Fiche and Chips

“Here becomes a vast interlude, November 6th 1978 to May 17th 1980, which is His Dexter Daylight Utterly Darkened as far as that includes [micro]fiches one and two also some six or seven tape works to various purpose, 'A Vital Inventory, They Know Youre with a some one else' plus 6 performances from the manuscript using various of the tapes.”

The above a quote from, 'A Companion Guide to His Dexter Daylight Utterly Darkened': itself a part of the larger work: see left, Volume 5, page 2.

Another vast interlude brings me to 2020. One of the upstairs bedrooms in our house is our library come office. There are two filing cabinets in this room: one of them I painted yellow over 35 years ago and contains manuscripts, flyers and posters, and other such material from the years 1975-1986 when I was specifically a poet; but also 1983-1987 when, as well as a poet, I was a student of computer science and the philosophy of science.. In the years between 1986 and 2010 I hardly, if ever, looked at the material in this filing cabinet. My son and an academic career in computer science was the focus of most of my attention and energy. Since retiring from academia in 2010 I have looked in the filing cabinet and gradually thought about putting the various halves of my life together to some extent.

In Spring 2021 and out of the blue and the pandemic and my chosen quietude in Saltburn I got an email from Charlie Morrow about the 12th International Sound Poetry Festival that was held in New York in 1980.

At that Festival it turns out that I performed a small selection from His Dexter Daylight Utterly Darkened (HDDUD). Before that I performed other sections of the same large work on a French sound poetry tour with gigs at Renne, Le Havre and Paris. Some documentation of these performances can be found on pages 10-20 of 'A Companion Guide to HDDUD': see volume 5, left. I haven't yet found out, let alone remembered, anything about the other 2 performances.

When Charlie contacted me he asked about the text, HDDUD that I performed from and could they include it, along with a recording of my performance, in the publication they were going to produce? But Volumes 1,2 and 3 of HDDUD consisted of 194 A4 pages and were originally published in 1979 on two microfiche each of which held 98 A4 images. The first image on each fiche was an A4 size registration image, so there were 97 of may A4 pages on each fiche.

The first image, left, is a photocopy, slightly smaller than actual size, of microfiche one.

The problem was, I no longer have a working microfiche reader although I do have one each of the two original microfiches and a large number of A4 pages in the yellow filing cabinet which are more or less the original manuscript. Unfotunately the surviving hard copy pages don't match up completely with those copied onto the microfiche. I therefore couldn't read the original publication.

I searched the WWW and found a company that would copy my two microfiche into a pdf file, for a fee of course: see link, top left.

Charlie sent me a copy of that recording of my performance at the 12th International Sound Poetry Festival and from that I tried to identify what material from HDDUD I had performed. The only material I can identify with certainty is on page 51 of the first pdf: a section titled 'Relative Value Chart'. I am led to assume that the section of the whole work that 'Relative Value Chart' belongs to, 'Basic Formulae and Standard Procedures', pages 44-54 of the pdf file, was the material I was performing at the Festival.

This led me to what I think of as an archeological investigation into my own past work. I had no memory of the actual structure of HDDUD nor its relevance to the other materials 'A Vital Inventory' and 'A Companion Guide to HDDDUD'. At the bottom of page 53 and the top of page 54 of the first pdf of HDDUD you will find the sections making up the second image on the left.

'A Vital Inventory' is the application of Volume 2 to Volume 1 in order to construct a single complete work? Something like that!

And does Volume 3 figure in 'A Vital Inventory'?

Yes! And here is how. The second part of 'General Introduction', 'Programme For Utilizing-Out Of The Presentation', page 54 of the first pdf, third image on the left, outlines the intention.

I don't know how the black blob got onto the microfiche but it is not the only such blob, a blot on the copy book, the copy of the book … and I certainly don't remember how I applied all this to the construction of A Vital Inventory … but I certainly did … at least A Vital Inventory was produced, was somehow produced, and was written to 73 pages, 2425 lines, all handwritten … with several different ink pens, several different inks, on several different types of paper, mostly lined, but 19 unlined … and all very carefully handwritten to make reading easy …

This is not quite everything however. As far as I can see from my archive relating to HDDUD there was also to be a sixth volume called Suspended Animation. I have this in a manilla folder and it contains a large number of A4 images, of the sort interspersed thoughtout Volumes 1-3, of photocopier manipulated black and white images. For the moment I have decided to not inlude these in this WWW presenation.

Such is my attempt to digitise, document aend represent these vast interludes ...