Overcome by an indefinable malaise at the sight of these drawings – the same sort of malaise he experienced when he looked at certain rather similar Proverbs by Goya, or read some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, whose terrifying or hallucinating effects Odilon Redon seemed to have transposed into a different art – he would rub his eyes and turn to gaze at a radiant figure which, in the midst of all these frenzied pictures, stood out calm and serene: the figure of Melancholy, seated on some rocks before a disk-like sun, in a mournful and despondent attitude.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, transl by Robert Baldick, (2003)
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Can.. C-can.. I have some Nuzi.. please just something cute and wholesome…🥺🥺🥺🥺
here ya go friend!
i actually quite enjoy doing this, so anyone can continue sending me ship request in my askbox please! rarepairs and poly are okay, but i will not accept pr--ships and ships i'm just not a fan of :)
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Herod’s palace rose up like some Alhambra on slender columns iridescent with Moresque tiles, which appeared to be bedded in silver mortar and gold cement; arabesques started from lozenges of lapis lazuli to wind their way right across the cupolas, whose mother-of-pearl marquetry gleamed with rainbow lights and flashed with prismatic fires.
The murder had been done; now the executioner stood impassive, his hands resting on the pommel of his long, bloodstained sword.
The Saint’s decapitated head had left the charger where it lay on the flagstones and risen into the air, the eyes staring out from the livid face, the colourless lips parted, the crimson neck dripping tears of blood. A mosaic encircled the face, and also a halo of light whose rays darted out under the porticoes, emphasized the awful elevation of the head, and kindled a fire in the glassy eyeballs, which were fixed in what happened to be agonized concentration on the dancer.
With a gesture of horror, Salome tries to thrust away the terrifying vision which holds her nailed to the spot, balanced on the tips of her toes, her eyes dilated, her right hand clawing convulsively at her throat.
[...]
The dreadful head glows eerily, bleeding all the while, so that clots of dark red form at the ends of hair and beard. Visible to Salome alone, it embraces in its sinister gaze neither Herodias, musing over the ultimate satisfaction of her hatred, nor the Tetrarch, who, bending forward a little with his hands on his knees, is still panting with emotion, maddened by the sight and smell of the woman’s naked body, steeped in musky scents, anointed with aromatic balms, impregnated with incense and myrrh.
Like the old King, Des Esseintes invariably felt overwhelmed, subjugated, stunned when he looked at this dancing-girl, who was less majestic, less haughty, but more seductive than the Salome of the oil-painting.
In the unfeeling and unpitying statue, in the innocent and deadly idol, the lusts and fears of common humanity had been awakened; the great lotus-blossom had disappeared, the goddess vanished; a hideous nightmare now held in its choking grip an entertainer, intoxicated by the whirling movement of the dance, a courtesan, petrified and hypnotized by terror.
Here she was a true harlot, obedient to her passionate and cruel female temperament; here she came to life, more refined yet more savage, more hateful yet more exquisite than before; here she roused the sleeping senses of the male more powerfully, subjugated his will more surely with her charms – the charms of a great venereal flower, grown in a bed of sacrilege, reared in a hot-house of impiety.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, transl by Robert Baldick, (2003)
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