#sacred and terrible air

[revacholianpizzaagenda]

3sentence, Ambrosius & Revachol, "let the light in"

(x) (the whole world is a zone of imminent entroponetic catastrophe, Ambrosius will be anointed Innocence within one year of Le Retour, returning is an entropolic concept, so is light apparently, et cetera)

"Let the light in," says this guy Saint-Miro on the radio, day in and day out, it's quick and catchy, "let the light in", it makes people feel nostalgic for the liminality of summer mornings they never quite lived. By mid-April, "let the light in", the perfect slogan, is the go-to feel-good mantra of every depressed schmuck in Revachol, which is to say, a good eighty million people living their lives as a synecdoche for the world, and then they do just that. They let the light in, that sacred and terrible thing, they open the blinds and the intermediate frequencies, and all the terrible lost colours of the past come out, and everything begins to be again.

#disco elysium #püha ja õudne lõhn #sacred and terrible air #PJÕL #AMBROSIUS #ambrosius saint-miro #mine #3 sentence fic

[yellow-yarrow]

"kill them with kindness" WRONG. go into the pale 👉🌊🌊θ ∡ ~x y∿∿φ.📈θ☁️🌫️🌫️🔔🌫️🌫️🌫️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️🌊🌊🌊☁️☁️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️☁️☁️👻☁️☁️☁️☁️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌊🌊☁️☁️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️☁️☁️☁️🌊🌊☁️☁️🌫️🌫️🌫️A🌫️🌫️☁️☁️☁️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌊🌫️B🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️🌫️🌫️☁️☁️S☁️☁️☁️🌫️🌫️🌫️☁️☁️☁️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️O🌫️🌫️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️🌫️L🌫️☁️☁️☁️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️U🌫️🌫️🌫️☁️☁️☁️☁️🌫️☁️☁️T☁️☁️🌫️☁️☁️☁️☁️🌫️E🌫️N🌫️🌫️🌫️☁️☁️E☁️☁️🌫️🌫️☁️☁️☁️☁️☁️🌫️🌫️G🌫️☁️☁️A🌫️🌫️🌫️T🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️☁️☁️☁️🌫️I🌫️🌫️☁️🌫️🌫️O🌫️☁️🌫️🌫️N🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️☁️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️☁️☁️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️☁️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️🌫️ ⚫

.

#sacred and terrible air #is this anything #st miro:

[citizenabovesuspicion]

hey pjõl fandom (all five of you) this is my very important contribution

#pjõl #sacred and terrible air #this book ruined my weekend #can't recommend enough #disco elysium #kinda

[mythrilthread]

It’s been a while, and this project fought me every step of the way, but I managed to finish this book. This is a Frankenstein’s monster of two fan translations of Sacred and Terrible Air slapped together and haphazardly edited some more to my personal satisfaction. As far as I could tell while I was typesetting it was even more bleak than already bleak world of Disco Elysium, and deeply nihilistic to boot.

So I wanted to make it look as disturbing as I could manage (and still want to hold it long enough to read).

🫁 Endpapers are hand-inked neurographics;

🫁 I painted and splattered the edges to look as moldy as possible;

🫁 The spine is linen, and titled by hand;

🫁 The design on the cover is a concept art for the game (I know the book is not set in Revachol, but I wanted a very specific brand of Eastern-European angst, and that church fit the bill).

#bookbinding #fanbinding #mythril thread books #disco elysium #sacred and terrible air

[yarrowdraws]

Ambrosius Saint Miro/pale apocalypse themed poster.

the images I used are Dürer's Apocalypse woodcut and St Ambrose raised to heaven line engraving by C.N. Cochin.

some closeups:

#sacred and terrible air #ambrosius saint miro #disco elysium #püha ja õudne lõhn #poster #i found these really cool free to use brutalist graphs and elements maybe i'll make another pale themed poster later #i love brutalist posters so much. the random symbols and graphs are so fun. and i can blast it with effects and textures as usual

[renmorris]

after reading sacred and terrible air…I do think that Harrier is an Innocence, BUT for Revachol only.

like an Innocence he’s the reflection and distillation of an age's ideologies, he’s a manifestation of a collective and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. it’s horrifying. just because the world has a voice doesn’t mean you should listen to it. if the masses are reactionary and they want war and annihilation. that’s bad.

we know from thoughts like REGULAR LAW OFFICIAL and accounts of his behavior pre amnesia that Harry naturally bounces rapidly between ideologies. idiot doom spiral's tequila sunset account is about a fascist apocalypse cop Harry.

regardless of how you’re choosing to play him, this is how Harry is. he’s an extremist. what he attaches his extremism to is what changes.

we see how Revachol feeds into whatever he believes at the moment, how they rile each other up. how she will echo whatever he believes in the moment when he talks to Joyce. I’m not going to copy/paste them all, but this is one of my favorite examples:

HALF LIGHT - Maybe a good bloodletting is just what Martinaise needs?

SHIVERS - Houses drenched in red, blood gushing down Rue Saint-Cispare... the whole place mopped with a giant red rag! Fresh bullet holes for all the old buildings...

most importantly he’s a guy. he’s a very ill guy. he’s very disabled.

so in practical terms, this all means he’s immensely over stimulated and stricken with divine madness but also just normal boring madness. nothing he has will save him from poverty or his disabilities. as Trant says he’s absorbing everything he hears and sees

he talks to the dead. he made the swallow when he raided the church, he tore a hole in time with an atrocity, and accelerated the growth of the Pale. he knows how many days are left until the end of the world. he can look at Korty and see how he may kill him in the future, he’s linked to the city and she speaks to him.

and he still desperately needs access to healthcare he isn’t getting. he’s a saint and is weighed down entirely by mundane horrors and realities

#disco elysium #harrier du bois #disco elysium meta #püha ja õudne lõhn #sacred and terrible air #and that’s without getting into his very personal similarities with the next Innocence #disco elysium blogging #pjõl blogging

[crustaceousfaggot]

#pjõl #püha ja õudne lõhn #sacred and terrible air #disco elyisum

[citronellals]

easy there, tiger / it's a meat grinder

#depicting zaum use iykyk #sacred and terrible air #hot entropolic summer #PJÕL #püha ja õudne lõhn #tereesz machejek #second piece depicts Some approximation of vidkun. i think the violence is surreal enough to not require a tag but #if it bothers u lmk and ill tag it #doodles

[ritual---impulse]

The way the Pale is described, I can't help but think of Michael Biberstein's works:

#burst posting from my drafts #the Pale #Disco Elysium #sacred and terrible air #pjõl #michael biberstein #hot entropolic summer

[gazorninplat]

As much as I love Disco Elysium, I think I was not prepared for Sacred and Terrible Air. Of course, I was expecting to know more about the world of Elysium as a whole, and Robert Kurvitz is a very good writer, but the thesis of the novel (and how it makes its points) flash-banged me.

Disco Elysium this is not, and it wasn’t supposed to be, but I think I can understand better now what the team at ZA/UM was getting at with this specific setting, and these specific narrative angles. Kinda messy, because it’s been a week since I finished it, but here are some things I’d like to highlight: 

1. The pedophilia. I surely wasn’t expecting this to be such a central theme of the novel, but a lot of its main points revolve around it. The most interesting use of this, as a narrative device, is how the girlfriend of Jesper basically accuses him of being a pedophile because he cannot relate to the adults around him. He’s still obsessed with a girl he met when he was 13 years old, and fetishizes a scrunchie he stole from her bag two decades ago. Yeah, I guess Jesper, well into his thirties, is still in love with a 13 year old girl. His girlfriend is almost half his age, and they started dating when she was 15 years old and a lingerie model (!). Zigi mentions how pedophilia was a bougie disease, and well… That idea went right into my thought cabinet (I call it “Bougie Babies for Sale).

Still processing it.

Now, let’s go back to the rest of the main characters. With all this in mind, a pedophilic overtone covers their interest in these four missing girls, but Jasper is the only one who acts on it, sort of. Khan remains in a sort of arrested development (he still uses a shirt he had when he was 13), foregoing normal adult relationships, and Tereesz joins the police as an investigator with the idea of still finding them some day (essentially letting these eternally prepubescent girls define his entire existence), leading him to a very dark path. I wonder if the brutality they afford to the “actual” pedophiles in the story (Vidkun Hird and the Linoleum Salesman) comes from the realization that they are not that different?

2. Obviously, though, this fetishization of the Lund sisters is also a fetishization of the past. The novel states it in the first few pages; they disappeared twenty years ago, in a time that most conservative people remember as the “good old days”. Basically their version of the American Fifties. Now, being obsessed with the past is a running theme in both SaTA and DE, but the angle here is different.

I already said it: the past is not remembered, is fetishized with an almost sexual yearning by a lot of the male characters of the book. They want to be consumed by it (and lucky them! It will) and do nothing more than serve it. It reminds me of a poem by Yamil Nardil Sadek, which, translated to the best of my ability, goes like: 

She awaits me

sitting on the bed,

wearing leather,

and armed to the teeth,

the Memory.

Yeah, that sums up Sacred and Terrible Air pretty well. Everyone is being consumed by the past, bite by bite, and enjoying it. Vidkun Hird, by the mythologized version of his tribe’s history; Sarjan Ambartsumjan, by a miniature ship model that requires constant, devoted thought or else it will disappear, the three main characters by the memory of that summer with the Lund girls. Even the Linoleum Salesman is being haunted and consumed, of sorts, by his sickness and dementia that only sometimes let him take a peek of the past. Beyond that, there are very few characters that do not spend time being followed by relentless ghosts. Literally, in the case of Zigi. Which brings me to…

3. The Pale. It was a really cool concept in Disco Elysium, and it’s an existential nightmare in Sacred and Terrible Air. It always was, really. But here it lets you take a look into it in a way that’s applicable in real life. The Pale is a metaphor for many things, but actually for a single one: A world where our current Capitalist reality facilitates both apathy and yearning for better days, often idealized in our collective pasts.

My favorite scene, one that was incredibly puzzling but so obvious in retrospect, is a beautiful speech by the ghost (?) of Ignus Nilsen to Zigi. I will just paste it here:

“I said terrible things, yes! I stood on a white horse, in a blizzard, and gave speeches. In the mountains, on the construction site… I swung my sword, with silver sunbeams on the hilt. And all around me fluttered white flags, crests of crowned horns made with silver thread, a pentagon between the prongs of the horns, the branches raised to heaven. Everyone who came here with me became happy, Zigi! Communism is powerful! Believe in Communism, it’s a burst of enthusiasm! I promise! It’s beautiful when you believe in a person, but without it…!”

“Without it, there is nothing.”

“Nothing. It was a blizzard, but it was bright, it was morning. Communism is white, it sparkles! Communism is the morning, it is a jubilation!” 

The Pale begins to recede dangerously around the entroponaut.

The fucking Pale recedes with talk of Communism! At first it might appear a little heavy handed (yeah, Communism, by itself, could save the world). But then I got into how Communism could be a solution to the antipathy and chronic nostalgia that sustain Capitalism, and then it hit me. Nilsen, a literal ghost from the past, is talking about a future that could have been. That he wanted to accomplish. That people, probably, can still achieve. The Pale is not eternal, it can be pushed back. Because the Pale seems to subsist on the past, it abhors any talk of the future. A better future. That’s how we solve things, and for a central thesis, is not bad at all.

With that being said, and because I’m just rambling here while pretending I’m working, there are also some things that I just didn’t understand, but maybe it was because of the translation. The original novel is written in a very poetic style, and some of that is still here, but I still need to untangle…

1. The Man. It is said that the day the Lund girls disappeared, they were joined by a mysterious Man that nobody seemed to remember correctly. A character even suspects that she was remembering wrong. Now, the Pale erases people and memories retroactively, so maybe it had something to do with it, but… Who was that? Is there any theory about that Man, or I just missed something? Some scenes and narrations were tough to parse for me (my primary language is not English).

2. Was Malin Lund pregnant? That flash with the fetus was sudden and weird.

3. What was the significance of the three meat piroshkis? They mention that it was unusual that the girls bought them (and if you do the math, you can realize early on that they were not planning to get back home. That purchase didn’t leave them enough money for the bus fare back), but that’s it. Were they for the Man? Also, the narration mentions that Lund girls’ picnic basket contained “the kind of things girls like to eat”, so maybe they were planning to see the boys and bring them the kind of things boys eat? I’m overthinking that? The chapter actually titled “Three Meat Piroshkis” just left me even more confused.

4. I don’t understand how Khan’s pen works at all. The one he brought to the school reunion. That was the part I re-read the most. Anyway, even with that, I loved Sacred and Terrible Air. Definitely one of the most enthralling reads I had, with or without the background of Disco Elysium. I’d still like an official translation that could potentially solve the issues I had, but for now, a Top 10 Book for me.

Go for it now.

#disco elysium #sacred and terrible air #robert kurvitz #literary analysis #random thoughts #book quotes

[revacholianpizzaagenda]

New fan translation of the Disco Elysium novel posted on reddit!

This one comes with the extras and also the original writing/editing/worldbuilding credits, and the lists of hundreds of names of Elysium characters, geographical entities and assorted concepts that fill the inside covers of the printed copy. Hours of unrestrained fun with the lists alone.

And footnotes. So many footnotes. And fayde checks everywhere because you wouldn't believe the stuff that was canonized in English by the game to begin with.

#disco elysium #sacred and terrible air #püha ja õudne lõhn #very partial to the names lists myself. there's a nabucodonosor pryce! some hater! the missing innocence!

[yellow-yarrow]

Disco Elysium / Sacred and Terrible Air / Malevich: Black Square / Damien Hirst: Black Sun / Mark Rothko: Untitled, Black on Grey/ Kathleen Ryan: Bad Peach / Kathleen Ryan: Bad Lemon (Creep) / Malevich: White on white / El Lissitzky: Light Abstraction

#disco elysium #sacred and terrible air #püha ja õudne lõhn #web weaving #de web weaving #todays theme is light and color and the lack of

[tubrasko]

You forgot the most powerful magic of all, the magic of alcoholism and mental illness

And the pjõl trio (+ Zigi)

#disco elysium #equestria: elysium #elysium #my little pony #mlp #harry du bois #kim kitsuragi #sacred and terrible air #püha ja õudne lõhn #pjõl #lilienne carter #lilienne the net picker #cuno de ruyter #kuuno de ruyter #cunoesse #the deserter #dolores dei #inayat khan #jesper de la guardie #tereesz machejek #tag for zigi? idk

[myfriendfaust]

“I’m making you into a cretin, ya feelin’ it??"

#It's a little late but at least I got it finished! #happy anniversary pjõl! <3 #hot entropolic summer #sacred and terrible air #pjõl #püha ja õudne lõhn #tereesz machejek #ZA/UM #disco elysium #artists on tumblr #my art

[yarrowdraws]

"Julia Dobreva came from Graad. Jean Abadanaiz was born in Revachol. She was brilliant, charismatic, a revolutionary comet. He was her partner and stabiliser, the planet who kept her in orbit."

Jean and Julia, the "revolutionary lovers". There isn't much information about them to work with so everything aside from her dark makeup are just my headcanons. I ended up referencing other characters and historical figures, & I took the "forbidden love" as them coming from different classes.

#disco elysium #julia dobreva #jean abadanaiz #sacred and terrible air #im not entirely satisfied with this maybe i'll draw them again someday #guess which historical figures and characters i had on my moodboard for this and i'll send you a telepathic communist kiss

[spockandawe]

Right, here's something new! This is the novel Sacred And Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz, the writer behind Disco Elysium, set in the same alternate universe. The original is written in Estonian, and there's been talk of licensing a translation, but that was supposed to happen in 2020, and given the time lapse since then and other events, it looks increasingly unlikely. So earlier this year, two fan translations dropped! As the fans involved say, definitely support an official translation if it happens, but if it doesn't happen, at least there's this. One translation is by a hired translator, and one is by Group Ibex as MTL that went through iterative edits. And something that's very interesting to me given how much time I've spent wallowing in the danmei pit, I couldn't identify which one i definitely liked BETTER. So rather than wrestling decision paralysis, here we are!

Dos-a-dos time, babey! I did one of these in VERY small size for binderary, but other than that, I think the only time I've done this is for my sixfold/fourteenfold experiments? It's very pleasing to have one in my hands that's so substantial. There's 350ish pages on either side of this, and I love it a lot!

It does feature one easter egg that's a special treat for me. When I was trying to pull together the front matter and scrounging for info about the original Estonian novel, google translate gave me some... interesting takes on the title, and I took my favorite (holy and terrible smell) and tucked it inside my endpapers. To build on the stack of in-jokes that will be inscrutable to anyone who stumbles on this book later, I scented the spines of the books with perfume, 'the sea foams milk,' both because the scent felt right for this and because the name felt thematically appropriate

I had a very fun time with this! The formatting took more time than I expected, but the actual binding was nice and relaxing. I don't cover many covers with paper, but this paper was so PERFECT for the story, and then I got excited about matching the endpapers to covers, and the bookcloth spine was a flawless color match, and this all came together so nicely! It was a great little project, and I had a great time making it :D

#crafts #bookbinding #sacred and terrible air #robert kurvitz #dos a dos