Month: January 2023

If The Kraken Still Had Eyes

NEWLY found specimen, giant squid, eyes the size of dinner-plates.
PUPILs, slits in light, plates in the deep, always seem to watch you,
UTTER fascination, thrill for the museum-goers. What if it were alive?
BRINE? If I were in there with it? It would see me . . . it’d be the last thing I ever see.

Pictures of octopus pupils at various dilations depending on amount of light shining on pupil
Octopus pupils photograph take from Frontiers in Physiology, The Eye of the Common Octopus, at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.01637/full

Note: this one is a counter-factual allusion to China Miéville’s Kraken, in which the specimen no longer has its eyes:

Its eyes would have been twenty-three or twenty-four centimetres across,” Billy would say. People would measure with their fingers, and children opened their own eyes mimicry-wide. “Yeah, like plates. Like dinner plates.” He said it every time, every time thinking of Hans Christian Andersen’s dog. “But it’s very hard to keep eyes fresh, so they’re gone. We injected it with the same stuff that’s in the tank to stop it rotting from the inside. “It was alive when it was caught.”

Kraken, China Miéville, p8

Warm embers in old age…

SUGAR, sugar, I’d love to buy you A ROSE,
but the florist’s shut and the car is broke.
ELDER, my elderberry, there’s no KNEED;
I know ya love me, and that ain’t no joke.          

What Trees Might Recount

SUGAR sap pressure ebbing, yet bare arms stay held aloft in winter’s cold.
KNEED with branch knots, gnarled giant stands firm in time.
ELDER, awaiting springs, you watched our generations as they
AROSE, then fell. If you could spread our tales like a rustling canopy!

Tulip Mania

NERVE, you’ve gotta keep it,
HEADY times for savvy investor,
TULIP bulbs booming.
STRAP in, no way to lose..

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania, which is where the image and quote below are from:

A tulip bulb is supposed to have traded for all the above combined during the mania

Tulip mania (Dutch: tulpenmanie) was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels. The major acceleration started in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history. In many ways, the tulip mania was more of a then-unknown socio-economic phenomenon than a significant economic crisis. It had no critical influence on the prosperity of the Dutch Republic, which was one of the world’s leading economic and financial powers in the 17th century, with the highest per capita income in the world from about 1600 to about 1720. The term “tulip mania” is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values.