The PS Inspiration Thread

“Day and night, constantly erupting, the child Titania floats on her vast maternal rivers.

She comes from mythologies. Still all aquiver from being born. She rolls over on me, her new bed, the last one, she murmurs between my reeds: “my mire, my sacred mire.”

I saw you, huge heavy-thighed statue, three thousand years ago in Crete, at dawn, your gaze carved out of night by the coming day, your mouth drawn out of silence by a brilliant smile, I saw you recumbent but alive, dreaming at the edge of wakening’s brilliance, a very naked goddess.

I heard the sound of sobbing in your breast, sobs of wonder, because what a birth it is to awaken! You inhabit a primitive castle, lined with blood satin. An archaic statue with a powerful body, that has scarcely come out of the earth, with legs still so earthly, with colossal legs, with a broad, majestic neck, but whose head already partakes of the world of great birds.

I and my bloods, we want to come into your castle, we want to stay in every room, every corner, lick every stone.”

- The Book of Promethea by Helene Cixous (translated by Betsy Wing)

The dead man’s death gives us the essential primitive experience, access to the other world, which is not without warning or noise but which is without the loss of our birthplace. So it gives us everything, it gives us the end of the world; to be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality we carry. We don’t know we’re alive as long as we haven’t encountered death: these are banalities that have
been erased. And it is an act of grace.
”
— Helene Cixous

Interesni Kazki: http://interesnikazki.blogspot.com/

Geese Come as Guests

I dream I have found the last of him. In the deep river currents where no reeds grow it floated like an abandoned cradle. I am ready now, to take the river into me. I do not want to, but now there can be no more delays, and I can see the colors of the water changing. I am draped in his body—intestines, blood, leg, clavicle, cheek, eyes, jaw, scalp, hands, skin, spleen, heart, skull. I am dressed for the ball, for a second wedding, for the insensate ritual of taking my dream-husband’s corpse into myself.

I know what is coming, what the river will leave in me like sandy deposits in the delta. I am resigned, I want it done. I want to leave it on the banks and never think on it again. The hawk-headed child looms large in my vision. I can feel its feathers already prickling the walls of my womb.

I stifle revulsion as I clean the last of the dream-husband’s organs in the cool river, which has inundated the valley and given life to the amaranth crops. I am the body of the sky, and I will give birth to light from light. I cannot tell if it is still a dream. If the child I will take from his mute body will be a dream-son or if he will be real. I am the amaranth, and I am the river. I hold the last of him in my hands, mottled gray and shot with hardened blood. And on its length is written:

This is the Book of Dreams.

Valente, Catherynne M. (2011-11-06). Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels (Kindle Locations 2650-2660). Wyrm Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Jesse Balmer:

David Ho: http://www.davidho.com/

He sings of the vast void and of seeds, of shatterings and scatterings and gatherings, of seeds of earth and air and sea and flickerings of flecks, the flash, the flux of fire. He sings of the beginnings of all things in these original forms of force, and how a young curved world took shape, unfurled its involutions and emerged in evolution, revelation of its own course; how its hard crust sealed eternal nevers in the deep blue-black of ocean and the world took form, little by little, in ephemera; of the awestruck earth watching a newborn sunrise shining, and the showers of the rainfall out of clouds high in the sky; of the time when forests first began to spring, and of the living creatures roaming, far and wide, over the unknown and unknowing wilderness of hills.

He sings of the first little gifts of the uncultivated earth: foxgloves in every dell, smiling acanthus mingled with the gypsy lilies, and wild ivy wandering everywhere; the goats that wander home unherded, udders stretched with milk; the oxen with no fear of any lion, not for all his might; and of our very cradles flowering with soft caressing blossoms; of the snake perished among the poisonous plants, and perfumes of azure breathing from every hedge. He sings of the marvel of a maiden gathering the golden fruit of hesperidium; he sings rings of moss-bound bitter bark around the alder sisters of a photon, brings them springing from the ground to tower tall as poplars.

He sings how, as the gulls strayed by permissive streams, one of the sisters of the music led him up into the mountains of the aeons, how the choir of the sun rose up before him; how a shepherd singer of divine lines, hair entwined with blossoms and bitter parsley, spoke to him: – These pipes of reeds you see – take them. The music gives them to you, just as once it gave them to a scarred old man to rhyme, to draw down ash trees rooted deep in time, down from the hills. With these, tell of the birth of the grinning forest, pride of all the groves of Apple.

He sings of after times, when we’ve all learned at last to read the praise of heroes and ancestor’s deeds and know what manhood is, of how the corn will flood the fields with golden, shimmering grain, the reddening grape hang heavy on untended vines, and solid oak will seep with sap that is part honey and part dew.

Duncan, Hal (2011-08-11). Vellum (The Book of All Hours) (pp. 232-233). Macmillan Publishers UK. Kindle Edition.

http://agustincroxatto.blogspot.com/

I think I must have nearly fallen asleep, when suddenly my flesh sparked and shivered, and a thing began to coalesce out of the hematite air. I could not, at first, see anything at all but a length of deeper black amid the blackness. Its edges seemed to shimmer with light, a heat lightning crisping the edges of a shape, glowing like an afterimage. I was afraid, granddaughter, of course I was afraid.

I cowered into the curve of the cavern, shaking like a newborn fawn. At length I perceived a long head and flowing hair, luminous eyes round as moons. It seemed a part of the stone, a part of the night, a part of nothing I had ever come near to knowing. My eyes rolled in my head and sweat slicked my skin. My heart beat so fast I felt as though I had swallowed a hummingbird.

Valente, Catherynne. The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden (Kindle Locations 515-520). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

"this is okay. i can roll with it.
my mind runs out across the universe.
finds its level.
i'm not leaving.
i'm -- arriving.
everywhere at once.

and whatever else it might be its not the end.
it doesn't feel like death.
unless a rock pool dies, when a wave breaks over it.
or warm breath dies as it fades --
and makes its peace with the air."
-M.Carey, 'Eve'

"If she licks the wallpaper, will anyone notice?

The taste of Mrs. Wull’s wallpaper has been a long-standing question in Rosa’s mind. It’s the vibrant red of prickly pear preserves, striped with veins of minty green. When she was small, she imagined it tasting like figs crossed with raspberries, sweet and sappy and juicy-tart all at the same time. Now that she’s older and supposedly wiser, she knows that wallpaper, no matter how colorful or tempting, is just wallpaper, dust-flavored and dry as a moth’s wing rasping across your disappointed tongue. Saint Nicholas isn’t real, true love is a lie, and the only thing that won’t let you down in the world is its ability to let you down. The past few weeks have been, if nothing else, something of a learning experience in that regard.

Rosa knows all of this, but it doesn’t stop the stubborn five-year-old part of her from wanting to try. Feeling a little ridiculous, she sidles over to a corner, extends the tip of her tongue, and gives the wallpaper a tentative swipe. She braces for the bitterness of boiled glue, the chemical tang of several generations of mothballs and kerosene smoke. She prepares for life’s bad taste in her mouth, inevitable as wrinkles or scorpions in the kitchen...."

-Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/her-words-like-hunting-vixens-...

Great Stuff Wicke, wondering if HTML img tags will help:

http://keiththompsonart.com/images/full/minstrel.jpg

http://keiththompsonart.com/images/full/tower.jpg

http://keiththompsonart.com/images/full/slavepits.jpg

edit: Guess not, looks like linking might be forbidden.

edit 2: hmmm, even just having the links like that doesn't work.

When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, "This? I've done this before." She says I have old eyes.

When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, "Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby."

And yet, for someone who's apparently done this already, I still haven't figured anything out yet....
-Sarah Kay

“It lurks before us, in the everyday. It’s the boss of all the things hidden in plain sight. Terrible things, they are. Appalling things. Just almost in reach. Brazen and invisible.

It caught my glances. It can move through whatever I see.

For most people it’s just chance, isn’t it? What shapes they see in a tangle of wire. There’s a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear. But now . . . the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me. It can thrust itself forward. It makes me see it. It’s found its way through. To me. Through what I see. I opened a door into my perception.”

She sounded frozen with terror. I was not equipped for that kind of adult fear, and my mouth worked silently for something to say.

Unknown. Looking for Jake, By China Mieville (Kindle Locations 1329-1335).

Fulvio di Piazza: http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/fulvio-di-piazzaashes-to-ashes

Some time later he sees her again. She had somehow been caught naked far off down the beach, and was running awkwardly back to the house over the uneven ground, her pale arms raised a little like wings, her hair not dishevilled at all but still pinned up neatly. She is uncanny without her clothes, like a figure in a painting. He is struck by the wind from her body, and it evokes in him a ghostly love, not for her, but for everything.

“I love,” he says flatly, his lips not far from the floor. The words are soaked up by the wood and deadened. “I love,” complete in the intransitive, like “I go.” He can’t hear himself say it. If he could have heard it, he would have turned himself into a cartoon again.

Cisco, Michael (2011-04-14). The Great Lover (Kindle Locations 580-587). Chomu Press. Kindle Edition.

Heh, that other world is someone's home country.

Great photos though, I love the colors and architecture!

Oriol Angrill: http://www.oriolangrill.com/

http://oriol.byethost15.com/imatges/obres/Campanella%20wildlife%20HD%20w...

"You cannot hear a poem without it changing you," she told me. "They heard it, and it colonized them. It inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives. Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known."

- How to Talk to Girls at Parties: http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Short_Stories/How_To_Talk_To_Girl...

The outcome of these little perceptions is therefore more efficacious than one would think. They form that je ne sais quoi, those inclinations, those images of the qualities of the senses, clear as a whole, but confused in their parts; those impressions that surrounding bodies make on us, and that embody infinity; the bond that every living being has with the rest of the universe.

One may even say that as a consequence of these little perceptions the present is pregnant with the future and laden with the past, which plots all (sympnoia panta, as Hippocrates put it), and that in the smallest of substances penetrating eyes like those of God might read all the concatenation of the thigns of the universe.
-GW Liebniz

"There's a ghost on the horizon
When I go to bed
How can I fall asleep at night
How will I rest my head

Oh I'm scared of the middle place
Between light and nowhere
I don't want to be the one
Left in there, left in there

There's a man on the horizon
Wish that I'd go to bed
If I fall to his feet tonight
Will allow rest my head

So here's hoping I will not drown
Or paralyze in light
And godsend I don't want to go
To the seal's watershed"
-Hope There's Someone, Anthony and the Johnsons: http://www.youtube.c...h?v=tykT7e71DNU

You, God, who live next door–
If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking–
this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.
I know you’re all alone in that room.
If you should be thirsty, there’s no one
to get you a glass of water.
I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!
I’m right here.
As it happens, the wall between us
is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry
from one of us
break it down? It would crumble
easily,
it would barely make a sound.

From Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy