Creative challenge

Late last night I had a call from Rachel whose currently spending a month in Tucson Arizona as an Artist in Residence, given the use of a house in a beautiful location where she has freedom and opportunity to make and record any kind of new music she fancies. She's taken all her favourite instruments and pieces of music making technology with her and is having the time of her life. Normally she has to fit creativity into the struggle to earn her keep. 

She wanted to tell me about a composition she's working on combining recorded loops, live voice, 'cello and guitar. The inspiration came from learning about watercourses surrounding the city of Tucson, dried up for most of the year, but still holding water from the last monsoon rains deep underground. It seems migrating birds follow the river bed whether they see water flowing or not. This image was what inspired her.  The piece was still being made but she played it back to me over the phone. The sound quality was poor but I got the concept, and suggested that a poetic voice-over might help her audience visualise those birds flying over an arid landscape where water lies deep down. I went to bed wondering if I could write something she could use.

I work up to another grey day with light rain in the afternoon. At least we didn't get wet going to St Catherine's for the Eucharist. It was an All-age Family Eucharist this morning with a congregation of about thirty adults and ten small children. A few of the smaller ones were very noisy and ran around the nave non-stop for much of the service, making it hard to concentrate on worship. I thought about going to the Cathedral instead but decided to accompany Clare to church. Not a good decision on my part. It's important to include children in worship, but they need socialising, taught by parents to be aware of other people in the same space. It's a process of learning for everyone, but is it one we're honestly engaged with and discussing? I don't know.

The last hymn called 'Think of a world', written in 1969  a much used as a school assembly hymn intended to give thanks for the environment we inhabit and all its components, things we took for granted back in the day. Its opening stanza is 

'Think of a world without any flowers, / Think of a world without any trees, / Think of a sky without any sunshine, / Think of the air without any breeze.'

It continues in other verses to imagine a world without animals and humans. In the fifty five years since it was written, the unthinkable has started to happen. Species loss, habitat loss, climate stability and so on. I came away from church feeling downcast rather than uplifted. An example of outdated irrelevant hymnody. We'd have been better off to end with 'Where have all the flowers gone', asking ourselves why the biosphere is deteriorating and what do we need to do to heal the world.

It started to rain early afternoon, so I donned rain jacket and trousers for my walk in the park, I left just as Clare's study group was about to arrive for a special session. Fortunately the rain wasn't too heavy, so I didn't get soaked. While I walked, thinking about Rachel's composition project, images and ideas turned into words and phrases, so I stopped user a tree and drafted a poem using Google Keep to make a note of it.

When I got home, I finished the poem and sent it to Rachel. In the meanwhile she'd sent me the sound file she'd played me over the phone. I recorded the poem and edited together the two files using Audacity to give her an idea of how it would work. My voice recording microphone isn't brilliant and needs a lot of tweaking in Audacity for my weekly prayer video.. I think it would work better with her voice recorded on a higher quality device rather than mine. Let's see how this fits with her. This was a pleasurable occupation for me on a Sunday, a reminder that I need creative projects to sustain my spirit and morale.

After supper I watched another episode of 'Sambre', dealing the response of the Mayor in a town along the eponymous river to news of a Council employee being raped, annoying the judiciary and police by issuing a public safety warning to female citizens, despite mounting evidence of a serial rapist going back decades the forces of law and order aren't proactive in pursuit of a perpetrator, so a statistical analyst is engaged to map incidents and see if they can narrow down the rapist's habitual starting point, a technique originating in profiling serial killers in Canada apparently. This was an innovation when it was first used twenty years ago, and is now part of the forensic toolkit for tracking serial offenders. It's a great way to use movie drama to explain historic information and, without benefit of a commentary.