here's the life i've always longed for

23 ❦ queer ❦ she/her recovering ex-catholic you can find my thoughts under #journal

[nn-ee-zz]

Hiii, I was just wandering if you wouldn’t mind blabbing about the symbolism and stuff behind some of your design choices with the horse men that you might not have mentioned. Like with pestilence and death specifically I feel like there’s a lot of symbolism I’m picking up on without fully understanding. Like with Death’s sickle, both a homage to the classic scythe and a nod to the “reaping/harvesting” of souls. And with pestilence I feel like there’s something that I’m skirting around without grasping. The multiple legs strike me as a deliberate similarity to insects, and if I’m right I think that the rider is bound in a body bag type deal, similar to how disease and pestilence is so often both spread through the improper disposal of body’s, and how wide spread pestilence leads to mass graves filled with disease and the horrible anonymity that comes with being just one face in a pit of hundreds etc? All of this is, ofc, to say that I’ve adored your series of the horsemen so far and would go absolutely rabid for some insight on some of your design choices<3

My horsemen of the apocalypse! I will add the original commentary and some extras, less about the symbolism and more about what brought me to design them the way I did.

The symbolism is for you to chose, there is no wrong answer.

WAR

I can't bring myself to represent war with a cool knight. It's horror. War is a bound child crowned with shrapnel, tied to a wounded horse that is being pulled forward by unseen people.

I've read a handful of books regarding war. A lost quote said that it should be shown as horror, it should make generals vomit, it should make you sick. I haven't seen war but my family has.

It was the first horseman I've designed, and it was in my sketchbook for months (maybe over a year, maybe even more) before I had the courage to draw it. I was really scared about how people would react to a mutilated child.

Recommended reading: The Red Crown - Mikhail Bulgakov, a short story about a man coping with the loss of his brother in the war

FAMINE

Someone who lived thro a famine shared that their head was only occupied with thoughts of food. Famine consumes your mind. All animals were eaten. Neighbors gave their pets away cuz they couldn't do it themselves. People walked around town as if in a dazed dream, slowly

Recommended reading: The Last Witnesses - Svetlana Alexievitch, a collection of testimonials of people who were children when WW2 began. Some quotes below;

'''A cat! A cat!' Other children saw it and started chasing it. The educators were local habitants, looked at us as if we were insane. In Leningrad there were no living cats left...A living cat was a dream. Food for one month...We talked about it, but they didn't believe us.''

''During the first year of evacuation, we didn't notice nature, everything that was nature provoked in us only one desire - taste to see if it's edible. Only a year later I noticed the beauty of the Urals''

''I dreamt of catching a sparrow and eating it...''

''A candle burns and the shopgirl cuts the bread pieces. People follow her with their gaze. Her every movement...with burning eyes...crazed...and all that in silence.''

''People walked slowly through the city like shadows. Like in a dream...a deep dream...As in, you see it, but you think you're seeing a dream. Those sluggish movements...floating...As if a person walked on water and not on land.''

''In Leningrad there are a lot of monuments, but one is missing that should exist. They forgot about it. The monument to the dogs of the seige. Dear doggy, forgive me...''

I don't like talking about it. It made no sense to draw Famine with a horse.

PESTILENCE

Based on the notes of a doctor who said the most frightening thing about viral disease was how it didn’t frighten. People didn’t know or didn't care. They lived and spread until it was too late and they became another name on the record

The clothing being made out of shredding plastic is no coincidence; pollution is a form of pestilence too

Recommended reading: Notes from a Countryside Doctor - Mikhail Bulgakov. Roughly translated quote below;

''Ah, I verified that here syphilis was frightening precisely because it did not frighten. That was why I evoked that woman.* I remembered her with a kind of affectionate respect: because she had been afraid. But she was the only one!''

*Early in the chapter, doctor mentions a woman that appeared in the clinic with a letter from her soldier husband, where he wrote that he had syphilis and told her she should go to the doctor too.

DEATH

Recommended reading: Voices of Chernobyl - Svetlana Alexievitch. The Death of Ivan Ilitch - Lev Tolstoi

“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”

Death is the only horseman that doesn’t need to mount their horse; they will reach everyone eventually. Who is the saddle for then? Open ended question because this one you have to figure out personally

Many people pointed out how the horse is a Clydesdale. Good eyes! I purposefully asked a friend to guide me towards what type of horses are the sturdiest and most-friendly looking. I drew the horse grazing. It's not injured, it doesn't gallop. It's grazing peacefully because life moves on.

This is the only design that had a painting serve as a base - The Reaper, by Alexey Venetsianov. Not much or nothing at all is written about, I saw it in a book. It is a literal reaper but it haunted me, as if it's portraying more than a person.

The choice to make it a woman was due to a book about a crematory (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty) that connected women to death because everyone born is bound to die.

Ahhh, I don't want to give it all away. It's fun to figure things out. About them all. From the enviroment, to the movement, to the horses themselves. Many people even mentioned details that I did not notice and didn't add purposefully that were so inspired and amazing. I truly mean that the interpretations of the public enrich the works even more than my own words. And it's an honor to share that work with everyone.

Thank you anon!

[stlamb]

i'm excited to live the rest of my life like it belongs to me

[oresti-s]

Selected Poems, Master, Serene, Fernando Pessoa.

[exchristianjoy]

Undevotional - 1 Corinthians 15:31

Devaluing our lives makes it easier to convince us to throw them away or devote them wholly to someone else. It is meant to separate us from the inherent value of our lives. And it is impossibly cruel, on top of all that, to not even appreciate the sacrifice but instead demand it.

[amillionkilopascals]

there's something deeply painful about being in love with the way catholicism is packaged while knowing that truly, in its essence, it is something that is harmful and not good for me.

the facade of warmth, of beauty, that looks so alluring to the external observer, that gives way to abuse and a deep darkness at its core.

it's hungry work, pushing the poisoned fruit away from my lips when my family and loved ones are crying out to me to take it.

[winged-thinged]

The more I think about it, the more I think it truly is pretty damning that the best thing liberal Christians have to say about Christianity is that you can make a good belief system out of it, if you just ignore or reinterpret half the content. Like, yeah I'm sure that's true. I could also take a transcript from the Ben Shapiro show and take a Sharpie to it, and eventually come out with something meaningful, but I wouldn't credit Ben Shapiro for the result. I'd be aware that the product was blackout poetry, and that the actual poet was me.

I'm happy for the people who find meaning in making blackout poetry out of Christianity. I think taking what values resonate with you and leaving the rest is probably a healthier and more successful way of doing Christianity than taking a strictly literal reading of the Bible and struggling to obey the letter of every law. I just think it's silly (and dishonest) to pretend that that meaning was always already there. Like, look, I did a dual major in english and theology. I know systematics. I know how to interpret a text. Picking and choosing your textual evidence and rejecting your own worldview's foundational principles and ignoring most of the text's historical context is just not going to get you a well-supported reading or a solid, internally-consistent philosophical system.

It might get you a better story, though.

[brightdeadthing]

Come. And Be My Baby, Maya Angelou

[typewriter-worries]

[ Text ID:

The highway is full of big cars going nowhere fast And folks is smoking anything that'll burn Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass And you sit wondering where you're going to turn. I got it. Come. And be my baby.

Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow But others say we've got a week or two The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror And you sit wondering what you're gonna do. I got it. Come. And be my baby. ]

[yeehawpim]

I can be shaped by more than the things that hurt me

[unpackingbaggage]

Always trying to explain to my baffled atheist friends why God “suddenly” not being real is such a mindfuck.

And it’s like - there’s this guy. If you can learn what the guy likes and how he operates you can learn the boundaries of the world. You can study and say “xyz won’t happen because that would be against his character/his word” or whatever.

It’s very scary thinking shit can just happen and no one is in charge of it. Could a mind-control fungus take over humans? Sure! Why not? There’s apparently one that affects ants already.

The world is the same but it’s the perception of control that’s different. You know the boundaries of the possible. When things are terrible you can lean on the idea that there is an eternal plan at play that you just can’t understand yet. There’s this comfort that not only will things work out but you’ll get to personally see it eventually.

It’s “You’ll understand when you’re older” on a cosmic scale.

[fashionablyuninvitedx]

sorry for being weird and evasive. i was raised to believe that having wants and needs was a moral failing

[cithaerons]

Rothko wanted to paint basic human emotion. So he painted red over red over red. Behind the colour he was looking for light. In 1942 he painted The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, where Iphigenia is not a girl, but a black pine already resined in grief. Above her the amnesia of light, an umber sky, shadows spilling white, the only motion the white hands of the wind. The story of Iphigenia was never about the girl, but the men who called for the blood of a girl knowing that the winds would one day change. The forest charred, the air stilled, deranged, and the truth beneath it all is fear, was always fear, the open grave, the charcoal line, the dead growing out of the living like lichen, the pine a blood-eyed child, the pyres loose stones and living rooms. Dress it up in the white hands of the wind. Call it need. Call it necessity. Rothko wanted to paint basic human emotion so looked behind the light and found blood rushing to no end and no knowledge of end.

Ollie Cowley, Rothko / On Fear

[winged-thinged]

thinkin about how the church starves you of joy and peace and connection with the world and your neighbors and real experiences (and sometimes, literally, of food), and then tells you that Christ is the bread of life, now take and eat. and the more you listen and the more you substitute this fairy bread for the real sustenance of life—that is, experiencing the world; that is, joy and laughter and sex and connection and new perspectives; that is, living—the hungrier you get. and the hungrier you get, the more they tell you, turn to Christ. forsake the world. Christ is the bread of life.

[winged-thinged]

:/ the weird thing about trauma from a religious upbringing and abusive parenting is that there is no "before" to go back to. there is no finding a "second chance." there's no "person that you used to be" to strive for or fail at, no shiny happy memory of what life used to be like before you were buried.

there's just an endless twisting mire behind you. a story that won't quite sit right. a gray haze, and you. there are happy memories. hard, shiny parts that jut out from the morass at awkward angles, times when you almost felt like you were a person, for once. and there's you, picking your way out of the fog. awake for the first time, and still half-dreaming, feeling like a creature from another land, an ethereal thing ill at ease within the bright, loud, too-real Earth.

all these disjointed memories, half-forgotten and glimpsed sidelong, shaking in your hands. you want to put them down, but doing so means going into that buzzing shaking place without words where you used to not-exist. means vomiting yourself up in gouts and gouts of humiliating sludge. hurrying to catch up and try to build yourself a life in a world you never quite adjusted to, learning how to use tools foreign to your hands while all the time ignoring the whispers, the dream-world beckoning come back.

[resignedseraph]

Kinda funny in a fucked up way how the christianity I grew up was like, following the direct opposite of BDSM safety/etiquette procedures? You never see the dom, you can't opt out, you explicitly can't have any hard lines as for what the dom can ask of you/what the dom can do if you retaliate, you're automatically "in" by existing, any aftercare-seeming actions just gaslight you into staying, etc etc. Which I guess makes sense for why a lot of ex christians end up exploring BDSM and finding it fulfilling and comforting

[deservedgrace]

There's also a reason I almost always say "harm" when talking about issues in the church and not "bigotry". Bigotry is part of harm, sure, but it isn't the whole picture.

I think sin doctrine is harmful. I think the concept of original sin is harmful. I think purity culture is harmful. I think hell doctrine is harmful. I think vertical morality is harmful. I think mandatory forgiveness is harmful. I think sin leveling is harmful. I think emotion and behavior and thought control are harmful. I think child indoctrination is harmful. I think believing you are separate from the world ("we're in the world not of the world") is harmful. I think isolating/insulating yourself from the world is harmful. I think believing this life is your "practice life" and your "real life" is in heaven is harmful. I think believing that you alone hold the one source of truth is harmful. I think spiritual bypassing is harmful. I think atonement theology is harmful. I think proselytizing is harmful. I think telling people that their thoughts, actions, emotions, beliefs are being monitored every second of every day is harmful. I think believing you are more knowledgeable than experts because you have an all knowing God on your side is harmful. I think believing you know other people's experiences better than they do because you have an all knowing God on your side is harmful. I think encouraging/requiring victims of abuse to put up with abuse because divorce is a sin is harmful. I think prioritizing faith over evidence is harmful.

I'm certainly missing things but this is long enough as is. And not every christian or church does or believes every single one of these, but none of these are one-off or two-off or even three-off things I've experienced. These are all patterns I've noticed.

So I find it odd that when I talk about harm within christianity, a lot of christians only hear "bigotry". And I also find sentiments along the lines of "it's not the doctrine it's the people carrying out the doctrine imperfectly" odd. Even if there were a church that was 100% bigotry free, addressing bigotry doesn't automatically address any of these other things. And I think that the harm christianity does goes far beyond bigotry. I think a lot of the harm is baked into it, baked right into the doctrine. Which means that for every person causing harm by carrying out the doctrine "incorrectly", there are just as many causing harm by carrying it out "correctly".

[sophloaaaaaf]

the whole fucking idea of christianty doesn't make sense to me when I think about it. God supposedly sent jesus to "save us", but from who? He "paid our debts", but to who? Do we really have free will if the other option is death? If it's do or die is that not coercion? If a gun was put to your head and you were told to give up your wallet, would you really be giving it up out of free will? Can you love someone who would leave you to die if you didn't? What loving creator would create someone knowing that at their birth they are condemned?

Did god leave us to die in the name of free will?

[lindamarieansonsnaps]