Thursday, May 4, 2023

Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 4

Using OpenAI to illustrate my favorite Thomas Ligotti story, and to make my inner pictures visible for you. And for myself. First I fed the story text directly into the AI. Now I make my own description of what happens in the story. This works better.

You can read, and see, the whole story here:

While Nolon was gazing at one of Rignolo's landscapes, Grissul seemed unable to shake off a preoccupation with the artist himself, though he was obviously making the effort. But the more he tried to turn his attention away from Rignolo, the more easily it was drawn back to the flabby skin, the faded complexion, the undisciplined shocks of hair. Finally, Grissul gave a little nudge to Nolon and began to whisper something. Nolon looked at Grissul in a way that might have said, "Yes, I know, but have some sense of decorum in any case," then resumed his contemplation of Rignolo's excellent landscapes.

They were all very similar to one another. 


Given such titles as "Glistening Marsh,” 

"The Tract of Three Shadows," 

and "The Stars, the Hills," 

they were not intended to resemble as much as suggest the promised scenes. 

A vague hint of material forms might emerge here and there, some familiar effect of color or outline, 

but for the most part they could be described as extremely remote in their perspective on tangible reality. 

Grissul, who was no stranger to some of the locales purportedly depicted in these canvasses, could very well have expressed the objection that these conglomerations of fractured mass, these whirlpools of distorted light, simply did not achieve their purpose, did not in fact deserve connection with the geographical subjects from which they took their titles. 

Perhaps it was Rignolo's intuition that just such a protest might be forthcoming that inspired - in the rapid, frantic voice of a startled sleeper - the following outburst.

"Think anything you like about these scenes, it's all the same to me. Whisper to each other, my hearing is wonderfully bad. Say that my landscapes do not invite one's eyes to pass into them and wander, let alone linger for the briefest moment. Nevertheless, that is exactly their purpose, and as far as I am concerned they are quite adequate to it, meticulously efficient.

I have spent extraordinary lengths of time within the borders of each canvass, both as maker and as casual inhabitant, until the borders no longer exist for me and neither does... that other thing.

Understand that when I say inhabitant, I do not in any way mean that I take my clumsy feet tromping up and down staircases of color, or that I stand this stunted body of mine upon some lofty ledge where I can play the master of all I see. 

There are no masters of these scenes and no seers, because bodies and their organs cannot function there - no place for them to go, nothing to survey with ordinary eyes, no thoughts to think for the mighty brain.

And my thoroughfares will not take you from the doorstep of one weariness to the backdoor of another, and they cannot crumble, because they are burdened with nothing to convey — their travelers are already there, continuously arriving at infinite sites of the perpetually astonishing. Yet these sites are also a homeland, and nothing there will ever threaten to become strange. What I mean to say is that to inhabit my landscapes one must, in no figurative sense, grow into them.


At best they are a paradise for sleepwalkers, but only those sleepwalkers who never rise to their feet, who forget their destination, and who may thus never reach that ultimate darkness beyond dreams, but may loiter in perpetuity in these lands of mine, which neighbor on nothingness and stand next door to endlessness. So you see, my critics, what we have in these little pictures is a living communion with the void, a vital annihilation and a thoroughly decorative eternity of — "

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