#an inhabitant of carcosa

[joannabarnum]

"An Inhabitant of Carcosa" created for "Character in Context" at the A.R. Mitchell Museum in Trinidad, CO, June 7-July 27, opening reception Friday, June 7 from 5-8pm. The original watercolor, several smaller preliminary studies, and prints are available: https://www.joannabarnum.com/an-inhabitant-of-carcosa

[chronivore]

2020

[see-arcane]

Me while reading it "I need to read King In Yellow! I want to see scenes of this illustrated!"

Me now: "I need to read more fic about Jonathan and Mina's love 🙃🙃🙃 Just that or while they're fighting more bad guys and monsters"

But I still want the first part too lol

The King in Yellow short stories can be read here

Ambrose Bierce's (earlier!) short story, "An Inhabitant of Carcosa," can be read here

Aaand my personal favorite short story of Algernon Blackwood's, from which [SPOILER CHARACTER] takes a jab at [LOVECRAFTIAN SPOILER CHARACTER] for being unoriginal in his secret machinations and inflicting otherworldly Knowledge That Seeds Madness, is "The Man Who Found Out," available here*

*(Pour one out for Professor Mark Ebor, my most beloved and underrated nice old man blorbo)

As to Jonathan and Mina being loving and lovingly kicking evil's ass, you will just have to wait for @mayhemchicken-artblog's comic c:

[drowningparty]

“Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of low, lead-coloured clouds hung like a visible curse. In all this there was a menace and a portent—a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect there was none. The wind sighed in the bare branches of the dead trees and the grey grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of that dismal place.”

Ambrose Bierce, An Inhabitant of Carcosa.

[farou-i-rassgat]

Revelation of Hali

For there be diverse sorts of death -

Some wherein the body remaineth;

And in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit.

This commonly occurreth only in solitude

(Such is God’s will)

And, none seeing the end, we say

The man is lost, or gone on a long journey -

Which indeed he hath; but sometimes

It hath happened in sight of many,

As abundant testimony showeth.

In one kind of death the spirit also dieth,

And this it hath been known to do

while yet the body was in vigor for many years.

Sometimes, as is veritably attested,

It dieth with the body,

But after a season is raised up again

In that place where the body did decay.

[kirnet]

Something happened here

[909th]

picked up a copy of we’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the worlds getting worse by james hillman im veryyy excited to read it

[sharkestry]

Carcosa? The monstrous city at which unspeakable horrors are done in name of the great old one Hastur they call their leader? Great. How much is the average rent price?

The king of Carcosa will eventually consume and destroy the entire city with everyone in it when the time comes to increase his power? Well that's every politician ever for you, tell me something new.

The entire city is populated by a cult that worships the King and they often do unspeakable horrors in his name? Yes im aware with how political parties work

The nearby lake of Hali is said to be inhabited by a being of unspeakable power which sometimes comes into conflict with the spawn of Cthulhu at that lake? YOU'RE TELLING ME THIS PLACE EVEN HAS A NICE LAKE TO SIT NEXT TO!? And yes I am also aware about how tourists can be annoying sometimes.

Your spooky "Black stars on a bright sky" you keep mentioning imply there is little air pollution, since seeing a large amount of stars in a city is often wishful thinking. Housing crisis considered this place doesn't seem half bad

[kellyvela]

So, about Sansa's name origins, I mentioned the book "The Slayer of Souls" by Robert W. Chambers the other day.

This isn't something new, but I think we should talk more about it.

GRRM has paid tribute to Robert W. Chambers by naming some places and characters in ASOIAF:

[Source]

~~~

~~~

Carcosa is a fictional land that first appeared in Bierce's 1886 story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (included in this collection), and later is appeared Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow. It has since been usedby many other fantasy and horror writers and poets including H. P. Lovecraft, Joseph S. Pulver, John Scott Tynes, George R.R. Martin, and many more. Carcosa has even been used as a location in the HBO's True Detective and Netflix's The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. [Source]

~~~

But apart from Carcosa and the Yellow Emperor, maybe there's something else that GRRM took from Robert W. Chambers works to put it in ASOIAF.

Indeed, Robert W. Chambers's "The Slayer of Souls" has a chapter and a character called Sansa:

~~~

Robert W. Chambers's Sansa is not exactly similar to ASOIAF Sansa; in fact, I found the character close to Melisandre. But the thing is, that maybe, this character is the origin of ASOIAF Sansa's name.

And the title of book "The Slayer of Souls," reminds me of this:

I dreamt of a maid at a feast with purple serpents in her hair, venom dripping from their fangs. And later I dreamt that maid again, slaying a savage giant in a castle built of snow. —A Storm of Swords - Arya VIII

There's something so satisfying in finding more Sansa & Slayer associations ❤️

[palmviolet]

true detective s1 rewatch: thoughts on the finale

— our theme for this final masterpiece of an episode is: fiction. the series has skated near this before, of course, with its context themes of seeing and image, but this is the episode that really dives into an awareness of genre and storytelling. we begin with an in-depth look at errol childress and his home, the way he lives. he truly inhabits the southern gothic archetype — the grand, decaying house, the incestuous dynamic with reference to the 'cane fields' (something i haven't really discussed yet is the role of louisiana's history of slavery, which hangs over the narrative most conspicuous by its absence; angola, for example, that fabled threat used most often to imply sexual violence, is named after the slave plantation that once occupied the same plot; the place they filmed carcosa was an old civil war fort), the faceless dolls and the mummified father kept in a shack with horrors literally inscribed on the walls (including 'cassilda', another reference to the chambers work).

— childress also watches the television and apes the aristocratic british accents on display. he absorbs fiction and inhabits it, in the same way that he puts on an irish accent to flirt with betty, in the same way that he has her tell him the story of her assault while they are 'making flowers' (a metaphor that once again suggests we are beyond the realm of reality). he and betty are deliberately, exaggeratedly gothic, full of rot — they are designed not as fleshed-out characters, as most of TD's cast is, but as avatars for a gnawing belief in the void that consumes all in its path.

— this is the crux of rust's own beliefs about the futility of selfhood — that identities are illusory defence mechanisms against the void, that all we are is 'sentient meat'. (will be talking more about this line in my reply to an excellent ask by @queixumes, so look out for that.) that life is just a story we tell ourselves. and so with the childresses the veil grows thin: as rust follows childress into carcosa, childress's impossible taunts ("come die with me, little priest") echo around him less as character moments and more as authorial interjections, a manifestation of rust's own nihilistic belief and suicidal ideation. thus when rust does not complete the narrative ("take off your mask"; rust doesn't say the corresponding, "i wear no mask") he is breaking type, paradoxically defying the vacant literary formula in which he's trapped by expressing a self.

— the final scenes of the series entail rust's struggle with this newfound self. he has turned away the offering of the cosmic void; more than that, he has been to the void and found it not as empty and personality-less as he thought, but rather a void 'like a substance', a darkness that held the love of his daughter and his father in one. their selves persevered after death — and now finally he begins to recognise his own selfhood as well.

— this is reified by marty as a sounding board. for the first time, rust experiences recognition through the other with marty as that other — marty who listens to him cry ("talk to me, rust"), marty who encourages him to tell his stories of the stars. this is the other side of storytelling — the side that is not corrupt or empty, the side that has meaning because it is sincere, because it is earnest and with feeling. childress's storytelling is directly opposed to rust's, with childress an empty caricature of the rotten southern gothic and rust as a person looking to the stars: storytelling that does not suck inward to the void but looks outward to the world.

— i think it's significant that our final image of marty and rust is marty helping rust escape the hospital several days early. marty reifies rust's selfhood by something so simple as recognising what he likes — buying him his brand of cigarettes. but this is also in opposition to the medical institution. should someone with a hole in their guts be smoking? doubtful. but that's not the point — the point is that they have to "get out from under this [hospital] roof" in order to see the stars, that rust's lasting glimpse of hope ("the light's winning") is as he flees the institution, propped up not by its mechanics, in the form of the wheelchair, but by marty himself.

— as i've discussed in the past, TD's implications of the medical institution as a further corrupt branch of the state are very veiled, but they are present. there's a further signal of this in one of the hazy, slowly cross-fading shots towards the end: we see a doctor in the hospital hallway, carrying the image of a human body, fading into a shot of the childress shack with a human body drawn on it.

placed directly one after another, this is a juxtaposition that only associates the two. the shack is where childress keeps his desiccated father, talks about bringing him water, hosing him down — in some perverse way, treating him as a patient. this isn't designed to say explicitly that the hospital is involved in the conspiracy to the same degree as the tuttles, but it implies a broader institutional sweep of wrongness. within the medical institution is where most of us will experience ourselves at our most powerless; out of necessity, medical treatment strips identity and agency away, regimenting schedules and meals and visiting hours, labelling patients with identifying bracelets. in the same way that childress's narratives of southern gothic were a seductive call to the void of nothing, the absence of selfhood, the hospital, too, denies personality and self.

— this is why we finish with marty bringing rust his cigarettes against medical advice; this is why rust leaves the hospital, if not exactly on his own terms then at least on his and marty's. it is a final reclamation of the selfhood he has been denying himself all along — and an escape into a world that contains only one story, "light versus dark", as our final shot is of the stars winking into light. he is beyond our (potentially corrupting, as sight and image has been throughout the series) interpretation; he is in the void, yes, but it is a void with substance, a void with love.

[gorgonfuckerdotnet]

Ayyy carcosa, feel free to ignore if this is too personal for the two of them but do your NHP partners have a sort of "avatar" for themselves?

Like for example a fellow lancer of mine has an enlightenment-class who represents herself holographically with a mature (dare I say MILFy if I'm being honest) but with a head composed of innumerable inky tendrils with eyes on em.

Ty!

// Oh hey, not an anon // No not too personal // My specific instance of SCYLLA prefers simply being the Gorgon she inhabits // Sierra does like to use her subaltern for day-to-day stuff // But the hologram is what she uses in my HUD // Older holograms seem to be common, especially with the SIDEWALK variants, but Sierra likes to look like a very pretty woman // I'm not biased you're biased.

[superchat]

there was one persons interpretation of what this visualization is and it hit me so hard i think about it a lot

spoilers under the cut. ill be brief (if i can help it) and keep it pretty cut and dry without much flowery imagery (if i can help it) but whoever reads it can take the pieces and put them together and fill the gaps in with humanity

the various paintings of "isle of the dead" flash through elster

ALSO though the isle of life. (important)

a word that is IN the game is "carcosa" but the word is redacted in every mention of it. users only found it due to datamining.

"carcosa" is a term used in the "king in yellow", and a short story "an inhabitant of carcosa" which was inspired by a poem called "carcassonne". in the short story, there is an ancient, abandoned and ruined city called carcosa and the person wandering it is dead who used to live there. they forgot they were dead and forgot what the city was. until they see their own tombstone and then they remember. the story brings out themes of unfamiliarity, longing, contemplations of death, home

there was a promise made. (did elster make a promise? was it a promise they made to each other? either way.) elster at this moment remembers the promise.

the isle of the dead can very easily be interpreted to be "carcosa". a longing for death, to move on. to be at peace.

elster is bringing that to ariane. bringing her carcosa, her promise. there are several moments that present elster as the ferryman who carries souls from life to death. elster is bringing death to ariane (as was their promise?)

but there can be more to it than that. elster herself, is arianes carcosa. someone dear to her, someone special and someone who is home for her. elster is making her way back to ariane so they can be together (as was their promise?) remember, the isle of life painting ALSO flashes in elster,

maybe their promise was that they would never leave eachothers side. or that they would die together, or that ariane wouldnt suffer. or maybe that neither would suffer. maybe it was a promise to take care of eachother and be there to finish things for the other when time came. or that no matter how bad things got, theyd be with eachother.

but i absolutely LOVE the dynamic as framing elster as the harbinger of death for ariane but also as a harbinger of peace and comfort for ariane. she wants to die, but. she wants elster too. if she could live in peace and comfort with elster. i dont think shed want to die. but she cannot live in peace or comfort. in every sense, elster is her carcosa, and in that moment, elster remembers.

[sad-eyed-lady-of-the-paperbacks]

Here are some other misc. thoughts I had about chapter 2.

(Even though I’m technically using Pevear & Volokhonsky for this read-along, I really do gravitate to McDuff’s wording, so unless otherwise indicated that’s what I’ll be quoting from here)

I love McDuff’s rendering of the chapter title, “He Gets the First Son Off His Hands”—not even “his first son,” just “the first son.” Pevear & Volokhonsky do it pretty good too: “The First Son Sent Packing.” But I just like the—I don’t know, passivity in McDuff. He just gets him off his hands

The fact that Fyodor was simultaneously “making everyone’s lives a misery with his tears and complaints” and “turning his house into a den of depravity” is so interesting. One is tempted to find his tears insincere, but there’s that quote from the first chapter: “Both versions may very well be true—that is, that he rejoiced at his release and wept for her who released him, all at the same time. In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.” (P&V) While the narrator assures us that there was no love on either side of the marriage, and that he appeared not to have been physically attracted to her despite her beauty, exactly what it is that he did feel for Adelaida Ivanovna, and what he felt at the time of her desertion and then at her death, might be more complicated than we’re ever going to understand.

“…the three-year-old Mitya was taken into the care of Grigory, the faithful manservant of the house, and had the latter not tended to him there might well have been no one to change the little boy’s wretched shirt.” For some reason that little detail is so heartbreaking. Thinking about how grubby a little toddler’s shirt gets, and that no one would have changed it if not for Grigory. The specificity of that detail really paints a picture of the neglect.

Interesting how the Miusovs intervened to save Adelaida’s property from Fyodor, but when it came to saving her child? Not a peep from them at first. Not that that seems to have been deliberate, just worth noting perhaps.

The fact that even if Fyodor did remember him, he still would have sent him to the izba with Grigory because a little 3yo would really cramp his style when he’s trying to have, to borrow a phrase from @an-inhabitant-of-carcosa “one man frat parties”

Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov is such a Character. We all know him. He’s just dying for any opportunity to tell you that he almost participated in the 1848 Paris barricades. That “almost” is “one of the most gratifying memories of his youth.”

Miusov engaged in a drawn-out and probably frivolous property dispute with the neighbouring monastery because he feels it’s his civic duty. But like @confessionofanardentheart pointed out, he also owned 1,000 serfs until they were freed.

Miusov used to fancy his cousin but it clearly wasn’t requited (and this would have been the late 1830s so he wouldn’t have even been able to wow her with his almost being an insurgent in 1848) and this is partly why he wants to assume responsibility for baby Mitya

He shows up all indignant at Fyodor and declares that he himself will undertake the upbringing and education of the little boy. And Fyodor decides that even though he already looks like the Worst Dad, it would be hilarious actually to concoct this whole bit wherein he is learning for the very first time that he even has a son.

(The narrator is correct in saying that the tendency of Fyodor Pavlovich to pretend and act out these absurd rôles, even in ways that actively make him look worse, is common in a lot of people. We’ve all definitely know this guy as well.)

The fact that Miusov was so indignant at Fyodor for abandoning and forgetting the child…and then proceeded to do just that

Baby Mitya being passed from home to home like a foster kid. No wonder he didn’t finish highschool and led such a disorderly existence. The fact that the narrator can’t even be bothered to fully recount all the homes he went through

Despite having been taken away from his father, Mitya inherits Fyodor’s penchant for drinking and chasing after skirts, but it seems without any of his financial shrewdness.

It’s absolutely diabolical that Fyodor is possibly enriching himself further off of Adelaida’s estate despite her family’s earlier interference. And he’s willing to bamboozle his own son to do it.

We learn so much about Dmitri as others perceive him here. All of it is accurate, but as to whether there’s more to him beneath this irresponsible and easily-duped exterior, we’ll have to wait and see

That second to last line gives a definite sense of foreboding and impending doom! One of Dostoevsky’s influences was gothic literature, and he is very good at building and sustaining a sense of looming threat. The sense of a catastrophe hanging over this crumbling family is very gothic.

[joannabarnum]

A mood study I did before “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” to work out the vibes and colors I wanted. Available.

[uss-edsall]

I have really enjoyed Signalis from a viewpoint of considering its origins and its makers. It is very clearly East Germany in Space. Well, East Germany in Space with a smattering of Chinese and other Asian influences.

The tech is very Soviet retro-futurism. The architecture of their society, from what we get to see, felt very Eastern Bloc brutalist. That's even without addressing the fact the flag is just the East German flag with some changes to it.

The makers of the game are very much German, and know their history, know their references. One of the planets is even named after a leftist paramilitary organisation from the Weimar Republic days.

Aside from the blatant The King in Yellow references (you literally pick it up to get to the game beginning in earnest) I can sense some relation to An Inhabitant of Carcosa. The painting that keeps showing up is the real life Isle of the Dead painting. I'm sure there's others, I just don't know them.

It's been fascinating to consider it from an outside perspective considering what exactly the creators were looking at for inspiration, or decided to reference in the creation of the game.

I am probably not finishing the game for its subject matter is hitting too close to home - but it's definitely a thought provoking game, and I have liked the aesthetics. (I especially like the Penrose's design)

[kirnet]

what if Dora Lange haunted Rust Cohle?

True Detective Original Scripts //True Detective (2014) // An Inhabitant of Carcosa, Ambrose Bierce // Disco Elysium (2019) // The King in Yellow, Robert W. Chambers // Excerpts from "Duned", Natalie Diaz // Earthmover, Have a Nice Life // Ptolemaea, Ethel Cain // Medicine, Gustav Klimt (destroyed 1945) // my art