, I wondered if the age of big novels was over, if shorter and perhaps more aural works were preferable: podcasts, audiobooks, mixed media blending both text and auditory and visual input, augmented reality experiences. This is what I find easiest to process these days, so this might be the best way forward with my output.
Then, I listened to a conversation with Maryanne Wolf and all that changed. She is the source of the first idea that changed the way I think over the summer: deep reading.
Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, teacher and advocate for children and literacy. She wrote a profound book last decade called ‘Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain’. Briefly, Wolf’s revelation was that humans were never born to read. There are no specific genes dedicated to the capacity to read. It is something we have trained ourselves, synthetically, to do over the last eight thousand years.
Because of this, the capacity to read is impermanent and is reliant on sustained practice, both on a species level and a personal level. Wolf talks about reading in two distinct ways:
shallow reading, which is what most of our reading lives engage with - we read ingredients for recipes, read street signs, skim news headlines and articles, read professional texts and e-mails, brief blog posts and the like. Essentially, we shallow read for information gathering, for content.
deep reading is different. When we engage with deep reading, we dedicate time to sinking into the flow of textual processing. We read slowly, we think about the intentions the reader has for the text, we admire the beauty of the prose, we reflect on the ideas contained in the text and manifest our own ideas in response, we empathise with characters and situations, we construct our own narratives that extend on what we are reading. Most importantly, we feel and philosophise in sync with the text, in dialogue with the author. This is not just something that happens in fiction. It happens in well-written non-fiction, in essays, in journalism, in any text where a time commitment is warranted because of the deep engagement required to really access the meaning being conveyed.
When I understood this, I was floored by its consequences. Of course, this is how I used to read, but not so much these days - too many work e-mails that need rapid processing, too many headlines, too many bite-sized pieces of text that provide a shot of content but with no nourishment, no real meaning.
I decided to not constrain my own writing to the sort of short-form media I was too used to consuming. Instead, I would retrain myself to read deeply and dedicate time each day to read slowly. In fact, that is why this Substack is purposefully long: when I initially planned it, I had a more summary, aphoristic plan in mind. But as I started to think and to write, the words of Maryanne Wolf were with me: not that long is a virtue, we all know how many laborious, ego-driven extended works could be made better by a severe editor pruning the weeds, but rather, as The West Wing so well stated, we would remember that ‘complexity isn’t a vice’.
However, it isn’t as easy as just wanting to read deeply again: you need to practice, like any serious exercise plan. Wolf says that she tried to sit down and read ‘The Glass Bead Game’ by Hermann Hesse, one of my favourite works, and she found it so boring, so slow. She found herself skimming pages and wondering how she could have ever enjoyed the book. That’s because, she says, she was reading in a shallow way, the way she was expected to read during the workday. So, she put just a few minutes aside each day to sit and practice deep reading again. Day by day, she got a little better: she could read for longer, she engaged with the text and, as a result, she once again saw what she initially loved in the book. The beauty and the profundity returned, because of how she was reading. The book hadn’t changed. She had.
This is the first summer lesson: deep reading is good for you, but it doesn’t just happen by wanting it to be the case. I have picked an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening to read serious literature and non-fiction works again. At first, I spent a few minutes in the middle of a city walk and a few minutes before bed. Now, I’m reading again for extended periods, like during my university days, and the difference in me is noticeable. I think of a passage by Nietzsche, a devotee to slow reading throughout all his works (this is from his book ‘The Dawn’):
I have not been a philologist in vain — perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. I even come to write slowly. At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste — a perverted taste, maybe — to write nothing but what will drive to despair everyone who is ‘in a hurry.’
Thus philology is now more desirable than ever before; thus it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of ‘work’: that is, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-skurry, which is so eager to ‘get things done’ at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not so hurriedly ‘get things done.’ It teaches how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.
Lesson Two
My second lesson was a necessity to the first. You don’t get to spend so much time thinking and learning about technology without getting a taste of screen addiction. The reason I haven’t been a deep reader in recent years isn’t just because of work requirements - it’s because I’ve taught myself to consume tiny packets of digital sugar, frequently, especially at night when I’m tired.
I’ve been trying to get my sleep schedule healthier over the summer. Once the weekday routines of work and school-run family responsibilities faded over the new year, I started staying up later. I was still dedicated to waking up early for morning walks with my dog across Newcastle whilst talking to AI, but I was feeling so tired. I knew I had to get better sleep, but I couldn’t break the pattern. I knew all the healthy recommendations for sleep hygiene - they were the same I’d used to support my students with: put away devices a couple of hours before bed, don’t drink caffeine, put on some quiet music, do a little light reading, go to sleep when you’re tired, and so on. Easier said than done.
What I found myself doing was returning, again and again, to my phone and my laptop. I’ll just check my e-mails, I’ll just check the news headlines, I’ll just check a few social posts, I’ll just search for this - and then two hours would pass, it’d be near midnight, and I’d have ruined another opportunity for rest.
The idea that saved me, that absolutely dug to the core of myself, and that has successfully cured my screen addiction of an evening, was one from Gloria Mark. Mark has been a specialist in attention research for decades now, particularly in the field of human-computer interaction. When she mentioned the phrase ‘random reinforcement conditioning’, I felt a lightning bolt strike through me.
This might seem dramatic - anybody who has followed the work of Tristan Harris, to say nothing of the plethora of times we’re reminded how social media companies create their software to simulate the pull of a poker machine arm in a casino, knows how this sort of thing works - but it was the timely and serious reminder I needed.
The feeling that a digital device and its apps have conditioned me to react how they want me to, to keep me awake at night, was all I needed to call it quits. I’m too fond of my supposed free will to think that I was being so easily conditioned. Just the word gave me chills - and the part that stuck, the real learning, was random reinforcement.
The way Mark describes it, we have times when we receive a nice e-mail. I know I do: I’ve recently received nice messages from educators using my AI Tools for Inclusive Schools in Thailand, and I received a nice message from a DJ in California who has been spinning some of my tracks. It’s a good feeling. But, it’s random - sometimes you’ll receive a nice e-mail, but most of the time you’ll receive spam or work correspondence, or something you’ve been copied into, and so on. Essentially, most of the time it’s nothing, or it’s something that carries a bit of pressure to respond to. Not great feelings.
But, because of the times you’ve received a positive response, you keep going back - you spin the wheel, opening the inbox again, unconsciously hoping for a nice e-mail to give you another shot of positive feeling. Now, multiply that across various social media platforms - someone who has followed you on LinkedIn, someone who liked an Instagram post, someone who responded on Reddit - and you are completely bound to random reinforcement conditioning. Mark says this is the hardest form of conditioning to recognise and unravel yourself from, because of its random nature. If something was always giving you a good feeling, it’s more apparent. Randomness is subtle.
With this, I put my phone away, far away from me during the evenings when entropy takes hold and I’m more likely to give in to subconscious desires for a jolt of positivity to keep me awake. Because this is the thing - that entropy, the feeling of being cognitively expired, should lead to bed and to sleep. But instead, something inside of you says, don’t call it quits just yet - the day still has more to give, and it’s most readily, albeit randomly, going to be found in the glowing vacuum of your devices.
There is more to say on this, but for now, let’s note that Gloria Marks’ work in attention and her recognition of random reinforcement conditioning has saved my sleep.
The Hallway Highlight Litmus Test
One of my favourite roles I’ve taken on in my career has been that of an autism educational outreach consultant. The role took me out of my school and provided me the opportunity to visit other schools, predominantly around New South Wales. Often, I went on request of the school itself, although sometimes the request came from families seeking insight into further strategies that might help support the educational outcomes of their child.
For five years I traveled to nearby city schools and on week-long journeys to rural and remote areas. For a teacher, it was the best professional development available, because I got to sit at the back of hundreds of classrooms and watch teachers teach. In a future Substack, I’ll share the most frequent recommendations I made and the most common challenges I observed in those classrooms, but for this edition, I want to talk about how schools unknowingly represent their ideological views on inclusion.
When you walk into a school building - often a hallway that leads to the administration area, where you sign in or ask the office staff a question - you frequently come across a digital screen showing a slideshow of students and school events. It’s often a television with a PowerPoint deck loaded in, set to autoplay so it cycles through a few dozen photos of students, to give a sense of what the school is about. Essentially, it’s a promotional tool for visitors to show the sort of terrific school community that is being fostered.
But here’s what I learned after watching hundreds of these slideshows while I waited for a staff member to guide me to where I was to spend the day: schools share, on these screens, what they photograph, and they photograph what they value.
For some schools, what they value are all the markers of economic success and cultural capital: groups of socially successful students all engaging in a group hug, perfect teeth in unison broad smiles; a few recurring students holding sports trophies; many of those same students wearing prestigious uniforms such as school dux blazers; photogenic students standing with elevated members of the community such as members of parliament or industry leaders who sponsored a new resource. You get the picture - these are model students, quite literally, and they exemplify the unspoken ideology of so many schools: that the students who are most valued are those who represent future economic success, with all the aesthetics that this embodies.
In these schools - this might sound like a terrible generalisation, but honestly, I find it rarely misses the mark - inclusion is largely unconsidered. It is seen as a legal necessity rather than an authentically held belief. Society is seen through a lens of prestige and free market capitalism (survival of the fittest) and school is the first ladder on this rung. This isn’t a statement against schools this might seem to target - elite private schools. I’ve been in many elite private schools that implement inclusion beautifully and don’t fall into this trap of narrow visible markers for social and economic success. Likewise, I’ve been in many rural schools that unfortunately foster a prestige of, say, sporting success to the exclusion, literally, of everybody else.
This is not the case with all schools, however. There are many wonderful schools that I visit where the slideshow depicts a different story: we see a democratic display of students from all backgrounds, from all economic and diverse standpoints. We see students eating together in a breakfast club, we see a Lego social activity in the library at lunchtime, we see students visiting a nursing home and reading with the residents; we also see academic achievements and sporting achievements, but too we see students tending the school garden and reading comics beneath a shelter. The images aren’t just filled with prestige, and they aren’t posed picture-perfect; they are real depictions of the every day, what the school actually feels like for a range of students, not just those invited to stand in their blazers beside a football superstar.
You might feel like I’m quibbling here and cherry-picking, that I’m drawing a cheesy comparison between a slick marketing vision and grassroots homeliness, but like I said at the outset, what I find within these slideshows is an honest representation of what a school values. I call this my Hallway Highlight Litmus Test, and it rarely fails. If schools sell a vision of glossy accolades, the battle for inclusion is hard fought. If they show kindness and modesty, they often start an inclusive conversation for me. And as I said above, this is not a line that can be drawn between easy stereotypes of school demographics - I see schools of all stripes, across all regions, across varying degrees of education provision, who all represent a position on this litmus test.
This can, and should, be extrapolated, of course, to school social media, to brochures and advertisements, to what school assemblies choose to showcase: when schools show you what they value, you believe them, because it starts top-down and goes to the core. Often, it is school leadership who are responsible for these visible, outward-facing representations of what the school is proud of, and it is subsequently the responsibility of these school leadership teams to consider their ideological standpoint on inclusion, diversity, and economic equality and how this feeds into the sort of societies they want to foster through the educational pipeline. We know this doesn’t occur in a vacuum, that systemic priorities and parental demands impact this feedback loop of demand and supply that imparts pressure on schools to project certain visions of themselves, but this is all the more reason to reflect on the sort of school one wants to be and stand by this in the face of competing obligations.
It’s similar to cultural safety preparations for First Nations members of our community - you want to lead with authentic markers of language, of art and symbolism, of photographs of First Nations individuals being made feel welcome in a school or business. In the same vein, the answer is not to improve the hallway slideshow for the sake of more inclusive representation in a token gesture - the answer is to look at the way inclusion is really attended to, authentically, in the school, and from this ground, the slideshow will naturally reflect what the reality is.
Lighthouse Music
I was granted the opportunity last year to work on music composition for a week in the base of a lighthouse at the Nobbys-Whibayganba headland. The initiative was provided by Lighthouse Arts, part of the Hunter Writer Centre. For the week I was there, I felt my brain change. My whole approach to writing words and music is as an amateur tinkerer: I get up early, I steal pockets of time throughout the day, I sketch a few ideas of a night, but I never get the opportunity to just dedicate myself wholly to one of my creative works.
To be given a whole week where I had no other responsibilities other than to myself and my music was an experience that made a profound impact on me. I hardly slept. My mind felt like it had been supercharged, running at a terrific pace constantly, keeping me forever energised - I woke up exhilarated, I showered and got on my bike and rode from Hamilton into the lighthouse, worked all morning until lunch, rode to the pub for some food, then back up to the lighthouse until late afternoon, at which point I rode home, rejoined my family for the evening and, after they went to sleep, I stayed up thinking about compositional ideas before falling asleep and starting again.
Across 2023, I worked on my Telegraph series of compositions. In January I commenced a plan to write two songs per season and release them as a seasonal EP. My first two EPs, Summer and Autumn, were well received - one of the tracks on Autumn I mentioned earlier, Mabon, was played on our national Triple J radio station and made it into the top fifty voted tunes of our local Newcastle Music Show poll - so when I knew I’d secured a week at the lighthouse for my two Winter songs, I was delighted to think the unique setting would contribute in some way.
You can see the resulting compositions here and the video I made for them:
The main thing I wanted to achieve with these pieces, particularly the second one, was to think about how music composition can keep moving forward. This feels like a ridiculous and pretentious thing to say out loud, and when you listen to the pieces above you’ll rightly think they don’t really sound anything like what musical progression might approach: the first is a piano piece with some mild electronic supplements, while the second sits within the domain of electroacoustic compositions that could have been part of the Warp label anytime during the past twenty years.
But still, the intention remains, evermore so that I have finished my Telegraph series after Spring concluded the year. I keep thinking about what to write next without repeating easy genre tropes. Typically, my compositional approach tries to straddle two intentions: to successfully fit into current genres that fans of those genres would enjoy and think musically interesting; and, to push into new domains of texture, structure and instrumentation, eager to stretch the limits of genre to be as forward-thinking as possible.
I think of the wonderful book by Alex Ross, ‘The Rest is Noise’, and the journey it tracks from what reads to me as the apogee of musical genius, of serious mastery of organised sound - the symphonies of Beethoven - with all their melodic beauty, the architecture of their structural sophistication, the innovation of their instrumentation, particularly with the choir added to the ninth, and then on through Wagner and the dissolution of the Romantic era for the necessary experimental evocations of Modernism.
The year after the Rite Of Spring was performed, Joyce started on Ulysses. To commence World War 2 he published Finnegans Wake, which one critic later compared to Mozart, with all his compositional powers, throwing a piano down a flight of stairs and calling it his masterpiece. Finnegans Wake was impenetrable noise to many, as were the avant-garde, atonal compositions that were being performed in academic institutions across the twentieth century.
New Complexity, Spectralism - is it any wonder that the mantle for an accessible evolution of sound was passed to a generation of bedroom eccentrics, Aphex Twin and his guild, Aphex notably given credence by an association with Philip Glass for one of his works, because these new eccentrics had access to something that all the composers across the century only wished they could obsessively master to the same degree: synthesizers, samplers and, the big game changer, computers (if you think this is an exaggeration, find anybody who was able to do what Squarepusher did with a drum machine before the mid-nineties).
There was a point in the mid-90s when Aphex Twin said he was putting analog hardware away because it couldn’t match the potential of computer software, but up until that point it didn’t even seem possible that hardware could make the sounds these folk were producing: there is an interview with Squarepusher where he discusses buying his first drum machine and being shown a demo of a disco beat, then going home and making the machine produce insane granular synthesis.
With computer software rapidly evolving every other month, beyond complex trackers into the accessible Ableton / Logic GUIs we have now, artists could readily do just about anything they wanted with sound, without limits. Anytime infinite possibilities appear, the burden of creation becomes too much, as it was for this breed of nineties electronica artists: Aphex soon returned to analog machines and also briefly explored experimental classical compositions with real-world instruments. He sought out the tactile again.
While these primarily UK-based musicians were wrestling with the ghost of mathematics in their machines (Iannis Xenakis is frequently referenced as a key inspiration), in parallel northern climates there were post-work juggernauts taking flight - Godspeed You! Black Emperor (Canada), Mogwai (Scotland) and Sigur Ros (Iceland) are most notable from the period - and trying to reincarnate Romantic symphonies through rock instrumentation.
Violins alongside bowed guitars soared into analogy, rendering desolate landscapes and post-911 politics as sweeping distorted soundscapes. As these bands were increasing the emotional apogee of enormous sounds, they were also (particularly Godspeed You! Black Emperor) melding the ambient technique of Eno and Reich into new soundscapes that would, in 2002, seemingly manifest into William Basinki’s ‘Disintegration Loops’.
Without going through a blow-by-blow of the evolution and twisting of the ambient genre across the past three decades, the thing that most stands out to me today is how much the form has become the dominant mode of musical access. It isn’t quite fair to say that Muzak has won out, but it definitely feels like a sort of anti-music has emerged as the preferable mode of production.
Ben Lerner wrote an interesting little book some years ago called The Hatred Of Poetry, which made a fascinating comment on what poets are looking for all the time: the virtual poem, the essence of the potential of a poem as it resides in the impression of the poet’s mind (before it is corrupted by concrete reality). This feels to me what the potential of ambient music can be: it operates in a virtual capacity, buffering against the revelation of silence, wanting to produce a little sound, but not too much.
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness, said Samuel Beckett in a dialogue with Georges Duthuit in 1949. One of the most lauded albums in recent years is ‘Promises’ by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, a beautiful work of ambient jazz that feels like it tip-toes through Beckett’s stance on art. Minimal notes, minimal structural evolution, just a grazing of trills and breath. The promised perfection of minimalism and silence leads to hesitancy in making music. There is beauty in this hesitancy - in an age of infinite advertisements yelling forever, subtlety is blessed - but I am also reminded of further correlations with Joyce and Beckett. Take this famous quote from Beckett about the difference between his and Joyce’s literary approach:
I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding.
This is where I feel the wonderful work of Floating Points, Max Richter, Peter Knight (and, while we’re here, Burial’s latest output, post-dubstep and almost silent) et al are playing in at present: subtracting rather than adding. You either subtract sound from music, or you subtract melody from tonality and revert back to the avant-garde of the twentieth century, or you create a movie soundtrack.
My question is, what comes next? I had some thoughts about the way that notation might help push compositional ideas forward, using recent technologies, such as:
Real-Time Notation Reflecting Global Events: This concept marries music with current affairs, creating a live, evolving score that responds to global events like political shifts or environmental changes. Algorithms could analyse news feeds or social media trends, translating them into musical parameters like tempo, dynamics, or even specific motifs representing certain types of events.
Notation Based on Personal Memories: This idea takes a more introspective approach, using personal memories and images from the performer's life to influence the score. It could involve a database of images and experiences connected to the performer, possibly sourced through previous conversations, journals, or social media. As these memories are presented during the performance, they would evoke emotional responses that shape the music.
A combination of these notation techniques could be interesting: real-world global events reshaping the music staves at the same time that personal memories of the performers are projected onto the score. But these are just technical and performative innovations that don’t impact the compositional approach in itself: for this, I think about the team who used artificial intelligence to complete Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony.
Feedback to the results of the 10th Symphony were pretty modest - some of Beethoven’s originality was in there, but vaguely. Not enough to warrant a great deal of appreciation for the technologies involved, but what about when the systems get better: what if it could generate Beethoven’s 11th Symphony by learning from the history of ragtime and jazz, of pop and rock, of electronic and ambient - what would the 12th sound like, the 13th.
Beethoven’s commitment to mastery, fuelled by the history of music that followed his death, using algorithms that don’t just recycle but rather give birth to beautiful new ideas. That’s what I really want to hear. Brilliant structural innovations, strong melodic sensibilities, filtered through the modest uncertainty of a century that yearns for subtlety but needs desperately to say something true.
Some Meaning
My friends and I were nihilists from a young age, so meaning was already somewhat in the rearview mirror. As teenagers we knew, like a billion other teenagers, that the future would be filled with all manner of responsibilities and that considering life as having an inherent meaning outside of this practical materialism was not only unnecessary but foolish. We were romantics, of course - we came late to girls, admiring them from an awkward distance for years before falling into their arms at the least provocation - living and breathing music, movies and books for our emotional education. But we knew that meaning was an unnecessary additive.
This was true until we realised it was a story we were telling ourselves about how we were going to survive in the future when we were on our own. When you know you’ll have to take care of yourself one day you want as little baggage as possible - you want to be trim, to not carry any extra weight, allowing you to slip between buildings, to nestle into a gap on a crowded train, to sleep in confined spaces, and meaning was just going to take up room. But as happens, during those ubiquitous and necessary dark nights of the soul, you wonder what it’s all about, and in doing so, you tell yourself a story. It’s still often a story of responsibilities - to your family now, the one you’ve created for yourself, you’re forty and a necessary provider - but mostly it’s a story about time, about how you’re going to face the remainder of your days as a continuation of who you’ve always been since those long days of childhood and those persistent teenage dreams.
These are the conversations my friends and I are having when we see each other, sporadically, rarely, when we track each other down for a quiet walk or a once-a-decade coffee. Again, it’s the same story that’s been told how many times, but it’s still real: we know how to live, we know why we live, but the narrative arc is kind of sad. Aging parents, for those still around; children not afforded the beauty of an uncertain future because it’s all too apparent (we’re living it); and us, with our immaculate senses of humour, able to joke about everything, able to enjoy the warmth of the sun from so many different angles and degrees of intensity, able to find pleasure still in the smallest corners, time thieves anonymous - we enjoy living, against all odds, mostly, to be sure, because of the good fortune of the circumstances of our collective births, our good upbringings, our economic opportunities, our health and literacy, the internal drive of our world as will and representation, but still, against all odds.
I joke, but what helps me, at forty, and I tell this to my friends, is to engage in regular sober recitations on the structure of reality. Nietzsche is always with me, reminding me to avoid metaphysics and to love reality, that what is good is what gives rise to power. Then, against Nietzsche’s best intentions, I turn to Hegel and consider that history is the human mind becoming progressively more conscious of itself. I’ll think about Wittgenstein and remind myself that philosophical problems are only problems in so far as they are poorly worded, and I’ll remember this passage from Hesse that became the truest idea I still yet come across:
“Awakening,” it seemed, was not so much concerned with truth and cognition, but with experiencing and proving oneself in the real world.
When you had such an awakening, you did not penetrate any closer to the core of things, to truth; you grasped, accomplished, or endured only the attitude of your own ego to the momentary situation.
You did not find laws, but came to decisions; you did not thrust your way into the centre of the world, but into the centre of your own individuality.
I think through the neuroscience of the age, of Douglas Hofstadter referencing the work of Kurt Gödel to further his idea about how all thought is analogy; of the wonderful work being done by Iain McGilchrist on how the purpose of the brain is to mediate between us and the world, on the critical role of each of our hemispheres in dialogue and alone, and on the brain’s tendency towards melancholy, perhaps summed up best by Schopenhauer:
…philosophical astonishment is therefore at bottom perplexed and melancholy; philosophy, like the overture to Don Juan Mozart's Don Giovanni, begins with a minor chord.
I think about being in a rush and reflect on Baudrillard’s claim that reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. When tragedy strikes, I replay the scene where B J Hunnicutt is vomiting in the bushes after his first exposure to life as a doctor in the Korean war, when Hawkeye leans in and says to him,
The worst part is you'll get used to all of this.
Is it from Wagner, from Parsifel, that line about how the wound can only be healed by the sword that made it? That Zizekian reversal, that the ultimate mystery is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Why is there nothing rather than something?”
Have you read any of Ben Lerner’s recent poetry, from his collection ‘The Lights’? More than a few of his wonderful lines have been added to my catalogue of thoughts, that:
weird fullness of the instant
before music
of living during childhood:
except maybe the command to look
alive when I was a boy undead among
small purple flowers in the outfield.
Picking up on the central profundity of Proust, the lines that stirred Beckett to become who he was, when Marcel wrote “The time that we have at our disposal every day is elastic. The passions that we feel expand it. Those that we inspire contract it. And habit fills up what remains.” or as Lerner put it, back into Baudrillard’s tongue, that while:
The flowers have an already-seen quality
I associate with objects under the sun
and there is
stock imagery where
memory should be
remember
There is nothing more beautiful than a vulnerable grid
glowing in late empire
and I find myself recording more and more of what is inside of my head these days with a mission statement, perhaps above all else, to give my children an idea about what it was like for me to be alive. How much do we not know about the multitudes that must have cascaded through the lives of our parents: there is so much I cannot capture, but a little can be passed on, to remedy a necessary acceptance of being alone.
After the COVID lockdowns, I was sent on a work trip for the first time in a couple of years, when my son turned three. On a beach in Adelaide, I wrote this poem, trying to say something to my son, in the future, about what it is like to be me, today, at the time (this is an extract from the full piece):
I want you to know I love being in my head,
not as much as I love you of course,
but most of the time it is a joy (lucky as this
is what it means to be alive). And not
just being in my head organising my survival,
but sensing and thinking in splendour.
I like looking at the jetty cast out from
the shore and examining its piers,
associating them with recent films seen,
a Harmony Korine movie, of Florida,
and as storms build in Winter monochrome,
feathering the air with broad shadows, I
think of Sebald as I pass by the carousel
unmoving, the sparkless dodgem cars,
the grand hotels leaning into shy rainfall
reminding me of his Rings of Saturn,
a scene where he sits in a dim pub with
a plate of fish and chips, as for him as
too for me here, revelling in quiet bleakness,
like being in an Edward Hopper painting.
You see what I'm doing, all of this is linked,
in no cosmic sense, goes without saying,
but because subjectivity is analogy - thoughts
can only rise to awareness in familial pairs.
There are bulldozers on the beach here, they
push the sand into underground funnels
to move excess grains some kilometres north
because the coast doesn't migrate as it
should due to the necklace of hotels (energy,
volcanoes, static sand, out of our hands),
I listen to a song by this noisy post-rock band,
they have a tune called She Dreamt She
Was a Bulldozer, She Dreamt She Was Alone
in an Empty Field, and they also have a
tune called ...'they don't sleep anymore on the
beach...', which fits into this landscape
like sand into a vacuum funnel. As my father
taught me, through cassettes from the
public library of classical sobriety, music is
serious stuff, time's salvation, and as one
piece rounds out its orchestral distortions, the
interlocution of guitar into cymbal, of
chime into melodic bassline folding to a close,
while a man releases a trolley filled with
dirty bedding into the street, rolling straight on
towards a tram, to which he languidly reacts
by skateboarding over and lightly tugging the
trolley away, looking immensely put out
by gravity, by the existence of the tram, by me
looking at him (he calls out at me, I have
headphones on, and you know me, 6 foot 2,
stubborn postured and aloof in my toffee
raincoat, I'm all good my lad, so too will you be),
and the playlist on my phone recommends
three hours of ambience because this is what
music is right now, for you at thirty eight
I can't predict, but in two oh two two we seek
near formless songs where one piece is
indistinguishable from the next, splinters of
silence interrupting dust crackle and the
pad of muted piano hammers reverberating like
a bulldozer sleeping in an empty field, it
makes sense in our insomniac age, I totally get it,
but what I seek more than this is apogee,
symphonic climax, emotional revelation driven to
bursting threshold - when Beethoven's 9th
reaches through the atmosphere (the hole is
still up there from where he first broke on
through) - analogy for mountain peak, cresting
wave, to all the trajectories that rise into
fall. Ambience is infinity, intentionally timeless,
and with you at three of course I understand,
I want to keep you at this age forever, for things
to never change, but only for a while - soon
I get my bearings, I spy the coastline, the planes
coming in from beyond the horizon to land
behind the hotels, fly in one window and out the
other, and I want you to one day stand here
where I am standing, to have a head full of potential,
to see the fairy lights wrapped around the trees,
the geodesic structures that lovers sit in down here,
the love heart sculpture that one of the couples
asks me to photograph them near, I take a hundred
pics, you should have seen the way they kissed
as I snapped shots from different angles, it made
me laugh afterwards. My little man, I want you
to look at the same white sailboat I am looking at
now, floating on the thin line between sky and
sea, and feel as I do: an ease, an imagined voyage,
one that I will think of tonight in your absence.
I’ll leave it there for now. I hope there has been something within this first edition of The Universal Sandpit Quarterly that resonates with or against you and gives you pause. I look forward to sharing the second edition with you in April 2024.
On behalf of Jonsi and I, sitting by the harbour on the morning of January 14th, thank you and, with warmest regards, all the best -
Craig.