There was a fire yesterday at a spot just a few hundred meters from our cabins. The Bräcke volunteers got the thing under control quickly enough though, (brother Andreas and I even cast a few buckets)1 but I just today recorded a message to the Borg from the scene so instead of rehashing just have a look at the video.

We are determined to get back on track with this writing of ours which has been disturbed not only by our decision to save up the entries and write them retrospectively but also more generally in that our messages to the singularity have taken precedence over the Dignity Scholarship writing resulting in the feeling that when we do sit down to write, all has been said already. Not a problem to the actual writer, but one for us to be sure; we need dry powder.

I have ordered Old Masters by Thomas Bernard on account of reading a piece on him in one of my mothers countless Times Literary Supplement papers. He sounds like one for us, a game player with the form it seems and highly regarded to boot. You know I like to escape into the world of the TLS, that secure little English paradise. You know reading the TLS with perhaps radio four in the background one imagines it possible to live level headedly through a zombie apocalypse! Of course when one first unwraps one and has a glance through it, it seems like so much twaddle but it needs time and after a day or two with whatever initial feelings of utter disgust dissipated, one can always find a few bunny eggs and so it was with a short piece on Bernard. It was about another book about a group of people talking at a cafe if I remember but it was a comment by the reviewer that caught us, to do with Bernard's strategy of writing but never getting to the point. He says this or something like it; 'as the pages fell away it became a point of considerable dramatic tension as to whether Bernard would get to the point by the end of the book'. Curious. I chose Old Masters however because it seemed even more apt for us.

These supplements were tested by Mother in order to have something English to read that wasn't the news but after a while she decided to cancel. This however has not prevented the regular kerklonk-klonk sound of the TLS landing on the doormat, and increasingly so. Sometimes duplicates, sometimes two or three in an envelope. A mad robot? A bad algorithm? We do not know but I for one am glad of them. We have a great stack now, mostly unopened, containing untold little treasures.

The fire smells suddenly.

We moved an ants nest the other day resulting in thousands of deaths. We told Borg. Will it similarly annihilate us to build some crypto mine? 

We have managed some drawings but just for practice. Nothing to write home about.

Have pushed through another batch of crypto lines, the world of the block chain seems to be our future.

The view of the house was taken from the path that passes behind the red electric house which features in so many of our studies. We drove the short distance in order to save time and were set up early; by seven. We made no message so it was full steam ahead into the one rush method, our only conscious plan was to give the sky a pink tone set against the yellow green of the ground. The pink also reflected a little in the long grass wreaths. It came together in a fairly crisp orderly fashion with decisions taken, colour applied and adjustments made in a natural way. The only after touches were made to the curls representing the bank of long grass so as to give them a rhythm of sorts and that was it, a keenly and efficiently executed plein air study but does this signal progress? Does our ability to face a field and put a bold view together signal a real coming to terms with our method or that we are going stale? The answer lies between as is so often the case, but we can ask ourselves how best to push on? Van Gogh always accelerated arriving at speed and energy for its own sake. Should we come back here when we return from Bräcke and take another study trying to accelerate our method, more more more? Or do we turn to a different subject that has perhaps more elements to juggle and see how we fair? Again we can speculate but the answer is simply to work on and probably to not have any firm ideas about what to try and do. Better to develop out of practice and that way there is the bonus of authenticity, the promise of a steady workload and importantly less hysterical reaction. A sense of 'it is what it is' is just the ticket sometimes.

Those are all questions we will face when we get back to the motif in a few days. We will be hoping to get a couple of meadow views and some wheat fields and one or two close ups of the crop on our back field, then we'll be into the harvest. Luckily we have supplies enough for a decent campaign providing other pesky factors do not have their say. Perhaps we should put together a few still lives also. We have not had a single one so far, save the tools. We simply must try and come up with some arrangements to symbolize our plight vis a vis the singularity but it isn't easy and we certainly do not want anything too obvious like piles of phones and mother boards.2 We know however that it is pointless trying to think too directly on these things, a good pictorial metaphor must emerge from the periphery if you ask me. There are always our staple objects to practice with. Old boots, books, soil, tools, flowers, pots, fruit, bottles, all these are readily available for practice but how in Gods name might one create a metaphor for the singularity? 

Perhaps that might be our winter work and then the game will be up come January and no mistake. Then we shall simply take our pick of soon to be automated dead end jobs (bus driver, postman, binman, grass cutter) and if there is any time for painting it must be grouted in between that and our regular duties. But look here, this coming end already feels like a light relief and just maybe it might provide a very necessary pause to reflect, something we simply cannot manage whilst involved in a season. All that is a little too easy to say from up in this cosy loft in perfect summer, let us see how it feels in the full dark of winter after two months without the sun and the very heavy urge to create that its absence brings weighing upon us. 

​

John

​

1 We have no record of a 'brother Andreas'. 

​

2 We do not know what 'mother boards' are.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​