Preamble

On the way to Cambridge Central Library (from whence I write), a couple of months ago, I spotted – Ah! Joyous Vision – one of my eternally invaluable friends, Sparrow, who was loitering in Glisson Road. I have known and loved Sparrow for over forty years – how time soars away on its mournful wing. We had a fair old converse about the sound recordings that had come into my possession, of speech and song ‘uttered’ by objects from Cambridge museums (I know this already sounds far fetched, but all will be explained). Sparrow offered to help me with my attempts to decipher the meaning of the recordings. It was he who suggested I write a blog to do so and said he would get our other friends involved.

Sparrow also suggested I upload the sound recordings – which I will call ‘oracles’ – so that anybody can take them to the museums, in order to listen to them in the presence of the objects themselves, new-creating their original utterance. Sparrow’s friends, Paul Rooney and Sergio Briars, have helped me with this file uploading and with other technical issues. Think of the oracles as audio-guides to the objects from whence they were uttered. With an awareness, though, that their guiding takes us through distinctly oblique, nocturnal realms.

The full length of my blog will be stretched over seven posts largely because computer access is limited to two hours at a time at the library here. I pray that my pan-blog, which will hopefully ebulliently flow from the content of the oracles, will figure a story that will at least throw a little dim light on the oracle’s tenebrous mysteries, and will weave a narrative that can return us, I hope, to life itself.