Death or victory
I’ve often wondered what might have lead to my writing something like this exchange in The Apsinthion Protocol.
MOIRA
It would be a one-way trip for whoever did it.
NANETTA
It would mean giving up everything in this world.
MOIRA
And possibly entering a far more wonderful one.
NANETTA
Or it might mean a few moments of ecstasy, and then annihilation.
MOIRA
And there is likely very little time to decide.
(In my bleak moments I often think that what Nanetta and Moira would eventually achieve — even if it was just blissful annihilation — would be superior to the alternative: adulthood.)
One finds one’s erotic inspiration where one is. Where I was for a lengthy stretch of young adulthood was Harvard’s Widener Library. Had I had my druthers, the erotic inspiration would have taken the form of a studious-but-sultry meganekko but sadly there was a severe druthers shortage in Cambridge at the time and so I didn’t get mine.
There was, however, this mural executed by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).
A doughboy embraces death and victory in the same moment. (We know he’s victorious because there’s a defeated figure in a stahlhelm at his feet, presumably one of those nasty wicked Germans.) At the time I would pass this mural daily (it’s on the library’s main entrance stairs) my conscious thoughts were that it was a singularly shameless bit of militaristic propaganda.
My subconscious thoughts, I conjecture, were on a different track entirely, thinking that maybe it’s cool — erotic even — to throw one’s life in like that. It’s a natural interpretation — look at the soldier’s face, it’s expression and positioning under Victory’s bared breast. It would explain a lot about the sort of things I’ve written.
Sargent didn’t do much in the more explicitly erotic line, although there is some, for example this study of a nude Egyptian girl.
Orientalist art — something I’ve found appealing before.
Oriental princess
I might have a real weakness for sorceresses, but not for princesses, even if they are designed like the fearsome but alluring 
Michiko Maeda. If you’re a sorceress, you can keep all your clothes on and you’ll still have me at the word “abracadabra,” but princesses will have to work harder, even if Rob’s dream-self will fall hopelessly and fatally for you.
What constitutes working harder in the context of an oriental fantasy might be easy to specify but not that easy to find. But I have a certain weakness for orientalist art (more evidence that I am a Bad Person) and it turns out that Flickr makes available a pool of fine orientalist art, from which the image to the right stood out for me. This will do very nicely as the image of an oriental princess working harder for my attention. I am especially pleased by the use of jewelry here, which seems to me spot-on. I’m not sure that the image was originally intended to represent any sort of royalty but really, who cares?
But the thing that really tickled my fancy when I looked into the provenance of this image a little further was that I found out it had been created by Henri Privat-Livemont (1861-1936), who was more famous as a creator of this Art Nouveau advertising poster.
An advertisement for Absinthe Robette. That works for me double. Not only does it reference the fact that Rob undergoes a dream analogue of the Apsinthion Protocol, but it also picks up on a theme I find personally appealing…
Dealing with the sorceress
Rob’s dream-self in the first Gnosis dreamscape is so desperate for the love of Michiko Maeda’s dream-self oriental princess that he resorts to the rather dangerous assistance of a sorceress.
And I enjoyed writing that, because I have something of a weakness for sorceresses. Goes along with being a thaumatophile, I guess. Every time I have the chance to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I try to stop by and gaze at this painting, which was probably my initial visual inspiration for the sorceress scene.
Domenico Guidobono (1668–1746), "Allegory"
That’s good. Woman. Book. Assorted supernatural stuff that I can’t decode. But perhaps a little better from my perspective is this image (possibly of Circe) by the English Pre-Raphaelite John William Waterhouse.
John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917), "Sorceress"
Woman. Book. And still better for the mad science lover, some sort of flask or beaker right in front of her. A good image if you think that the sexist organ a woman has is her brain.
But of course Rob’s dream is an oriental fantasy, so we need an image from orientalist art to really make the visual image work. Fortunately, I have one.
Friedrich von Amerling (1803 - 1887), "The Oriental" (click through for larger image)
Woman. Book. Play of light in an oriental setting. Works fo rme for the sorceress!
