#and/or once had an obsession with maenads

[knowlesian]

misty turning her head perfectly on beat with the start of mother, mother is one of those tv music moments that is just part of me now, it’s in my very dna

[kieransyphe]

there  was  a  certain  uneasiness  eating  away  at  his  viscera  ,  unbearable  and  oppressive ; would like to believe that it was just the consequence of burning his last cigarette yesterday but even he , in all his neuroses and ineffable emotions , wasn't that delusional. he had always carried loneliness for as long he could remember , always in a state of being apart , for fear of being misunderstood. for fear of being getting close and being left behind. for fear of being not who people wanted him to be. and now , for fear of causing harm just from contact. fear ... fear ... fear ... there was nothing more that he wanted than a way out of fear. then maybe , he'd know where he began and where his father ended. then maybe , he'd know how to control this gift that felt more like a curse sometimes. he wished there was a self - book for being an offspring of thanatos , but desperation had led him somewhere else — rituals and rites , cults and bacchantes , madness as liberation. the maenads once subjected themselves to willful repression , an obsession with order and symmetry , until dionysus liberated and allowed them to sing , scream , dance barefoot in the woods and release everything they had been keeping inside. it was an alluring image on his mind , to be absolutely free and not care about anything in the world. even just for a moment. maybe it was what he needed ; to face himself in his most naked state , to free the most primitive part of himself rather than attempting to murder it. but obviously , he couldn't just summon dionysus and ask the god for enlightenment. but maybe , the next best thing could help. knock after knock after knock , heavy fists banging against the door of the god of wines' cabin until there was an answer , until the door was opened ajar. " i need your help. " simple. explicable. desperate.. the other demigod's presence was intimidating , but it wasn't the kind that made him want to turn away and leave — it pulled at him , making him push past the door and enter the cabin before being invited in. " there's something in my head that i can't just──── " a pause , uncertain how to even explain it all without already sounding like a madman. he took a deep breath , attempted to will some calmness. " i need to feel free in my own skin. "

[an0det0l0ve]

My love,

here are for you 20 quotes from the book which is closest to my heart, The Secret History. May they touch your soul the way they did mine.

Love,

Casper

⟴ ⟴ ⟴

1. Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

2. It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

3. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

4. Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.

5. One likes to think there’s something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

6. Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so? Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?

7. “Cubitum eamus?"

"What?"

"Nothing.

8. There was a horrible, erratic thumping in my chest, as if a large bird was trapped inside my ribcage and beating itself to death.

9. They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.

10. Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.

11. They all shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had the strange cold breath of the ancient world : they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks - sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat.

12. She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.

13. That night I wrote in my journal: "Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone - was it van Gogh? - said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.

14. Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd always hoped that someday I'd be able to use it.

15. I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.

16. “Aristotle says in the Poetics,” said Henry, “that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.”

“And I believe Aristotle is correct. After all, what are the scenes in poetry graven on our memories, the ones that we love the most? Precisely these. The murder of Agamemnon and the wrath of Achilles. Dido on the funeral pyre. The daggers of the traitors and Caesar’s blood—remember how Suetonius describes his body being borne away on the litter, with one arm hanging down?”

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry.

“And what is beauty?”

“Terror.”

“Well said,” said Julian. “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.” I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining. “And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?”

“To live,” said Camilla.

“To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.

The teakettle began to whistle.

17. White Sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren’t my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew -the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in-an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.

18. She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief.

19. Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they’d had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops.

20. And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.

[shatteredionysus]

Lived long enough to become the villain - ofstarrycrowns

Leave ‘Lived long enough to become the villain’ to get a glimpse of my muse being a villain.

Dionysus smiled, he was only half dressed, in tight fitting pants, and a long feminine trenchcoat he’d picked up for someone, and he had his arms stretched out wide, fingers dripping with blood.

Behind him the city burned. Sirens and screams screeched. Every building but those she’d built was fair game, or the places she liked. People were rioting, drinking, tearing each other apart, and through it all his maenads were leading them in his hymns. Power surged through his veins as it had’t in millennia, and his eyes flickered between colors and shapes. Sometimes looking like a bull’s, or a serpent’s, sometimes grey, or black, or every color.

He would make her safe again. He would not go quietly into the night, he would not fade again. He felt his mind touching on the city’s, felt his power sliding into the souls of everyone drinking and reveling, and he didn’t hold himself back from claiming. From searching out those who would love his wife, and whispering quiet epiphanies, prayers of hers, old puzzle charms to keep them hidden from the madness, to keep them safe. 

They would love her.

It’d started last night, started with idiot humans mugging them. It would have been nothing, absolutely nothing, if he hadn’t been being foolish himself. And it’s not like they could cause either of them permanent harm. They’d only scratched his wife, before they knocked them out.

It had healed within moments. She was a goddess. But still. Still that tiny wound had filled the Olympian with dread. They were not as powerful as they once were. They’d all known some of their greater miracles were gone, without regular worship. But if she could be touched…

Terror had filled him, infected him. He’d obsessed over it for a day, then, once she was home safe and occupied with work. He’d gone out. And he’d decided…no more. He’d violated the pact he and the other Olympians had had. They’d all agreed to step away, the greater gods of the old pantheon. They wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t reveal themselves again. This would be war. But he was sure he could convince Ares at least to delight in it. It was worth it.

He strode up to their house, the door opening with a touch. “Darling. Darling you won’t believe the night I’ve had,” he called out, sing song and wild.

@ofstarrycrowns