Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 5

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:

Part 1  Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

Nolon and Grissul glanced blankly at each other and then followed the artist up to a narrow door.

Opening the door with a tiny key, Rignolo ushered his guests inside. It was a tight squeeze through the doorway.

"Now this place really is a closet," Grissul whispered to Nolon. "I don't think I can turn around."

"Then we'll just have to walk out of here backwards, as if there were something wrong with that."

The door slammed closed and for a moment there was no place on earth darker than that little room.

"Watch the walls," Rignolo called through the door.

"Walls?" someone whispered.

The first images to appear in the darkness were those crinkled wads of radiance Rignolo spoke of, except these were much larger, more numerous, and became more radiant than the others bound within their cramped little canvasses. And they emerged on all sides of the spectator, above and below as well, so that an irresistible conviction was instilled that the tiny gravelike room had expanded into a star-strewn corridor of night, the certainty created that one was suspended in space without practical means of remaining there.

Reaching out for the solid walls, crouching on the floor, only brought confusion rather than relief from the sense of impossibility. The irregular daubs of brightness grew into great silver blotches, each of them ragged at its rim and glowing wildly. Then they stopped growing in the blackness, attaining some predesigned composition, and another kind of growing began: thin filaments of bluish light started sprouting in the spaces between those bulbous thistles of brilliance, running everywhere like cracks up and down a wall.

And these threadlike, hairlike tendrils eventually spread across the blackness in an erratic fury of propagation, until all was webbed and stringy in the universal landscape.

Then the webbing began to fray and grow shaggy, cosmic moss hanging in luminous clumps, beards. But the scene was not muddled, no more so, that is, than the most natural marsh or fen-like field. Finally, enormous stalks shot out of nowhere, quickly crisscrossed to form interesting and well-balanced patterns, and suddenly froze. They were a strange shade of green and wore burry crowns of a pinkish color, like prickly brains.

The scene, it appeared, was now complete. All the actual effects were displayed: actual because the one further effect now being produced was most likely an illusion. For it seemed that deep within the shredded tapestry of webs and hairs and stalks, something else had been woven, something buried beneath the marshy morass but slowly rising to the surface.

"Is that a face?" someone said. "I can begin to see one too," said the other, "but I don't know if I want to see it. I don't think I can feel where I am now. Let's try not to look at those faces."

A series of cries from within the little room finally induced Rignolo to open the door, which sent Nolon and Grissul tumbling backwards into the artist's studio.

They lay among the debris on the floor for some time. Rignolo swiftly secured the door, and then stood absolutely still beside it, his upturned eyes taking no interest in his visitors' predicament.

As they regained their feet, a few things were quickly settled in low voices.

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:

Part 1  Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

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 — "

Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 3

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:

Part 1  Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

"Don't just walk stepping everywhere," Rignolo told his visitors as they all entered the studio.

He was a little out of breath from the climb up the stairs, wheezing his words, quietly muttering to himself, "This place, oh, this place." 

There was hardly a patch of floor that was not in some way cluttered over, so he need not have warned Nolon, or even Grissul. 

Rignolo was of lesser stature than his guests, virtually a dwarf, and so moved with greater freedom through that cramped space. 

"You see," he said, "how this isn't really a room up here, just a little closet that tried to grow into one, bulging out every which way and making all these odd niches and alcoves surrounding us, this shapeless gallery of nooks. There's a window around here, I suppose, under some of these canvasses. But those are what you're here for, not to look out some window that who knows where it is. Nothing to see out there, even so."

Rignolo then ushered his visitors through the shrunken maze composed of recesses of one sort or another, indicating to them a canvass here or there. Each somehow held itself to a wall or was leaning against one, as if with exhaustion. 

Having brought their attention to this or that picture, he would step a little to the side and allow them to admire his work, standing there like a polite but slightly bored curator of some seldom-visited museum, a pathetic figure attired in over-sized clothes of woven... dust. 

His small ovoid face was as lifeless as a mask: his skin had the same faded complexion as his clothes and was just as slack, flabby; his lips were the same color as his skin but more full and taut; his hair shot out in tufts from his head, uncontrolled, weedy; and his eyes showed too much white, having to all appearances rolled up halfway into his forehead, as if they were trying to peek under it.

Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 2

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:

Part 1  Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

It was well into evening and for some time Nolon had been been seated at a small table in a kind of park.

This was a long, thin stretch of land - vaguely triangular in shape, like a piece of broken glass - 

bordered by three streets of varying breadth, varying evenness of surface, and of varying stages of disintegration

as each thoroughfare succumbed in its own way and in its own time to the subtle but continuous movements of the slumbering earth below.

From the far end of the park a figure in a dark overcoat was approaching Nolon's table, 

and it appeared there was going to be a meeting of some sort.

There were other tables here and there, all of them unoccupied, 

but most of the park was unused ground covered with a plush, fuzzy kind of turf. 

In the moonlight this densely woven pile of vegetation turned a soft shade of aquamarine, almost radiant. Beyond the thinning trees, stars were bright but without luster, as if they were made of luminous paper. 

Around the park, a jagged line of high roofs, black and featureless, crossed the sky like the uneven teeth of an old saw.

Nolon was resting his hands at the edge of the small, nearly circular table. In the middle of the table a piece of candle flickered inside a misshapen bubble of green glass, and Nolon's face was bathed in a restless green glare. He too was wearing a dark overcoat, unbuttoned at the top to reveal a scarf of lighter shade stuffed inside it. The scarf was wrapped about Nolon's neck right to the base of his chin.

Every so often Nolon glanced up, not to look at Grissul as he proceeded across the park, but to try and catch sight of something in that lighted window across the street:

a silhouette which at irregular intervals slipped in and out of view.

Above the window was a long, low roof surmounted by a board which appeared to be a sign or marquee.

The lettering on this board was entirely unreadable, perhaps corroded by the elements or even deliberately effaced. 

But the image of two tall, thin bottles could still be seen, their slender necks angled festively this way and that.