Hunter's Tryst - A Journal

Gresham’s Law, named after Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-1579) but observed states ‘when a...

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 11:00:00 +0100

Gresham’s Law, named after Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-1579) but observed states ‘when a government compulsorily overvalues one type of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued money will flood into circulation’ and can be explained simply as ‘bad money drives out good if their exchange rate is set by law.’
The principle had been observed before Gresham - the Muslim historian Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) noted a time in history when those in power deliberately flooded the market with copper currency, all the while growing vast hoards of gold and silver. The fact that bad money is used by preference instead of good money is also noted in the play The Frogs by Aristophanes from near the end of the 5th Century BC in Athens.

‘Oh look, a girl with a beard!’ - what someone said about me in a dream of mine last...

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 11:24:45 +0100

‘Oh look, a girl with a beard!’

- what someone said about me in a dream of mine last night. It was pretty realistic otherwise, I was wearing my favourite coat and everything.

All right then..

Dionysus - poem.

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:06:00 +0100

This is a poem that I guess is a snapshot of a slow, experimental effort towards a more positive, celebratory and trascendental way of living - and with that of thinking, seeing, writing and being.

Also this weekend I discovered my boyfriend can have multiple consecutive controllable prostate orgasms.

This poem is indecent and without dignity.

Sink,
deeper, deeper,
warm, hot, wet,
sigh, sob, shiver
writhe, lithe, alive.

once, twice,
easy,
effortless, yielding,
squeezing,
‘Seriously, D— , really?’

momentous, humble, human,
‘our souls,’
like this poem,
comes by my hand.

How Disgusting.
Do you really have nothing else to write about.

No.

So, I did actually have a look on the #diary and #journal tags on tumblr. It’s made me realise...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 15:22:00 +0100

So, I did actually have a look on the #diary and #journal tags on tumblr.

It’s made me realise all that is achieved by writing intensely depressing and introverted posts - which is what every single thing in both of the tags is - is indulgence in pointless self-dramatisation.

I have resolved to write about the more amusing aspects of things.

In other news I found some oooooold logs sent to me by one of my friends who lives in the US from when he was seducing and caring for the chasm-like emotional problems of some boy in the UK - and it basically reads like a How to Seduce Fucked Up Boys 101 for Dummies.

Well, I told myself I would do something constructive with my afternoon.

So today I looked on the #journal and #diary tags on tumblr. Now I feel like a little teacup of...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 19:20:04 +0100

So today I looked on the #journal and #diary tags on tumblr.
Now I feel like a little teacup of instability floating on an ocean of madness.

‘This is an incredibly contrived situation,’ I think to myself. I am laid in a warm bath...

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 14:39:00 +0100

‘This is an incredibly contrived situation,’ I think to myself.

I am laid in a warm bath - full of nerves.
Is he coming?
Why would he not come?

I am amused that I cannot stop this being contrived - the jilted hopeful lover mournful in the soapy water staring up at the ceiling in fear and hope.

I lit a cigarette.

Terribly contrived.

As I smoked I found myself forgiving myself trespasses and forgiving those who have trespassed against me.

Tacky tacky tacky.

Then I sink back into the water and think - ‘This too shall pass.’

Kill me.

All The Forms of Envy - Story

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 12:46:00 +0100

The mine was cool and damp. As he abseiled down the shaft he could feel every few seconds his arms and legs lurch like they were falling down into the abyss, a flash of warmth and weakness, before returning to his body. He looked down. The beam from the torch on his head did not penetrate the abyss below, it only made the walls of the shaft glisten. He could see the thin sheet of groundwater flowing and trickling in places - over crevices and outcrops - and the white limey stains it had left over the years.

As he looked he felt the biggest lurch of his limbs so far, and the biggest leaping of his heart. He looked at the taut red rope and the safety harness. He got lower and lower and had to walk against the side when the shaft bent and rotated so the rope was rising up past the light of his torch into its own abyss. Black above. Black below.

He reached the bottom. It was a slate mine - like walking in a cave of pencil lead. There was a vast chamber with a black lake in it that went into various shafts, one of which forked about 100 yards in the distance into two smaller tunnels. There was the rusted skeleton of a pulley system. He walked up to it and turned the handle and he overcame the rust and it turned nothing.

A click echoed around the mine - he turned off his light. He saw only blackness - deepest, most lustrous black - the complete absence of light. He had never seen blackness like he had seen down a mine or in a cave. He held his eyes wide open and felt the presence of the walls and the roof of the cave high above him. Slowly he bent down and picked up a stone. He threw it at the lake and the splash and the bang and the echo were all incredibly vivid and he could tell his shot had veered slightly to the right.

He took from his bag a small lamp and switched it on and by its light assembled the tripod and affixed the camera. He set the exposure time on the camera to fifteen seconds. Then he took out a powerful torch, pressed the shutter and painted the mine with light.

He felt very tired. He could not begin to say so, but his head was weary too. The key slid quietly into the lock and the door surrendered. He locked it behind him and sat on the chair in the kitchen. For a few seconds he was lost in the simple beauty of de-lacing his boots. When he was done he sat up in the chair and looked around. It was very dark and he tried to figure out what some of the items in the room were - the mysterious black orbs on the windowsill or the shapeless pile in front of the pantry.

He twisted the light switch - which was an emergency stop button he himself had wired - and saw a pile of laundry and a teapot next to a sugarbowl and a strainer full of old leaves.

Thud thud thud thud thud thud thud creak creak thud thud thud.

He told himself to fix that stair.

Creeeeeeeak.

She stirred and he told himself to oil the hinges on the door.

The sheets were cotton and they made a gentle sliding noise as he lifted them and lowered himself into bed. His side of the bed was cool but he could feel her warmth in them still a little. She stirred.

’Good evening,’ she said. He smelled like that moist, musky smell of underground. He laid on his back and looked up at the ceiling and she draped a leg and an arm on him and put her head on his shoulder.

He scratched behind her ear.

For a second it felt as if this was all that he really needed. He was thinking about the past and it felt like looking down a very long tunnel, so long it had a dizzying curvature that made you feel unsteady just being in it.
She was very sleepy - all that existed for her right now was his warm presence in the bed and her marooned upon it. But she could feel his sadness and how it mixed with hers. He could not rig a rope and descend into her, explore her, climb her or rewire her. She could not be an insurmountable challenge or a palpable risk. He had never skiied down her or ridden a raft upon her, nor fished in her or shot her, cooked her and ate her.
All she could be was a person - a warm body in the night and an ear and a shoulder.

At the same time he was thinking about the mine and the lift-shaft. What he felt right now was not the lurch of the descending lift and the rising peril. It was slow and warm like glowing coal. But it was so not the same that he could not put them together yet he felt it was not possible for them to be apart.
She had thought in circles about him and it exhausted her so she thought about herself. She did not need something to climb or trespass into. She remembered the feeling of contentedness she had that day when it started to rain in the heat of the June day just as she got up the garden path so she sat in the porch on the chair smoking and looking out at the flowers catching raindrops.
Yes, he thought to himself - this is different.
But while she was awake asking if she really was satisfied with her existence, he slept and dreamed of climbing up a suspension bridge.

And finally I feel it - the dark thing, I mean - lifting. It really is like a bell jar - it really...

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 04:29:18 +0100

And finally I feel it - the dark thing, I mean - lifting. It really is like a bell jar - it really is like being in a transparent bottle that lets you gaze out at the world as it suffocates you.
Refreshingly, for once this feels rather excessive and melodramatic to write this - because it is hard to remember in retrospect what it really feels like.

I remember how incredible everything is - and I know soon I will be spiraling upwards into unbalanced frenzy of sensation and pleasure.

Or, sometimes bipolar tendencies can be fun.

I feel it closing in and I have absolutely no idea what it is. I am hearing him talk and my chest is...

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 01:38:00 +0100

I feel it closing in and I have absolutely no idea what it is.

I am hearing him talk and my chest is burning and my head is spinning as he talks about the dreams he has about being a girl and it is all so complex and beautiful and vividly, burningly human - it is like the humanness of it all is overwhelming me and I feel humbled before the sheer vastness of the human condition and experience, the impossible extensity and intensity of human experience - and I am but one simple mind before it capable of beholding it but never reaching into it.
All these people are islands. Beautiful, beautiful islands whose shores you can never set foot on.

I feel humble and awed.
But then there is despair. The hugeness, the vastness - all of it just a vehicle for the boundlessness of human misery.
There are those more impressive and complex than me in the world and I love them and I hate myself.
It is the private colour that stains my living - that no one can be made to understood and you can talk to no one about - only describe and it is futile.

‘You are ruining it,’ he said. His voice boomed. ‘I know,’ I...

Mon, 28 May 2012 01:26:31 +0100

‘You are ruining it,’ he said. His voice boomed.
‘I know,’ I said.

‘Everything else is going just fine and the one thing that you really want to work you are ruining because you know that you might ruin it and it is too much fear and effort to figure out how to not ruin it so you are ruining it,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.

‘Why?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.

Taken while exploring Barnsley Town Hall.

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:14:13 +0100

the Clocktower

Taken while exploring Barnsley Town Hall.

Some days my skin turns yellow and it rains razor sharp emeralds.

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:58:54 +0100

Some days my skin turns yellow and it rains razor sharp emeralds.

a heart drenched in ink: Why are you sad? My fingers stroke your skin of marble as I lean in...

Tue, 22 May 2012 22:24:27 +0100

a heart drenched in ink: Why are you sad? My fingers stroke your skin of marble as I lean in...:

evanwritessometimes:

Why are you sad? My fingers stroke your skin of marble as I lean in close, our noses touching and my breath restrained as it always is (the breath from your lungs is a part of your soul, and my soul I have since forgotten how to give). Your eyes are radiant and your fingers elegant in their child-like manners, yet you look at me with disdain and worry, you look at me with the look of a soul who is heartbroken. For though I’ve forgotten, I’ve forgotten how to give away my love, my soul, my passions, you haven’t, have you? So many haven’t, and their radiant hues have since stained my skin like melted glass, burned and etched it in their own patterns, but I shake them off and I cry in my own disdain.

Yet you don’t understand true empathy, true caring, do you? You let your blood run to sing to me of your love for me, but in that you do nothing but scar me, you do exactly what has given me fear for so long. You have become what makes me tremble and sob at night. You have become the one thing neither of us dreamt you would.

Now you’re just another monster in the night, and I wonder idly if everyone will prove so. Even myself. Dry your tears and forget the shadows, because hell if I don’t need you to smile at me like you once did.

Unspeakable Things

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:53:36 +0100

We know too well when we speak -
all the doubts that lurk underneath
Sometimes we turn our bodies to the wind
like sails and sail against it
the canopy keeps us warm and dry
as we float adrift.

Two years I sunbathed on the island
slowly shrivelling
breaking open coconuts
eating their insides
and casting the shells aside.

You were the sea all around.
One day I fell in you and drowned.

I felt my body sinking
and something rising up from it
I found myself desperately drinking
water in - to quicker fill my lungs.

What do we really know about living?
- Not what side of it we are on for certain
I think I arrive at the other side -
But death has not unburdened me of anything.

What in me was rising?
when your currents were churning and I was dying
It was me slipping away
and myself sinking.

I come to floating on your surface
my mouth tastes of salt
and I am looking up at the sky.

I don’t think this entry was meant to be amusing at the time - but it is now looking...

Sun, 13 May 2012 21:22:50 +0100

I don’t think this entry was meant to be amusing at the time - but it is now looking back.

When he sat down I noticed he carried himself like a girl. Pseudo-psychoanalyst cogs whirred, and then I had him down as a psychological eunuch. He asked me for some MDMA and I realised I hadn’t even said a word to him and was already speculating about who or what had castrated him in his mind. I gave him a line and then I gave him a line.

braydenxwhite: Her kiss was soft and wet, and gentle I loved it

Sun, 13 May 2012 18:39:26 +0100

braydenxwhite:

Her kiss was soft and wet, and gentle

I loved it

'On the Perception of Incongruity'

Sun, 13 May 2012 12:46:51 +0100

'On the Perception of Incongruity':

‘This whole thing turns everyday ideas about how perception works upside down. Traditionally, perception is supposed to work something like this:
1. Data from the external world reaches sense organs.
2. Sense organs send data to brain.
3. Brain looks at data and sees what is in external world.

This experiment would indicate that the process is more like:

1. Data from external world reaches sense organs
2. Sense organs send data to proper sensory center of brain.
3. Sensory center molds data to fit known patterns and sends altered data to higher-level decision-making areas of brain.

‘If you want to take it one step further, the experiment can be viewed as proof that what we see is not primarily determined by the nature of the external world, but rather by what we expect to see. More accurately, it’s evidence that the basic perceptual machinery of the human mind is made to look for patterns, and more importantly, when reality does not fit a deeply-ingrained pattern, our perception of reality may be warped by our own mind to fit with the pattern anyhow. And if you’re really extreme, you can take it even further and say that it’s empirical evidence that reality is, to some degree at least, subjective.’

The Fisherman's Daughter

Sun, 13 May 2012 12:01:00 +0100

The sun was going down. It sank into the green foamy sea and melted into it a corona of orange. The bay was a half-moon of brown rocks and a grey pebble beach and scrub scorched yellow-white. The land rose promptly up from the sea to a hill that made the bay an ampitheatre. The shadows of the weeds and grasses were already up the hill.
I was far from anywhere - the fishing boat that was being moored to a quay in the bay belonged to the owner of the land. It was Saturday, so he was fishing for his family or for a feast. As his crew finished with the ropes, an austere old woman in a white coat and broad hat rounded the crest of the bay on the path and her children followed behind. The rising lilt of fast Spanish came up the hill.

And then an old man - about sixty and with the oily skin of an old olive and a thick black beard like Robinson Crusoe, in grey trousers and a loose cotton shirt, carrying a small easel under his arm, came behind them - followed by a younger man who could have been his grandson.

The figures were small and their movements were faint and imperceptible. There was not enough detail. They all seemed to flow among each other - like they were dancing. The father was bounding backwards and forwards on deck and the crates of lobsters passed to the mother and children made them step, turn, hand them over and step-turn again. The boxes flowed into the back of the car - which had been there waiting for the father to begin with.
The old man reached them and raised one arm into the air. Then everyone’s movements were hesitant and stumbling. The father stood prone holding a lobster -box on the side of the deck, and the mother left the formation to pick it up. She walked to the car with it. Her children stopped moving.

Then the old man and his grandson walked away from the quay and the concrete platform it led to. They stumbled up the scrub until they reached a point I had not noticed - a flat outcrop big enough for two people to sit on. They unfolded their camp chairs. The old man set out his easel. He got up to look out at the bay and at the sea - then started to mix paint. His grandson got up and laid back on the grass, thinking. Then he started to lazily play the flute.

The fisherfamily were dancing again, this time around a coarse blue rope net - them swaying and it pulling and catching and resisting. The father, who had always been shouting, was now yelling loudly. He threw his hand out pointing at his daughter. Everyone else stopped. The father stooped to repair the net.
She broke formation and she was soon dancing up the hill, then clearly walking, then clearly smiling at the painter’s grandson. As she motioned to sit down, he stood up and stopped playing. I looked to see what the painter did. He only glanced because that is all the old and the wise need to do to see.
There was more Spanish like a song. The girl would lean back on her heels and raise her head to the man so you could see her neck - and then later she would be resting on her toes and swiveling, looking at the man with her head to the left with a fixed gaze, and then to the right - then brushing her hair.
The more the man stayed still, the more her body moved.

The dance of the fisher-family was drawing to a close - it was a slow procession of boxes back and forth, stepping with the heel and the toe - their bodies refracting in the hot air shimmering like a liquid. A large wave came in and the boat knocked hard against the quay. The sound of a column splintering echoed around the bay. The girl and the man looked and the painter glanced. He had painted the fishing boat as a rowing boat tended by one elderly Basque. He was smiling.

’Papa! Papa!’

The girl began to run down the hill. The man waited to follow her. The father was really dancing now - he would throw his arms out at his wife and give a wailing cry, and turn and look at the quay collapsed a little at once side and throw out his hands, and then throw them up, and then piroheutte on one foot, amble shoulders straight and head high to his younger children huddled in a row and accuse them all with a sweep of one hand. He kicked the car.

The girl tripped over the edge of the concrete platform. The father wailed again even louder and looked up at the sky. The man leaned from behind and plucked her up from under the shoulders as the father was striding towards her, shoulders bent, arm straight and palm dead.
He stopped short. His whole reason for moving had gone and so was his flow. His rage had simmered down to frustration.

He yelled and pointed to the path. He yelled again at the old man - who then sombrely began to fold up his easel. He drew close to the man - as close as he dare, which was not very close and pointed one last time, a triumphant thrust to the dirt path. As he turned towards the car, so did everyone. The girl was crying. The man had straight shoulders and turned to walk back up the hill to help his grandfather.

explorans: In his second year of neuroscience grad school, Greg...

Sat, 12 May 2012 18:17:15 +0100

explorans:

In his second year of neuroscience grad school, Greg Dunn was moonlighting with a different kind of experiment: blowing ink across pieces of paper. The neuron-like pattern it formed was instantly recognizable to him as a neuroscientist. “Ink spreads because it wants to go in the direction of less resistance, and that’s probably also the case of when branches grow or neurons grow,” he says. “The reason the technique works really well is because it’s directly related to how neurons are actually behaving.”

Dunn calls this the “fractal solution to the universe,” which he sees as the “fundamental beauty of nature.” He’s fascinated that this branching pattern holds true across orders of magnitude, whether that’s nanometers for neurons, centimeters for ink, or meters for a tree branch.

Since graduating with his PhD last fall, Dunn has continued to spend his days with neurons—big, golden ones ten thousand times the size of neurons in your brain. The former University of Pennsylvania grad student now creates paintings of neurons for a living.

Maurice Sendak. “I don’t believe in children. I...

Fri, 11 May 2012 19:32:27 +0100

Maurice Sendak.

“I don’t believe in children. I don’t believe in childhood. I don’t believe that there’s a demarcation: ‘oh, you mustn’t tell them that. You mustn’t tell them that.’ You can tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it’s true. If it’s true, you tell them.”

“It’s sublime—to just go into another room and—make pictures. It’s magic time, where all your weaknesses of character and blemishes of personality and whatever else torments you fades away; it just doesn’t matter.”

“You’re doing the one thing you want to do, and you do it well, and you know you do it well, and—you’re happy.”

“I think what I’ve offered is different. Not because I drew better than anybody or wrote better than anybody, but because I was more honest than anybody.”

“I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You’re going to trip over that for a good part of your life.”

“I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more.”

“Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess that’s where my heart is.”

“There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”