21st July 2025
Some observations on the allure of the Sea, this quality being found in its expanse and unknowability, together with an episode of 16th century Piracy
Lately, I shared a reading of a chapter from Moby Dick about the cultural significance and horror of whiteness. While the novel is captivating in part because of the unrelenting intensity of Melville’s style, I think its effect also owes much to its nautical setting. In the same way that Melville describes whiteness as awful (read: awe-full) because of its void-like emptiness, so the sea — vast, amorphous, uninhabitable — is as terrifying as it is mesmerising. Thus, Melville also writes:
We know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one … forever and forever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder [man], and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make … Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
7th July 2025
A reading from Herman Melville’s masterwork, containing a discourse on the paradoxical purity and terror of Whiteness
Having recently described some historical attempts to standardise colour vocabulary, I was put in mind of a favourite passage from a favourite novel — a chapter from Moby Dick which discusses the awful significance of the whale being white — which I read in the video below (the original text is also included beneath).
30th June 2025
An account of various Colour Systems, some long abandoned, interspersed with remarks on problems of Perception and Language
Previous observations on the language of botany introduced me to the word ‘glaucous’: generally defined as a dull or pale grey-blue or grey-green, the word is not usually seen outside of biology, where it describes all manner of flowers, fruits and vegetables (think especially of the glistening appearance of wine grapes or unwashed red cabbage), as well as animals like the glaucous macaw and the glaucous gull (for its grey wings). In the act of writing this, I also realise that my living room is glaucous, for I painted it a soft green which was impressionistically called feathers of a dove.
‘Glaucous’ is particularly common in ornithology, in fact, as in 1886 Robert Ridgway published A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists, in which he promoted the use of the word for the precise description of birds. By the time of his 1912 Color Standards and Color Nomenclature, which had much larger ambitions to standardise all colour terminology, he rather hysterically laid claim to having named 1,115 distinct colours, 20 of them glaucous shades. This is how he stated the motivation for his work:
21st June 2025
Some observations on the poetical language of Botany, with a consideration of the striking appearance and utility of Eryngium, the Sea Holly
In a competition for the field of study with the most beautiful jargon, botany would surely be crowned the winner. Physics is too everyman with its ‘big bangs’ and ‘black holes’, philosophy is too indulgent, using prima facie and ceteris paribus everywhere sine causa, and while anatomy has an enchanting, spell-book quality (corpus callosum!), its phrases spin out in a never-ending fractal that reads like an engineering manual (“the gigantocellular reticular nucleus is the efferent medial zone of the reticular formation of the caudal pons and rostral medulla oblongata”). Botany, meanwhile, stands out as something special: to the outsider, it is utterly senseless, yet somehow tuneful and full of poetry.
4th June 2025
A description of the purpose of the website Diary, such as this can be remarked upon without undermining the very same
The reader may share a feeling with me that it seems prudent to keep a diary, though, in my case, I have never been able to settle upon a theme for such a thing, for the most obvious one — myself — holds little interest for me (which is not to say that I do not ruminate or introspect, for I do these in excess, but rather that I should not like to reify such habits by sitting down to them with pen and paper).
But the perceptive reader will have concluded that I must have devised an answer to this conundrum, for here before them is a diary entry. However, I cannot reveal my answer except circumscriptively, by relating how I was inspired by Freud’s account of free association in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899):