The PS Inspiration Thread

Good find Unsung, that looks like an awesome blog!

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Taborda's Dark Mysticism:

http://www.juxtapoz.com/Illustration/tabordas-dark-mysticism

“Frodo indeed ‘failed’ as a hero, as conceived by simple minds: he did not endure to the end; he gave in, ratted. I do not say ‘simple minds’ with contempt: they often see with clarity the simple truth and the absolute ideal to which effort must be directed, even if it is unattainable. Their weakness, however, is twofold. They do not perceive the complexity of any given situation in Time, in which an absolute ideal is enmeshed. They tend to forget that strange element in the World that we call Pity or Mercy…”

“I do not think that Frodo’s was a moral failure. At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum – impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted. Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. His humility (with which he began) and his sufferings were justly rewarded by the highest honour; and his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed.”

“Frodo undertook his quest out of love – to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could; and also in complete humility, acknowledging that he was wholly inadequate to the task. His real contract was only to do what he could, to try to find a way, and to go as far on the road as his strength of mind and body allowed. He did that.”

“That appears to have been the judgement of Gandalf and Aragorn and of all who learned the full story of his journey. Certainly nothing would be concealed by Frodo! But what Frodo himself felt about the events is quite another matter. He appears at first to have had no sense of guilt… But then he thought he had given his life in sacrifice: he expected to die very soon. But he did not, and one can observe the disquiet growing in him… Slowly he fades ‘out of the picture’, saying and doing less and less. …when his dark times came upon him… it was not only nightmare memories of past horrors that afflicted him, but also un-reasoning self-reproach: he saw himself all that he had done as a broken failure.”
- Letters of JRR Tolkien, no. 246

“Little girl,” he said, “I would have killed you seven times over, each death a death more vile. Humanity is my plaything no longer, only a toy for those that are mine under the earth. But you, you are her child. You are hers. You are Dunizel. Not mine. Never mine. Though I made you to be my curse upon the world. Though I made you to be myself. You are Dunizel, that I loved, Dunizel who was the moon and sun together. Your mother’s daughter. I could no more hurt you than I would tear the stars from the sky.”

When she stood by him, Azhrarn kneeled before her on the ground. He bowed his head, and she set her hands upon it, upon that midnight ocean of hair, that case of ivory bone beneath that held the firmament of his brain.

“Dear Father,” said the crone, “do not weep.”

He said,”That is the bane on me. I cannot.”

-Tanith Lee, Delirium's Mistress

http://yukoart.com/

Great pics!

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'Crowds are attractive because of their egalitarian promise. The mob is a form of utopia. Justice arrives now, to right what has for too long been wrong with the world. As Elias Canetti wrote in his masterful psychological study, Crowds and Power, "All who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal." In this sudden equality is part of the appeal of a lynching. But, it is a spurious appeal. As Canetti says of the equality that mobs feel, "it is based on an illusion; the people who suddenly feel equal have not really become equal; nor will they feel equal forever.'
-Teju Cole

Boy_Wonder's photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joel_r/

Archie The RedCat:

http://archie-the-redcat.deviantart.com/gallery/

“Wishes of one's old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes. Even when one finds oneself in Fairyland and not at home at all, it is not always so easy to remember to catch the world in it's changing and change with it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

"Bastard's Song" by Cynthia Huntington

Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. 4 On the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloths. 5 No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to do any of these things for you. Rather, you were thrown out into the open field, for on the day you were born you were despised. 6 " 'Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, "Live!"

-Ezekiel 13, 3-6

My mother was a Hittite and my father an Amorite.
My foster uncle was an albatross
and his brother-in-law ran a gambling joint in Altoona.
My cousins were stockbrokers in Scottsdale before the crash.
I was sold to strangers for a bag of wheat
and wandered the roads and the mountain passes
like a dark wind, touching and picking up
whatever came into my hands. I will stay alone many days
until I meet up once more with the men I knew in my youth:
men from Syracuse, men from Toledo,
men from Odessa and Scranton and New Alexandria,
and all those men from Assyria. They will assail me
and pinch my nipples, and pull up my skirt,
and make me pure with suffering.

My mother was a prophet and a priestess of suffering.
She walked the hospital corridors in her white robe
wringing the bones of her hands. My half-sister was a mudfish,
whispering warnings in the reeds of the marsh.
My mother was a whore, a midget, a human sacrifice,
and a candle guttering at the top of a stair. My father
came from another world that called him back,
and swallowed him like Saturn, like time,
like a world without oxygen, or a slow disease.
He was imprisoned in a tree by a sorceress
one hundred years; he rode with an army on black horses
that pounded the earth and raised dust in the mouths of settlers,
and when he died his papers were taken away and burned.
He then was drowned at sea.

My grandmother lived to ninety-seven years
through cunning and fornication,
but never came to visit or to claim me.
I was found beneath a tree by a herd of wildebeests
who fed me on salt water and tears of the dead.
I endured innumerable blows inflicted by hypocrites.
I lay cast out on the ground. No one
pitied me or looked on me with kindness.
A woman bore me and consented to have me killed.
I believe I have a human soul.
My name is Sorrow. I fell into the earth like a seed
and grew like the grass of the fields
and I am alive today by no one's grace or will.

Nathan Spoor:

http://www.nathanspoor.com/NS_allworks.html

More NC Winters:

http://ncwinters.com/

NC Winters Flourish/Fauna:

http://411posters.com/2012/10/flourishfauna-series-by-n-c-winters/

"To reach the throne requires that a man journey. Even a path paved with good intentions can lead to hell, and my intentions were never good.

The Hundred converge for Congression to politic upon the corpse of Empire, and while they talk the Dead King makes his move, and I make mine. The world is cracked, time has run through, leaving us clutching at the end days, the future so bright that those who see it are the first to burn. These are the days that have waited for us all our lives. These are my days. I will stand before the Hundred and they will listen. I will take the throne whoever seeks to thwart me, living or dead, and if I must be the last emperor then I will make of it such an ending.

This is where the wise man turns away. This is where the holy kneel and call on God. These are the last miles, my brothers. Don't look to me to save you. Don't think I will not spend you. Run if you have the wit. Pray if you have the soul. Stand your ground if courage is yours. But don't follow me.

Follow me, and I will break your heart."
-Emperor of Thorns:

http://princeofthorns.com/

Incredibly Beautiful Fractal Flowers:

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/silvia-cordedda-fractal-flowers

Great finds guys. I'm enjoying the music!

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I have dreamed such dreams.
I was a man dreaming I was a god.
I was a god dreaming I was a man.
I have known passion.
I have known loss.
I have known the stars.
I have known failure.
I have known pain.
I have known war. And the end of all things.
And then I/And then I/And then We - went to sleep.
And went away.
And were no more.

And then...
-Thor, J. Straczynski

He sleeps where he lies, on the cellar floor, walked across by spiders. He goes to his dream desert. He walks his sand. He hears the howling of lost soldiers. The foundation stretches up for countless thousands of yards, for miles. It has become a tower in the charred sky. It is all the same material, the dead, only their eyes and mouths moving. Little clouds of sand sputter as they speak. He stands in the shadow of the tower he was made to build, its walls of shredded khaki, flesh and ochre skin, tufted with black and dark red hair. From the sand around it oozes the same dark liquid he saw in his own yard. Blood or oil. The tower is like a minaret in hell, some inverted Babel that reaches the sky and speaks only one language. All its voices still saying the same, the words he has heard for years.

The man wakes. He listens. For a long time he is motionless. Everything waits.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville (Kindle Locations 369-375).

"In the midst of winter, I finally learned there was within me an invincible summer"
-Albert Camus

“For years, it was said that nobody had ever reached the centre of the Vorrh. Or, if they had, then they had never returned. Business expanded and flourished on its most southern outskirts, but nothing was known of its interior, except myth and fear. It was the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species and, some said, propagator of them all, locked in its own system of evolution and climate."

“Dizzying abnormalities of compass and impossibilities of landing made it a pilot’s and navigator’s nightmare. All its pathways turned into overgrowth, jungle and ambush. The tribes that were rumoured to live there were barely human — some said the anthropogphagi still roamed. Creatures beyond hope. Heads growing below their shoulders. Horrors.”

“He had to find [a] way of stopping the wretched Englishman from being butchered in the Vorrh as he tried to pass through it for a second time. Nobody had ever accomplished such a thing; the great forest protected itself by draining and erasing the souls of all men; all except this one, apparently, who walked through it with impunity, even appearing to gain benefit from it. Sidrus did not know how or why this unique possibility had manifested itself, although he guessed that the witch child of the True People had worked some blasphemous magic with her protégé. What he did know was that if the Englishman passed through the forest again, he alone would have the opportunity to understand its balance, its future and maybe even its past. Not since Adam had such a single being altered the purpose and the meaning of the Vorrh, and now he was being hunted by a barbaric mercenary.”

-From Tor's review of The Vorrh:

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/11/wandering-the-weird-the-vorrh-by-b-catling

Yor-Art:

http://yor-art.deviantart.com/#