Jules P Richards

The most common answer from colleagues regarding their December break was ‘looking forward to a rest’.

I was going to look back at the Instagram snaps I have taken recently – but they are past, of little importance. They were of the moment, and those moments have passed.

And so to the Christmas hiatus… Nothing to be done… The interim is ours… ‘The rest’ is silence…

A season of sparkles and shadows.

To really see what’s before us, we first need to listen… to the unsaid, to the silence, to the rest.

In the UK our winter festivals are dominated by light and darkness, which perhaps amplifies or illuminates vulnerable aspects of our human condition. I loosely think of Plato’s cave, (loosely).
At ‘Christmas’ our world is full of reflections, shadows, projections, and fables, that excite, challenge, delight, and entice…  The cave walls amuse a kaleidoscope of possibility, reminiscence, hope, and delight… nothing is silent.

When the lights fade, the depth of echos can be heightened. After ‘the show’, we are perhaps left with… silence… only memories. When the action ends, the characters stop… There is little that is concrete, only memory, and the unsaid.

Breath out; sink beneath the thoughts…
Breathe in; rise above them… 

Now can be a time when trust can win and fear can be muted. Yes, we can delight in the reflections, shadows, projections, and fables; supreme fictions that excite, challenge, delight, and entice… nothing is silent.

But to really see what’s before us, we first need to listen… to the unsaid, to the silence, to the rest.

The ‘rest’ is a pause, or an interruption, a break in the music… (which can be a good time for a trumpet player to catch their breath!)

The Rest is also an uncelebrated but delightful compilation album from 2012 by Deacon Blue. Enjoy the rest.

Back to the garden…

A few years back (2018) we visited Tremenheere Gardens on a trip to the homeland. I made a few notes here: Conversation with constructions

We visited West Cornwall again this week…

As I mentioned before, trips back to Corny ignite archived memories. It’s not always a healthy thing to reminisce… Perhaps nostalgia is about the comfort of familiar patterns and routines…

A vacation (to vacate, Latin vacare ‘be unoccupied’), back to nostalgia (Greek nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain’). A break can expose cleft and contrast between our current routines and the echoes of formative structures.

Patterns are what we all seek. Patterns in language, entertainment, relationship, habit… It’s what keeps us sane.

Some of us struggle to acknowledge or subscribe to our cultures’ patterns. I wonder if that’s why nature is so inspiring or captivating to some? 

Nature’s patterns often outshine the structures that humanity constructs.

As I said before, interaction with our natural wild world often surpasses the framed human constructions we create. 

The camouflage of routine is broken by movement.

Personally I find comfort and excitement in the curves and circles of the natural. There is a joy, play and celebration in nature, it is filled with the beauty of other colours beyond the shiny yellow of happiness. Lines create a fabric, a safe textured structure. Curves created movement. Movement breaks shapes and makes new marks. Curves grow.

As the B-side of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi‘ spinning disc plays …

“We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden”

Postscript:
Vex not thy spirit at the course of things; they heed not thy vexation…
Marcus Aurelius

On a dog-walk this morning (that is walking the black-dog while I wait to taxi the family home from their work), I snapped some shots of the charming Queniborough. A small village is Leicestershire.

The snaps contained the usual familiar cultural trappings and noise; cars, signs, posts, wires etc.

I wanted to reflect, represent, capture something… ‘What I saw’ made me feel/think stuff. Under the everyday thoughts we can perhaps glimpse more… something the views evoked… potential? nostagia? sublime? curiosity?

I snapped the photos below, and with the tools of my trade, primarily Adobe Creative Cloud I rendered a quick reflection. Some may use pencils, paints etc but I find editing and rendering photos a similar process to putting mediums on paper. With a little finishing through Snapseed I came up with the below.

It’s done by combining and reworking the image. Perhaps similar to how a painter or illustrator might rework a drawing to portray more reality than an unconsidered glance.

A view, a consideration…

Went for a stroll this morning, above the voluptuous rotting summer the sky promised an incandescent bright greyness.

Occasionally for me, a Sunday morning can ring a clarion glimpse of a hopefulness.

I recalled one of the last performances I was part of with the Global Harmony choir… we sang to a room of very aged old-people in a Melton Mowbray care home. Seemingly at the dusk of their lives, we sang to them the Bob Dylan song Forever Young. Ironic but complementary, it was a powerful moment. I recall a radiant greyness.

I first heard a live rendition of Forever Young in a folk club in Mountsorrel about 25 years ago. Pete Morton’s encore song was a remarkable heartfelt rendition.

The book I’ve been reading has been sleepily drifting, it’s failed to grab my attention… What happens to those characters you fail to notice, when you fail to finish a novel… who knows… who knows the strangers we pass…

Thankfully, helped by a reflective Desert Island Discs with Adrian Edmondson, this Sunday’s luminous grey helped me break a sleepy fast…

It can be huge (a good small word) to suddenly realise the potential smorgasbord of joys in the valley beyond… Steady the horses… The potential for indigestion is high…

There IS so much to delight if you are fortunate to glimpse it, but as they say at work, vision without execution is hallucination…

When you discover a new menu, exciting sustenance, you’re not sure where to start…

Like opening a new book…

Like a young man stepping off the train in a new world, the prospect of years to discover new things… wow… the optimism of youth…

Whether it’s from hunger, fear, nostalgia, or the sublime, a curiosity can be stirred…

To-do list;
Embrace Bernard and Jack…
Discover new sounds such as Helena Deland and Anna Lapwood…
Recap on familiar ideas with Jules Evans…
Revisit Waiting for Godot…

“Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance… at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it before it is too late… What do you say?”

I might be aging, but will always try to sing, it is well with my soul, and may you stay forever young.

*The title of this note on my phone started as ‘Hunger’. Though I don’t truly know the meaning of the word, I have kept it.

Why do we take photos? As mentioned before, I’ve always enjoyed producing ‘images’. I started as an apprentice graphic artist. I studied creativity and visual art at degree level. I worked as a commercial graphic designer for many years. ‘Graphics’ refers to any visual representation of data. As a creative I try to represent things in a new affecting way.

In his celebrated work ‘Ways of Seeing‘, John Berger said “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”

What do we see? What do we know? Do we ‘see’ it before we think it, or do we ‘think’ it before it’s seen?

Grounding

Nowadays I continue to play with images (imagine) as a hobby, as a release; a way to ground myself in the world around me.

Personally, my everyday perception of things often tends to be either under- or over-saturated; the data in my head sparks and whirls and often ‘does not compute’.

I often capture images in-passing, and quickly render them on my phone to try to reflect the feelings and thoughts of the moment.

Here’s a scattering of images produced on-the-fly over the last few weeks;

There’s more here: Instagram #julesprichards

and here: Flickr #julesprichards

I’m a words and pictures person, it’s what I do; Graphic Repro

And we will all always look to pictures and words, signs and significance to make sense of our lives, but perhaps… 

“…people become fascinated with pictures and words, and wind up forgetting the Language of the World…” Paulo Coelho, “The Alchemist”

It’s been a few months since my last post in May. What is there to say? 

To be honest, before the summer break my synapses were arcing and neurons were whirling and not much was making sense. Juggling expectations, hopes, desires and failings, I was trying to just hold stuff together. As one does. 

We were blessed with a sunny break in Brittany and we’ve returned back to the familiar with a sense of gratitude and a glimpse of ‘content’.

It might be age, but more and more I am finding the gaps between the words, the quiet between the noise, the questions before the answers, and the “unheard sounds”, the ‘language of the world’ to be sweeter.

In the words of my yoga instructor after a challenging practice,
“{now} …you’ve nothing left to do, you’ve nowhere else you need to be…”

With good thoughts, kind words, and honourable intentions. Onwards…

All shall be well. I continue to seek and cultivate mudita, perhaps the most difficult attitude to embrace; big-hearted, magnanimous, tolerant, broad-minded, patient, forgiving, generous, mudita.

With the language of the world; “Today may we know and greet everyone with a love that is at our heart.”

But I’m still a words and pictures person; Graphic Repro

Who knows where the next breath might take us?

I read “Stop limiting yourself, here’s 10 AI extensions that will blow your mind!”
Playing with Chat GPT recently left me marvelling but dazed  – like stepping from a quiet rest room in Tibet directly onto Fifth Avenue, New York. A mix of excitement and apprehension, a mixture of exhilaration and trepidation. Perhaps, rather like stepping out of a plane in mid-air?

I had the opportunity this week to fly above the Leicestershire countryside in a Piper aeroplane. It was flown by my wife (with a little help from RAF pilot Sean). It was awesome. The experience gave us just a hint of what flying is. “Power up and bank to the left”… wow! It left us wanting more.

Looking at the latest possibilities in my field of graphic design, the AI tools available are now phenomenal. Amongst others, Adobe CC generative fill features will now create content and adapt images from text prompts, turning a skull in the desert into a lotus flower in the jungle with a few clicks. AI tools, they’re amazing and the potential is ridiculous. The sky’s no longer the limit.

Flying high this week I was privileged to have a taste of something beyond my reach. The potential of current AI technology is also the start of another world beyond the one we currently know.

It might be easy to feel disparaged when experiencing a sense of things beyond one’s reach; if only this, if only that…

But, I am reminded of Icarus, reaching too high, and the flurry of cautionary tales regarding recent automatic AI content ‘creation’.

My other recent reading has been considering the essence of our lives, ‘our breath’.

When we truly breathe, we have an opportunity to expand our life force. The essence of our life, good respiration, can help keep us healthy. To fill our lungs, allows fresh oxygen to be distributed throughout our core. The heart of us can be nurtured, cleansed and rejuvenated by our breath.

As the wave comes, washes over and runs up, then turns around and recedes… back to the ocean, so our being can be washed by a reciprocating, restorative breath. 

Back to sensing life beyond our reach. Perhaps a healthy approach is to be thankful for the fullness of a deep breath. Be content with the content of our liveliness. Once we are thankful for what we have, and release that deep breath with gratitude, who knows where the next breath might take us.

Pause, Breathe, Relax, Smile…

It’s why we make music…
The wind lifts…
The simplest melody breaks the silence…
Delighting chords warm the spirit…
Sparks light up, reflections ripple, out and up…
An intake of breath…
The sharpest tones, orchestrated brass, voices in resounding harmony… full chorus… crescendo… the heights of hope and confident cheer…
Then you grasp the familiar bell and the sound stops… the definite melts… the truth is challenged…

When that’s done, we bow… to the empty space…outside of meaning.

After the lightest brights and saturated colours,
the harmony echos, and the words linger…

The wind lifts…
It’s why we make music.

Some say he “never lifted a finger in the house or the garden… couldn’t even be bothered to wipe the toilet down…” …but he worked hard…

It’s that time of year again. The last few months have been taken up line learning.

Usually my character is the slightly clownish, likable simpleton, or a friendly comic addition, but this one’s a tad different.

I’m playing a bloke who is a tad sarcastic and ignorant. He’s a good bloke deep down, but perhaps familiarity over the years has made him contemptuous and negligent… just a tad? Or perhaps he gave up everything too, but lost sight of everything also?

It’s been a challenge playing a heedless rude character*, it does not come naturally (some may think otherwise).

For me perhaps being on stage started in the late 1980s with Joey Wizzbang the Clown in a Cornish pantomime. This progressed through things like ‘Teddy’ in Pinter’s The Homecoming, ‘Lucky’ in Beckett’s ‘Godot, and jump to recent years and a few comic japes with Syston’s QT Theatre. Most recently, I played John, QT’s hugely enjoyable production of Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends.

As mentioned, QT Theatre‘s May production is a tad different.

Pretzels for Dinner, by Janet Shaw is directed by our own Jude Latham. It’s ‘a bitter-sweet comedy looking at life through the eyes of Anne’ …married to Bill for thirty-five years, she devoted her adult life to being a wife, a mother, and her daily routine, like her weekly shop at Asda. As life goes on, can Anne remember dreams and ambitions?

Some say Bill “never lifted a finger in the house or the garden… couldn’t even be bothered to wipe the toilet down…”

We’ll see if he lives to regret that attitude.

QT Theatre’s production of Pretzels for Dinner is on in Syston from 23 – 26 May, by arrangement with Stagescripts Ltd.

*On a more serious note, to play a character fully you do need to feel it. The ‘trusting’ of a character is not rehearsed; we act a rehearsed part, but to some extent it’s with feeling that we can then trust in the transference of truth to an audience. Feeling another character can be an odd experience, and this one has been a little awkward. I have found bits of Bill’s ‘character’ coming out at home in my conversations with our temperamental smart speakers, and in my response to our dog when he pesters for scraps. I have also had some seriously traumatic dreams that I put down in part to the characters and narratives of the play. Here’s to Bill!… he means well, but thinks he prefers Cleethorpes to Sharm El-Sheikh.