The PS Inspiration Thread

Canto XII from The Heights of Macchu Picchu
by
Pablo Neruda

Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays--
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouths.

Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.

And give me silence, give me water, hope.
Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.
Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.
Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.
Speak through my speech, and through my blood.

"Wolf is the Grand Teacher. Wolf is the sage, who after many winters upon the sacred path and seeking the ways of wisdom, returns to share new knowledge with the tribe. Wolf is both the radical and the traditional in the same breath. When the Wolf walks by you-you will remember."
-Robert Ghost Wolf

"I think it was then that I told him truly why I was not on his side: Because the Good was more of an adventure."
-Roberto Calasso, Ruins of Kasch

"The black clouds I'm hanging
This anchor I'm dragging
The sails of memory rip open in silence
We cut through the lowlands
All hands through the salt lands
The white caps of memory
Confusing and violent

I had a dream last night
And when I opened up my eyes
Your shoulder blade your spine
Were shorelines in the moon light
New worlds for the weary
New lands for the living
I could make it if I tried
I closed my eyes I kept on swimming"

-Change of Time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJIFL34aTss

I am the voice of the voiceless;
Through me the dumb shall speak,
Till the deaf world’s ears be made to hear
The wrongs of the wordless weak.
And I am my brother’s keeper,
And I will fight his fight;
And speak the word for beast and bird
Till the world shall set things right.
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Cloud Atlas Trailer

UN-$!$!$@#@#-ing-BELIEVABLY GORGEOUS:

http://io9.com/5929189/first-6+minute-trailer-for-cloud-atlas-is-simply-...

Any sunset, look at him: standing there,
like between his legs there's a horse
somehow, on either side of it a saddlebag
of loss, a pack of sorrow, and him Kid
Compromise his very own shoot-'em-up,
'tilt to the brim of his hat self, smirk to match,
all-for-love-if-it's-gotta-come-to-that half
swagger,
half unintentional, I think, sashay.

The silver spurs at his ankles where maybe
the wings would be, if the gods still existed,
catch the light, lose it, as he stands in place,
scraping the dirt with his boots: lines, circles
that stop short, shapes that mean nothing—
no bull, not like that, but scraping shyly, like
a man who's forgotten that part of himself,
keeps forgetting, because what the fuck?

As he takes his hat off; as he lifts his head up
like if right now he could be any animal he'd
choose coyote; as all the usual sunset colors
break over his face,
he starts up singing again,
same as every night, same song: loneliness
by starlight, miles to go, lay me down by
the cool etc.—that kind of song, the kind
you'll have heard before, sure, somewhere,
but where was that,
the singer turning this
and that way, as if watching the song itself—
—the words to the song—leave him, as he
lets each go, the wind carrying most of it,
some of the words, falling, settling into
instead that larger darkness, where the smaller

darknesses that our lives were lie softly down.

"Riding Westward" by Carl Phillips

Whoah. Great find Dalmosh!

Apparently, what follows is an untitled piece by Genevieve Valentine: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/valentine_11_10/

After it was over, they pulled her from the sea.

It is impossible, from the ground, to look at a star....

"It’s not more than a few hundred paces. But as he draws closer, he sees his error. It’s not a dwelling, destroyed or otherwise.

It’s a signpost.

A signpost made from some hammered dark alloy he doesn’t recognize, four fingers forked away from one another at right angles. The whole assembly is canted slightly downward out of true and stands behind a small mound in the tufted marsh grass terrain. The inscription on the pointers is illegible, scoured down by salt-sea winds and time, but he thinks the lettering looks like old Myrlic.

There’s a gauzy wrap of cobwebs spun down from the top and outward like some diaphanous triangle of sail run up the signpost’s mast. Marsh spiders hang in the gray midst of it, fist-sized and smaller, motionless, tending the strands with long poised forelegs. Ringil feels a sympathetic stab in his belly where the wound is …

It won’t kill you, hero.

Clicking, crow-rasp, indrawn breath of a voice.

Another stab in the belly as he realizes that what he’s taken for a mound is in fact something sat at the base of the signpost, something cowled and swathed in dark rags and so hunched and bent over that he can’t believe it just spoke.

Then it lifts its head and looks at him.

Later, he will be unable to remember exactly what it looked like under the cowl. He’ll recall only the way he steels up and looks back into the—what color were they? what shape? how many of them?—unblinking eyes."
-Richard Morgan, The Cold Commands

Passed on from a buddy of mine -> So this guy makes all kinds of interesting weapons, thought y'all might get a kick of hit.

His Machete Crossbow:
http://www.youtube.c...&feature=relmfu

Full Auto: Gatling Slingshot
http://www.youtube.c...&feature=relmfu

Slingshot canon:
http://www.youtube.c...&feature=relmfu

Pump Action slingshot crossbow:
http://www.youtube.c...&feature=relmfu

"One way or another, the world will go on being the place of epiphanies."
-Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods

Illustrations depicting the Eddas: http://dustycandy.deviantart.com/gallery/

"I'd heard it said that fairies have no souls."
"Then I do ache, and bleed, and smart elsewhere; still, call it a soul for it is solely mine."
-Gaiman, World's End

My boots left no trace whatsoever on the slick blue-white ice. A few more steps and I was finally standing at the edge, walking cautiously onto the wide shelf formed by an angular chaos block jutting a few meters out over the pit. The constant steam had long since worn the edges of the block smooth. Eventually, this block would melt free, undercut by ages of heat and water vapor, and pitch into the churning abyss far below. I took a deep breath of the dry, stale air inside my helmet and peered into the throat of Sakpata.

“Tell me, what the hell did we expect to find out there, Deet?” Ronnie asked me.

“What did we think it would be? Little grey men with answers to all the mysteries of the universe, free for the asking? A few benign extremophiles clinging stubbornly to the bottom of an otherwise lifeless sea? I can’t remember anymore. I try, but I can’t. I lie awake at night trying to remember.”

“I don’t think it much matters,” I told her, and she started crying again.

“It was waiting for us, Deet,” she sobbed. “It was waiting for us all along, a hundred million [freaking] years alone out there in the dark. It knew we’d come, sooner or later.”

Kiernan, Caitlin R. Two Worlds and In Between

The raw red thing crouched somewhere at the other side of the cellar makes a soft, wet sound and strikes a match to light the hurricane lamp gripped in the long fingers of its left hand. Dancy closes her eyes, because the angel has warned her never to look at its face until after it puts on one of the skins hanging from the rusted steel hooks set into the ceiling of the cellar.

All those blind and shriveled hides like deflated people, deflated animals, and it has promised Dancy that some day very soon she’ll hang there, too, one more hollow face, one more mask for it to wear.

Kiernan, Caitlin R. (2011-10-23). Two Worlds and In Between

"We kept our god under the sink, in an old aquarium, so it wouldn't spill its web all over the house. We didn't tell you because you were so curious. Our daughter: you are like an otter, or a hummingbird. How would you stand against such a monster as our god?

We took you to the shore, and watched you play in the surf. You don't notice how special you are, but everything else in the whole world does. The salty ocean spray always falls toward you. When the sun is out, its beams always find you, the heavy center, the pollen-coated middle; you are always so much brighter than everything around you.

We put you to bed and opened the cabinet under the sink, careful not to wake you or upset our god. Did you know spiders can hiss? Well, not all of them, but this one did. You turned in your bed, dreaming of the blue and red crabs that hide in the piles of rock at the beach. You call them "jellies," and only you know why.

We lit candles around the spider's glass. It reared up against the flame, and in the candlelight it truly looked like a monster.

We asked for good health, for good fortune. We opened the top and tossed in mealworms and cold crickets. The bugs rained down on the spider's fat body, and it turned on them in a rage. While it ate, while its mouth made dark, wet sounds, we broke down:

Be kind to our daughter, we pled. Be easy on her. We love her so much. We loved our children before her, but your poison stopped their hearts, and we did not watch while you wrapped them in your sticky web that smelled like honey, filled our house with the scent of flowers for months while you feasted, hiding the rotting stench. Each child was sicker and sadder than the last, hearing you eat while in the womb, knowing what was in store for them...."

-Sean Markey, The Spider in You: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2009/20090323/spider-f.shtml

"Noir… It is the name of an ancient fate. Two maidens who govern death. The peace of the newly born, their black hands protect."
-Noir

Also, music is goodies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpXpbrJTo2E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O3-ohtxxsw&feature=related

2nd one's title and lyrics:

Noir Original SoundTrack
Canta per me

canta per me ne addio
quel dolce suono
de' passati giorni
mi sempre rammenta

la vita dell'amore
dilette del cor mio
o felice, tu anima mia
canta addagio...

tempra la cetra e canta
il inno di morte
a noi si schiude il ciel
volano al raggio

la vita dell'amore
dilette del cor mio
o felice, tu anima mia
canta addio...

TRANSALATION

Sing for me farewell
that sweet sound
of the past days
it always remember me

the life of the love
beloveds of my heart
oh happy, you my soul
sing slowly...

strenghten your lyre and sing
the hymn of death
the sky opens to us
they fly to the ray

the life of the love
beloveds of my heart
oh happy, you my soul
sing farewell...

levels of Inception:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37614275@N00/4937227405/

Awesome, thanks for that atomicb!

=-=-=

http://esper.tiddlyspot.com/

"Planarversity 101: So You Want to Be a Hero?

Dungeons & Dragons meets academia! Plumes & Parchments is a Dungeons & Dragons 4E campaign centering around the Planarversity, a school for heroes.

The prestigious private institution of higher learning was founded in the famed city of Sigil, and over the past century since its founding, has spread to the most distant corners of the known worlds. The Planarversity exists to uncover and unify the knowledge of the planes. As a secondary function, the Planarversity gathers the brightest exemplars from the each world to nurture, educate and polish into heroic examples of its ideals."

"Who you are is not a weakness, but rather will be the strength that you wield..the world doesn't just get better, it's the individuals of the world that make it get better..."
-Hal Duncan's It Gets Better Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpiWXBDgS9k&feature=player_embedded

"In the centre of Fedora, that grey stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.

The building with the globes is now Fedora's museum: every inhabitant visits it, chooses the city that corresponds to his desires, contemplates it, imagining his reflection in the medusa pond that would have collected the waters of the canal (if it had not been dried up), the view from the high canopied box along the avenue reserved for elephants (now banished from the city), the fun of sliding down the spiral, twisting minaret (which never found a pedestal from which to rise).

On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for the big, stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer."
-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities