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tryst-art-archive · 1 year

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March 2012: Dead Ten Years (Draft 1)

This is both a nonfiction personal essay about me, my creative process, and my stepping away from art in 2009, and a Khra-nicles prequel/side story about Unge. It was done for a fiction class, but I'd already established a habit of telling true stories about me while pretending they were fiction.

I'll talk about this a little more in one of the upcoming posts, but in March 2012 I briefly returned to dA and tried to resume drawing and creating as I had done when I was a teen. It would not last.

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I have always sat down for tea with my characters, sipping away in the café of my mind where we chat about their lives and their futures and their thoughts and their dreams. Before I decided I was too terrible an artist to wield a pencil, I entered these teatime meetings by drawing my characters endlessly: profile, three-quarters view, face-forward stare, hands and arms and legs and feet and limbs, limbs, limbs, and a raging expression here or a joyous one there or an image of melancholy or remorse or fear or shock or thrill, and then the most important scenes from each of their lives until finally I went back and did the whole thing over again, pages of history notes sacrificed to the characters’ forms, their lines obfuscating the words.

For a time, starting around 2009, I ceased drawing any of them at all, convinced that the only worthy endeavor was to create new characters, explore new realms, run away from the world I’d been building since 2005 and the pantheon of characters Mare and I had birthed in the primordial soup of our friendship, all to attain a kind of writing I didn’t particularly enjoy. Somehow, every character following that so thoroughly drawn tribe fell flat, pancakes on a cold griddle. Proportionally, my sense of frustration grew, and I slowly became convinced I wasn’t good for much but long strings of actions, play-by-plays of capture the flag, and roaming introspections that blended Eastern and Western in a way that my peers did not like.

And then, in a fit of desperation, unable to conceive of a single new plot or personality, I wrote about Arren, andI felt reborn. It seemed to me then that my mistake all along had been to deny the characters I’d had tea with everyday of my life for four years. Quietly, I began to draw.

Unge S. Chickt stood at her window overlooking the city of P’tak from its opulent heart. Xev had been dead for ten years.

It was 0 A.K., the age-turning year following the death of the Demon Kifer, and Unge could hardly get used to the ideaJust the fact that the Demon was dead was nigh-impossible to adjust to after his reign of terror—thousands of years of civilization burning under his sanguine gaze ending all at once, demarcated by a change in calendar. Only the Elementals who were as old as Khra itself remembered a time before the Demon.

It had also been a year since Unge had met the hero who had slain Kifer: Arren Minetelle, a petite Fox Raeth with ice blue eyes wrapped in the blood crimson of a Ranger’s cloak. At the time, the girl had pep, a raging fire in her spirit that did not compromise, and a conviction that hers was the right path, the just one. She appeared, determined to slay Kifer, armed with knowledge from Rhawen, and prepared to risk it all. Unge sent her to Nassab in search of an artifact the girl had called the Demon’s Eye and did not see her again until the Battle at the Elemental Fields. There, Unge had joined her forces—IMDP—with the Elementals’ and the Rangers’ in order to defeat Kifer and his army. Arren appeared amidst the fray, her left eye gone, replaced with a desiccated, angry orb. Unge had naught to do but watch as the girl grappled with Kifer, tearing out the massive, glowing red stone that occupied his left socket. The Demon had screamed, his voice reaching an unearthly pitch of terror, and from Arren’s eye the desiccated thing leapt out with an angry hiss, falling into Kifer’s now empty socket. All at once, the Demon exploded into dust.

After the battle, Arren was nowhere to be found, and the Ranger’s Head was dead. Though Raeth celebrated Kifer’s death—such celebration Unge had never before seen—terror seized the Rangers’ ranks, chickens without heads. And then Arren returned, slogging out of the northern forests and stumbling westward to the Rangers’ Headquarters. The Rangers, the country’s populace, even the Elementals, demanded that she be the new Head, this woman who had killed the world’s great evil. Yet she stood before them, her left socket still a ragged hole, the edges of the bone cracked, the skin scarring, and she said no.

Garron Baylinthe became the Head, and Unge should have been happy about that. The man was a native of P’tak, born and bred in the city’s love for technology, though woefully filled with its distrust of magic, too. Still, this should have been fortuitous for Unge, placing her and her city in a less precarious position with the rest of the nation. All the same, the moment filled her with an odd foreboding, and before long she found herself contacting Arren, asking one thing: Watch the Rangers. Become a double agent.

Miraculously, the hero had agreed.

In some sense, I suppose, you could almost frame my understanding of my characters as a psychosis. As I was, by and large, depressed and suicidal between the ages of ten and nineteen, I developed a habit of consulting my characters. I would sit in the shower—I would have been fourteen or fifteen at the time—and, feeling thoroughly sorry for myself for no good reason, I would conjure up an image of Kriamiss or Pain, and I would imagine them embracing me, lending me their strength through simple contact.

This evolved, as such things do, such that, in the middle of high school, I would walk through the halls feeling them behind me—imaginary friends though it only occurs to me now to name it so—and it would be a simple matter to draw strength from them in that way. And, again, the whole affair evolved, as the fact of being single began to chafe, such that the characters became ideals, promising that, oh, if only they were real, they’d certainly love me because clearly no one else would.

There’s something shameful in that memory, an embarrassment lurking around the roots of the heart, and yet when I think how, after I’d abandoned them all, I brushed closer to death than I ever had before, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps the trade-off was fair.

Unge had never trusted the Rangers. They were, to her mind, a dangerous lot. Their Head was also Raeth’s Head, and while he was elected by the Raethian populace at large, Unge couldn’t help but wonder if the system could be rigged. Even when she was younger, breasts barely formed and yet already yearning for a greater purpose, the fact that the Rangers were Raeth’s only police force, its only military filled her with dread, fear, and something acid like bile. Where was the safety on that gun? Suppose, just suppose, that the Rangers ever went astray? Just suppose that they lost sight of their purpose, lost sight of their limits, lost sight of Raeth’s needs. What then? Who would be there to stop them? The Elementals didn’t bother themselves about Raethian business. The Mages were a scattered group of farmers’ helpers and wandering midwives. There was no one else.

For a long time, Unge struggled with that thought. Even when she set out from Nitemaer, determined to see the country in full, that sense of Ranger Danger followed her, with no feasible solution in tow. None, until Xev.

Twenty years ago, Xev said, “You’re right about this Ranger thing. We gotta do something ‘bout it.” Xev was from N’zik, a small city surrounded by desert to one side and jungle to the other, previously the capital of an ancient Dragonfolk civilization, and now just one of the four Raethian settlements that could be properly called cities, one for each point of the compass. Unge was not terribly impressed with the southern city, though the use of sandstone was lovely.

“I know, but what’s there to do?” Unge was perhaps twenty at the time, a traveler for only two years who’d nonetheless done away with the decadent fabrics and elaborate constructions of Nitemaer’s garb in favor of the simple leather and cotton to be found in most Raethian villages. “I’ve been thinking about this for years, and still I don’t know.”

“No ideas?” Xev, a Dog Raeth all of sleek Labrador blacks and dewy brown eyes, melted over the arm of his chair. He seemed impossibly long, arms trailing across the floor, toes delicately brushing the ground, and yet he was still, somehow, in proportion.

“Well.” She paused, turning the thoughts over in her mind. “If you’ve got one organization in charge of everything, that’s a problem. But what if you had two?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Two?”

“Say you’ve got the Rangers, just as they are, but then you make, like, a second Rangers— ‘cept call them something else obviously—“

“Obviously.”

“—Well then you task the second group with not only defending the peace and all that stuff, but also with keeping an eye on the Rangers. Then you go to the Rangers and say, ‘Hey, keep an eye on the new guys.’ So now you’d have double the police force and both would be making sure the other one didn’t slip up and go evil on us all.”

Xev smiled and reached out to touch Unge’s tawny hair. “Well why not do that then?”

Unge blinked, and one of her canine ears twitched. “Well, I mean, that’s not something I can do.”

Xev merely shook his head and offered her his hand.

Within a year the foundations of IMDP had been laid, and the year after that, they began recruiting. Five years after that conversation, IMDP was complete with secret agents, a business front to hide behind, and the cooperation of P’tak’s local government. The time had not seemed prudent to reveal themselves to the Rangers—much more effective to merely spy on them for now, until IMDP was of equal strength at least—and so the organization remained in shadow, its business front slowly elevating it until its letters stood atop a skyscraper right at the heart of P’tak, among the richest of the rich.

And then Xev died.

Here is something else about the characters and me. Nearly all of them are some part of myself, magnified over and over until perhaps you couldn’t tell they were ever me at all. Yet the fact remains that they are magnifications, and if you really, truly wanted, you could trace back their lineage. Kriamiss was a wish fulfillment fantasy on steroids, and forever and again, in the present, it is always a struggle to determine how to reduce an angsty enchanter-healer-angel-thing back into a person without upsetting the tender chronology of his entire story arc, of which Unge S. Chickt is but a small part. And so you have to look again and see what else they stole from you. By which I mean, from me. For Kriamiss it is the angst. Specifically, the angst that flies in the face of all the talent, all the ability, all the good fortune, and all the love that has ever and will ever be showered upon his foolish, morose head. His is a suburban ennui in a place that has no suburbs—though obviously I have suburbs, roiling in my blood the way a tar pit might bubble. Arren Minetelle, great savior of not only Raeth but all of Khra—the world’s hero, defeating its personification of evil—has what in common with a girl from [town], Massachusetts who can barely handle a stubbed toe, never mind ripping her own eye out— twice? For that you should look to Arren’s motives. Here is a woman whose cause is so just and so righteous that surely she must be the hero, surely she has saved us all, and yet she hunts down Kifer not because it is the right thing to do—so many had tried and failed over the thousands of years of his life—but because he killed the man she loved, a Ranger called Rusek who believed in due process. Arren enters in on a quest for revenge first—an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind—and on a quest for justice second, and therefore Arren is a cross-section of should and is, and if I don’t have that in common with her, then I don’t know myself.

But perhaps you don’t know these people, though now you must know Unge, and I’ve mentioned Xev, but as he is borne of M[...]’s consciousness, not my own, I cannot tell you about him. I can tell you about Unge, but I think you will find it anticlimactic.

Unge is among the oldest of the bunch. I drew her before anime styling crept, poorly, into my artist’s hand. I drew her before there was a Khra or a Kriamiss or an Arren, at a time when M[...] and I were only just acquaintances who shared a school bus. Unge came out of Neopets.com, out of a time when anthropomorphic animals were new and exciting to me so that I took to drawing gelerts—strange, dog-like things—in skirts with big, lavender eyes—a terrible sight to behold. When I “adopted” a gelert someone had named Ungeschickt, the name disappointed me. I therefore had to make Ungeschickt – quickly shortened to Unge for all intents, dues, and purposes – into the most badass of motherfuckers. And so, the first picture of Unge, ever, presented her as a femme fatale in a pink miniskirt and pearls, thoughtfully gesturing with her bloodied dagger. In this way, Unge was born of my love of 007, only to transmogrify, upon her entry into Khra, into a desire for a better world.

A knock, followed by Tarrin Carithelle, Rien Carithelle, and Arren Minetelle, all but Rien looking stoic. Unge turned, forty years of espionage squeezed into a business suit, forty years of aggressive gaiety etched into her face. “Hello, my darlings.”

Tarrin and Arren sketched stiff salutes, each in their own style, and Tarrin pretended that she was not awed by Raeth’s Very Own Hero. Rien beamed, unfazed by the world’s goings ons, mind still tangling with gears and levers and electricity.

“What did Rhawen say?” Unge asked, settling into the plush chair behind her desk and gesturing for the trio to settle themselves where they saw fit.

Tarrin snorted, mouth opening to snarl about the peculiar woman, but Rien cut her off. “She doesn’t want to see anyone besides Arren right now.” The tiny girl adjusted her glasses. “Though she did like the things we brought her. Especially the mechanical pencils. Completely taken with them.”

Unge rolled a pen on her desk. “But we don’t get to know where to find her?”

“No,” Arren said, a stone slab dropping. Her youth frightened Unge, sometimes. The ghastly eye socket, the runs in her face, deep-set, that made her look like marble, the ice blue of her remaining eye—just ice now—her hand never straying far from her sword’s pommel (a sword only allowed by P’tak’s strict ban on selling guns outside the city and the centuries-long lack of trade between Raeth and Nassab, though that wouldn’t last much longer if Unge had anything to do with it).

“No?” The pen rolled off of Unge’s desk.

Tarrin grumbled but held her tongue.

“Rhawen is not in a position to be as helpful as she’d like, and to that end it is better for her if as few people know her location as possible.” Arren allowed herself a sigh and continued, “I had thought that enabling you to go to her directly might not be asking too much, but Rhawen is adamant on this point. She is…”

“Yes, what is she?” Unge snapped, frustration surprising both her and the three women before her.

“Unge?” Rien squeaked. Unge shook her head.

One of the lines in Arren’s brow softened. “Rhawen is something of the world. Old. She has her reasons.”

“Well I’d feel a lot fuckin’ better about it if she’d just give us straight goddamn answers,” Tarrin growled.

The brow line reasserted itself. “Perhaps you should just get better at riddles then,” Arren said.

Unge pondered for a moment. She’d been working with Rhawen before Arren had killed Kifer, but the woman had never opened up to Unge the way she had to Arren, and even that was a chilly connection.

A wave of fatigue washed over her, and she missed Xev.

“Well thank you for trying, my lovelies,” Unge said, feeling herself sink onto her desk. “I suppose we’ll just do things the way we always have. We’ll wait.” Xev wouldn’t have tolerated this waiting. He’d have been tracking right up to Rhawen’s house and demanding answers, all with a pleasant smile.

One of the oddities of the internet is that every individual’s idea of it is discrete, separate from every other individual’s idea of it. My internet is different from yours is different from Steve’s is different from your little cousin’s even though we all can and do talk about the internet as if it were one thing—one place—when, in fact, it is a thousand tiny microcosms. My internet was a place for outsiders to hide and feel less alone. I spent time on Neopets, constructing, building, proposing characters and web pages and drawings and later yammering on to deviantArt and then role playing with M[...] on AIM—all day, every day, talking around the character’s conversations as if we were at some sort of party—and on and on and on, until between M[...] and I, we had produced an entire world filled with faces I knew and loved in a way I could not know or love the people around me because reality would never be anything but disappointing. (And so there it is.)

But what is odd is that when we left that world, all the other fictions out there were never enough for me either. So it was disappointing reality, disappointing fiction, and then before you know it, you’re what feels like a lifetime away from those socially reclusive days, and you find yourself starting to submerge yourself in all those old habits right back over again. And what’s more, M[...] is too, though the methods are slightly different. Why, after abandoning deviantArt four years ago, have we returned to it, just as she graduates from [college]? Why, four years after I set aside Khra, the KriamBook, the Pupcat Riley Story, the Asher Concept, and Arren’s Tale, have I found myself inexorably drawn towards them, fed up and disgusted with everything else that droops out of my pen, just when I’m meant to be serious about my work, my career, my life, and the future? What has caused us to come full circle, and why am I the only one of us twain questioning it?

Xev died on a mission of first contact.

Unge harbored two great dreams. The first: fix the Raethian judicial and political system to better prevent corruption. The second: re-establish diplomatic ties with Nassab and undo the political damage caused by the Great War, a thousand or so years ago. The trouble with this latter goal was, first and foremost, that a Human of Nassab would always kill and Raethian on sight, and most Raethians wouldn’t behave a whole lot more nobly. Oh, naturally, illegal trading had always occurred between the two continents—P’tak’s technological wealth was drawn directly from that fact—but Unge desired open trade. Raethian society was ruled by magic—the fact of the Elementals on the continent ensured that—and Nassab, left without easy access to magic, had turned to technology. And Unge wanted both. Nitemaer was one of the few places that mixed them, and that mentality ran deep in Unge.

It was only natural that—observing the black market ships sailing between Bollen on Nassab and P’tak on Raeth—Unge determined that IMDP would certainly engage in some trading of its own and once begun, found their dealings with Bollen went well. Unge then thought to expand. To that end, she sent Xev to northern Nassab, and when he returned, he was merely a head in a box, a note pinned to the outside: “No Dogs.”

Unge shook the cobwebs from her mind. Tarrin and Rien had left, returning to their respective departments. Arren remained, sipping water and looking over Unge’s view of P’tak. Unge, at her side, pointed out through the city’s haze to where the ocean was just barely visible. “One of these days, that’s gonna be all boats all the time.” She smirked. “You won’t be the only Raethian to scoot around Nassab.”

Arren nodded, remaining eye closed. “Rhawen asked a favor of me.”

“Oh?”

From a pouch on her hip, Arren removed a small letter, some tiny object weighing down one of the envelope’s corners. It was sealed with orange wax—an odd choice—the imprint of what looked to be a dragon in flight squashed into the pumpkin color. An extinct animal for an ancient woman who didn’t look a day over twenty-five, apparently knew everything there was to know, and then refused to tell you. Why not dragons?

Unge took it to the desk and broke the seal. Alongside the letter, Rhawen had inserted a pendant matching the seal impressed into the wax—one of those extinct dragons in flight. Unge ran her thumb over it, unsure of its connotation, though remembering that Rhawen wore one such pendant. She glanced at Arren, a question in her eyes, but Arren did not meet her gaze, sipping her glass of water instead.

Unge settled into her chair and read the letter.

Allow me just one more moment of your time, before you read Rhawen’s letter, before you decide if all this time spent poring over a day in Unge’s life and the musings of her author—her technical, real author, not Rhawen, the Narrator, who is the voice who tells these stories—was wasted.

Purpose applies to all of these situations. I don’t know what your life was like in 2001 or 2002, but I know what mine was like, and for all the material fortune in the world, I was nonetheless struck with a deep-seated misery that I couldn’t explain, and really I still can’t, at least not in a way that feels authentic. I was filled with guilt over this feeling—“There are children starving in Africa!”—and yet the feeling persisted until I became jealous of the starving children because at least they knew why they were miserable. It’s no surprise then that the characters I birthed were universally sad, universally restless, and universally struck with tepid misfortunes which, in theory, should be world-shattering, and yet in application remained ineffective. Kriamiss’s mother dies when he is fifteen, and he flees his home, finds the father that abandoned them and that man dies too, and then when he finds someone to love in the world, she kills him, and it isn’t until he’s been dead five hundred years that he has a second chance—to save the world, to become whole. My inability to feel anything at a degree less than acutely became his saga of misfortunes—too many to be useful, narrative-wise, but just enough to try to justify feeling the way I did.

So why feel so acutely? It’s hard to say. Do you blame a chemical imbalance; do you blame a spoiled upbringing; do you blame an inherent, genetic sensitivity, or do you perhaps put it down to some sort of flaw, a lack of the “right stuff”? I’m not sure; it’s all too far away to say anything concrete about. The memory is unreliable, the heart is unreliable, the mind is unreliable, even the evidence of the eyes is unreliable, because all is perception. In the present time, however, let us put it all down to purpose. There was purpose when we created, there was a loss of purpose when we stopped, and now we seek out purpose again—and so the whole world, the whole array of characters, have returned, because they cannot exist without us.

And how about Kriamiss or Unge? Why is it that every character I create is alone, at the end of the day, always by themselves, contained within the space of their own bodies, isolated? I am alone when I am with people; I am alone when I am not. Solitude, then purpose. We—the characters and me—travel alone and look for something to do. Something meaningful. Save the world, that’s always good, or maybe just improving it will do. Always with the epic narrative, always with the complete saga, and always with the search for purpose and the inescapable solitude.

I reiterate: the characters are me.

Unge—

Some twenty years ago, I sat on a café veranda in N’zik, and I watched a young Dog Raeth with tawny hair and a full bosom chitter and laugh with another young Dog Raeth, this one a sea of blacks and browns constructed into a long, lithe, lingering body. They laughed with one another, at one another, at themselves, caught in what I shall call puppy love. I saw, at that time, their histories and their present, and while I have never been known to predict the future, everything I could sense about them suggested that they were bound for greater things. When, ten years ago, one of the two passed from this world on to Ahrk, I knew of this too, and I thought for a long time about how to make things right.

What answer can I give you? Arren sought out her own, and I supported her, and now, even with all the knowledge a mortal can be allowed, I find myself regretting. There lies Kifer, dead, and is not one girl’s youth worth the safety of thousands? But still the regret persists.

I digress.

You have a dream.

The Dragonfolk are waning, but their presence is still felt and revered in the northern climes of Nassab. Southern Nassab is, generally, filled with hatred for their once-oppressors, but in the north the sentiment is less present, the sins more forgiven, and so a Dragonfolk token can go a long way. Therefore, please find enclosed the symbol of the Dragonfolk; may it earn you passage to those places closed off to all but the eldest. I will only ask that you do not use it to go to the Verde Isles.

With these thoughts in mind, I wish you well and tell you now that Xev died wishing for you.

Rhawen E. Fox

Unge choked and found, through her sobs, that Arren stood at her shoulder, merely holding it. The younger woman maintained that spot, one worn hand acknowledging Unge’s pain for the half hour it took the older woman to regain herself, her gaiety washed away by a ten-year-old memory of a dead man.

When Unge had subsided, Arren took herself to the other side of the desk and sat down. She folded her arms on the black, sanitized wood, her posture suddenly more like the girl she should have been. Eyes hard on Unge, she said, “I’ve known tears like that.”

Unge nodded. “Xev was—he made this. All of this. Just by saying it was possible. Just ‘You can do it, Unge.’ This can be done. And then it was. That was all it took. He said I could do it, so I did.” Her breath rattled. “How do you come back from that? How do you answer for that death?”

Arren took her hand and gave it a squeeze. Unge could feel every crease, every callous in the hero’s hand. Here was where her sword had worn itself a home and here at the finger tips the place for her bow. These tiny cuts for every hour of traveling from one Raethian coast to the other and these weathered folds for every night spent alone beneath the stars forming a web to catch demons. Arren’s nails were dirty, but in spite of the usage written across her hands, Unge could see where once the delicate shape of a genteel woman’s glove may have fit, and Unge’s own palm felt suddenly fat and chubby in the grasp of one so conflictingly worked.

Arren withdrew, her whole self drawn back up into the raw eye socket, sucked behind a glacial mask. She stood, saying, “The Rangers will miss me momentarily. Baylinthe’s put his son and Brue Nadir as his top officers. Most of the men are terrified of Brue, which leaves me and the boy to see that morale stays up.”

Unge closed her eyes, nodding her understanding, but found Arren leaning in when she’d opened them again.

“The boy. Maroc Baylinthe. He might be trouble.”

There seemed something more she wanted to say, and Unge prompted her—“How so?”—but Arren shook her head and stepped away. “It may just be me. The men love him.” A tightness around her mouth suggested a deeper trouble, but Arren shook it off. “No, it is nothing. He is a Ranger, after all.” With that, Arren saluted, said her farewells, and whisked out of the room, just a red cloak disappearing behind metal doors.

Unge considered the disappearing cloak and fingered the pendant. She laughed. “Dragonfolk symbols and the great hero feels compassion? Oh dear.” She’d have to have someone look deeper into these Baylinthes. Arren wasn’t the most intuitive of ladies, but Unge wasn’t about to dismiss her discomfit out of hand. The Rangers had completely failed to exhibit corruption, these past ten years. Perhaps now was the time?

Unge left her chair, pendant still in hand, and returned to her favorite spot, staring out over the city—her city—where she contemplated reconciling the half-animal Raethians to their long-lost cousins, the Humans of Nassab.

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frostygalaxies · 4 years

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Memes for a fandom that doesn’t exist, made with my group chat

#memes #memes for a fandom that doesnt exist #fandom #taz #mbmbam #mcelroy #tma #penumbra pod #kifer city

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seaoreos · 2 years

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*gnome voice* ha hae!

#I’M TOO GAY. Litteraly I cannot take this amount of gay feeling s #i cannot. Explain #i just. Wah.#red will make fun of me for this lol #not redd (friend) or red (Kifer city)#but. Y’know. Red :o) red my friend red #they tease me abt being gay for him. Mean 2 me </3 #although redd would tease me probably JSJHEHEGDGD #but man i.#I love them so bad. It’s so much and I’m SO fear that my impulse control will like. Lapse when I need it not to bc adhd #and I’ll just say it. I mean I have plausible deniability bc I say ‘I love you’ platonically enough but #IM AFRAID MAYBE MY GAY ASS VOICE WILL GIVE IT AWAY OR SMTHN?#I am losing it. LOL :o)#sea thoughts

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rhapsodyinblue45 · 5 years

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I scrape along deserted corners

my mind constructing cadences

from words

collected feelings that linger

upon curbs of darkness

late night pedestrian

wandering crosswalks

staring up at the cityscape

mesmerized by its intimacy

hugging the park's skyline

mellow lights hovering above

exposing secrets in a rhythm

the public enraptured

with the private conversation

and I'm a vagrant

on this pavement

solitary amidst

the pulse of multitudes

a city inside myself

suspended worlds

©️Rhapsodyinblue

12.12.18

Image: Cassie Kifer

#poem #poetry #spilled ink #spilled thoughts #writerscreed #poeticstories #verse #tumblr poets #songoftheclouds #13cupsofteareblog #night sky #night post #mystical mind #mindscape #love letters #twcpoetry #poetryelixir

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armenianassembly · 6 years

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The Critical Role of the YMCA and American Relief in Armenia a Century Ago

Armenian National Institute Releases Major Exhibit

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Armenian National Institute (ANI) launched a new 24-panel digital exhibit displaying the role of the YMCA and American relief work during the first republic of Armenia (1918-1920). The exhibit focuses on John Elder and James O. Arroll who arrived in Yerevan, Armenia in January 1918 to open a YMCA center. As with digital exhibits previously released by ANI, American Relief in the First Republic of Armenia 1918-1920, subtitled “John Elder and James Arroll in Yerevan, Gyumri, Sevan & Etchmiadzin,” is freely downloadable from the ANI website (www.armenian-genocide.org).

Neither Elder nor Arroll had anticipated being stranded as the only Americans left in the country’s capital city with all communication to the outside world cut off when the frontline faltered. World War I was still raging at the time and Allied forces were in retreat on the Caucasian front. The November 11, 1918 Armistice that ended the global conflict was many months away, crucial months during which the very existence of the Armenian people hung in the balance.

By the time they left Yerevan in August 1919, John Elder and James O. Arroll had become responsible for the entire operation set up by U.S.-based charities that had earlier sent emergency aid and volunteer workers to Armenia. As John Elder wrote on January 16, 1919: “One year in Yerevan and what a year it has been. Had anyone told me a year ago that in addition to running a YMCA, I would be in charge of factories employing 7,500 people, orphanages with 350 children and a 120 bed hospital, I would have thought them crazy.”

ANI Chairman Van Z. Krikorian said: “The stellar example of American humanitarianism by Elder and Arroll continues to be emulated to this day. They were pathfinding pioneers who traveled all the way to Armenia during a very difficult time. All the relief workers who went to Armenia after the 1988 earthquake, and the Peace Corps volunteers who continue every year to extend their helping hand are following John Elder’s and James O. Arroll’s superb example. Armenians and Americans alike are proud to share this chapter of remarkable service to those in need.”

The exhibit reconstructs the story of the near superhuman efforts undertaken by John Elder and James O. Arroll to rescue Armenians from the many perils they faced during the 1918-1920 independent Republic of Armenia. The exhibit relies upon John Elder’s own words from his published journal, along with original records that he personally saved from the time of his service, and the photographs that he made and captioned.

Elder and Arroll arrived as two enthusiastic young men dedicated to the purpose of sustaining morale among soldiers enduring long campaigns and treacherous conditions as the Great War kept grinding on, year after year, without end. They departed as two celebrated heroes who stood by the Armenian people at the fateful hour. John Elder wrote on May 26, 1918, as Ottoman Turkish forces advanced to the outskirts of Yerevan: “You never can tell what may happen. Just as the end seems at hand the pendulum swings the other way…After a two-day battle at Sardarabad, the Turks have been completely routed.” With the decisive battle won, two days later, on May 28, 1918, Armenia declared independence.

The only Americans in Yerevan at the time, Elder and Arroll witnessed momentous events and the unfolding of a heart-wrenching humanitarian disaster as the ravages of war were revealed once the fighting stopped. A year elapsed before a new crew of relief workers reached Armenia to lighten the burden they shouldered. In the meantime, their efforts and accomplishments had become legend among admiring Armenians and fellow Americans at home.

The YMCA digital exhibit is the fifth such exhibit developed by ANI based on American documentation of the Armenian Genocide. It follows upon other educational material developed for the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, including the four large exhibits displaying hundreds of historic photographs. These exhibits include:

Witness to the Armenian Genocide: Photographs by the Perpetrators’ German and Austro-Hungarian Allies

The First Refuge and the Last Defense: The Armenian Church, Etchmiadzin, and the Armenian Genocide

The First Deportation: The German Railroad, The American Hospital, and the Armenian Genocide

Iconic Images of the Armenian Genocide (also available as a slideshow)

Survivors of the Armenian Genocide

The exhibit displays 95 images, 64 from John Elder’s photo collection, 8 contemporaneous records and documents, and 4 maps. With 32 quotations from Elder’s journal authenticating the photographs, along with introductory and explanatory text, the exhibit opens a window into life during the first year of the newly independent Armenian republic in 1918. The exhibit includes the entire set of photographs Elder attributed to his time in Armenia.

Several American relief workers are also mentioned in the exhibit, including Reverend Ernest Yarrow, Gertrude Pearson, F. Tredwell Smith, and Mabel Farrington. Mary Kifer, whose life was cut short after leaving the Caucasus, improbably found romance while conducting relief work in Armenia. Her story parallels “A Farewell to Arms” before Ernest Hemingway wrote his WWI era tragedy.

Other American personalities in the region appearing in the exhibit include F. Willoughby Smith, U.S. Consul in Tiflis, who supported the efforts of the relief workers; Robert McDowell, who was at the front when the Turkish forces broke through and invaded Alexandropol/Gyumri; Dr. John H.T. Main, president of Grinnell College in Iowa, who witnessed the horrific conditions in Armenia firsthand on behalf of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East; missionary Grace Knapp; and John Mott, longtime president of the American YMCA, who, with the encouragement of his friend President Woodrow Wilson, dispatched young Americans wherever they could lend civilian support behind the front to men in combat.

John Elder was particularly happy to welcome two Pennsylvania natives like himself, Pittsburgh businessman Howard Heinz, and president of the American Bar Association Walter George Smith, who traveled to Armenia on behalf of the American Relief Administration. Both were members of prominent families. Smith was married to Elizabeth Drexel, whose uncle, banker and philanthropist Anthony Drexel, founded Drexel University in Philadelphia. Smith became the most vocal American Catholic advocate of the Armenian people at the time.

“The Armenian National Institute thanks the Elder family for supporting the research undertaken to develop the exhibit, and for permitting our organization to continue to honor the memory of such a committed humanitarian,” stated ANI Director Dr. Rouben Adalian. “At the height of the conflict in the Caucasus when other relief workers chose to evacuate, John Elder refused to leave fearing that tens of thousands more Armenians would die of starvation if the relief programs were discontinued. He is credited in providing relief for 15,000 Armenian orphans. Such selfless heroism must be recognized.”

Adalian added: “I also want to thank Dr. Christina Maranci, Professor of Armenian Art and Architecture at Tufts University for lending her expertise. Dr. Andrew Anderson of the University of Calgary graciously extended permission to reproduce the very high quality map depicting the situation in the Caucasus in 1918. I thank as well the staff at the YMCA Archives for retrieving critical information about the protagonists of this exhibit.”

Dr. Adalian continued: “The YMCA exhibit should be viewed as a continuation of the historical reconstruction provided in a previously issued ANI exhibit and titled, The First Refuge and the Last Defense: The Armenian Church, Etchmiadzin, and the Armenian Genocide. That exhibit documented the extent of the spillover consequences in Eastern Armenia, then part of the Russian Empire, and of the atrocities committed in Western Armenia in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The YMCA exhibit is a compelling reminder that the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide continued to unfold over the course of many years and spread across Eastern Armenia as well with every advancing step of the Turkish armies. The evidence gathered by John Elder demonstrates that Russian Armenia was not spared the genocide perpetrated by the Young Turk regime. He wrote on January 16, 1919: ‘Among the refugees it has been a holocaust.'”

The exhibit concludes with U.S. President Herbert Hoover’s tribute to the remarkable role of the YMCA pair who risked going to Armenia in the thick of World War I. The exhibit marking the centennial of the founding of the Armenian republic also extends appreciation to the Peace Corps volunteers today who are following in Elder’s and Arroll’s footsteps under the leadership of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia Richard M. Mills, Jr. who happened to be the State Department’s first Armenia desk officer when Armenia regained independence in 1991.

Founded in 1997, the Armenian National Institute (ANI) is a 501(c)(3) educational charity based in Washington, D.C., and is dedicated to the study, research, and affirmation of the Armenian Genocide.

#Armenian Genocide #Armenia #Turkey #Ottoman Turkey #Young Turks #YMCA #ArmenianGenocide

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letstalkcamps · 5 years

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UPDATE: Former “Vertebrae” owner charged with two new felonies

OKLAHOMA CITY - Krystie Kifer, former "Vertebrae" chiropractic clinic owner, has been charged with two new felonies. Court records show she stole ... from Google Alert - Chiropractic http://bit.ly/2EI8cBS

#IFTTT #Google Alert - Chiropractic

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marsh-potatoes · 3 years

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AND a LINEUP!!! :D

ft. kifer city kids part of a universe me n my friends r all making !!!! :3

i love all of my children sm omg.. *cries* 💞💞💞

pls like this i worked so hard ;—; </3

#kifer city #silas #mae cantos #ollie #ocs #oc #reference sheet #marsh draws #oc lineup #lineups r so difficult rip my hands uvu;

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tryst-art-archive · 1 year

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April 2012: "Dead Ten Years" Draft 2

I have always sat down to tea with my characters, sipping away in the café of the mind where we chat about their lives and their futures and their thoughts and their dreams. Before I decided I was too terrible an artist to wield a pencil, I entered these teatime meetings by drawing my characters endlessly: profile, three-quarters view, face-forward stare, hands and arms and legs and feet and limbs, limbs, limbs, and a raging expression here or a joyous one there or an image of melancholy or remorse or fear or shock or thrill, and then the most important scenes from each of their lives until finally I went back and did the whole thing over again, pages of history notes sacrificed to the characters’ forms, their lines obfuscating the words.

For a time, starting around 2009, with high school graduation and entrance to college imminent, I ceased drawing any of them at all, convinced that the only worthy endeavor was to create new characters, explore new realms, run away from the world I’d been building since 2005 and the pantheon of characters Mare and I had birthed in the primordial soup of our friendship, all to attain a kind of writing I didn’t particularly enjoy. Somehow, every character following that so thoroughly drawn tribe fell flat, pancakes on a cold griddle. Proportionally, my sense of frustration grew, and I slowly became convinced I wasn’t good for much but long strings of actions, play-by-plays of capture the flag, and roaming introspections that blended Eastern and Western in a way that my peers did not like.

Unge S. Chickt stood at her window overlooking the city of P’tak from its opulent heart. Xev had been dead for ten years.

It was 0 A.K., the age-turning year following the death of the Demon Kifer, and Unge could hardly get used to the idea. Just the fact that the Demon was dead was nigh-impossible to swallow after his reign of terror—the thousands of years of civilization burning under his sanguine gaze ended all at once, the shift demarcated by a change in calendar. Only the Elementals, who were as old as Khra itself, remembered a time before the Demon.

It had also been a year since Unge had met the hero who had slain Kifer: Arren Minetelle, a petite Arctic Fox Raeth with ice blue eyes who arrived in P’tak wrapped in the crimson of a Ranger’s cloak. At the time, the girl had pep, a raging fire in her spirit that did not compromise, and a conviction that hers was the right path, the just one. She appeared, determined to slay Kifer, armed with knowledge from the Narrator called Rhawen, and prepared to risk it all. Unge sent her to Nassab in search of an artifact the girl had called the Demon’s Eye and did not see her again until the Battle at the Elemental Fields. There, Unge had joined her forces—the agents of IMDP—with the Elementals’ and the Rangers’ in order to defeat Kifer and his army. Arren appeared amidst the fray, her left eye gone, replaced with a desiccated, angry orb more appropriate in the skull of a dead thing than that eighteen-year-old’s petite visage. Unge had naught to do but watch as the girl grappled with Kifer, tearing out the massive, glowing red stone that occupied his left socket. The Demon had screamed, his voice reaching an unearthly pitch of terror, and from Arren’s eye the desiccated thing leapt out with an angry hiss, falling into Kifer’s now-empty socket. All at once, the Demon exploded into dust. An entire Age sifted to the ground and melted into the soil.

After the battle, Arren was nowhere to be found, and the Ranger’s Head was dead. Though Raeth celebrated Kifer’s death—such celebration Unge had never before seen—terror seized the Rangers’ ranks. For days they grappled with the sudden loss of Raeth’s and their leader while searching desperately for their hereo, and then Arren returned, slogging out of the northern forests and stumbling westward to the Rangers’ Headquarters. The Rangers, the country’s populace, and even the Elementals, demanded that she be the new Head, this woman who had killed the world’s greatest evil. Yet she stood before them, her left socket still a ragged hole, the edges of the bone cracked, the skin scarring, and she said no.

Miraculously, the hero had agreed.

This evolved, as these things do, such that, in the middle of high school, I would walk through the halls feeling them behind me—an imaginary entourage—and it would be a simple matter to draw strength from them throughout the day. And, again, the whole affair evolved, as the fact of being single began to chafe, such that the characters became ideals, promising that, oh, if only they were real, they’d certainly love me because clearly no one else would.

Unge had never trusted the Rangers. They were, to her mind, a dangerous lot. Their Head was also Raeth’s Head, and while he was elected by the Raethian populace at large, Unge couldn’t help but wonder if the system could be rigged. Even when she was younger, breasts barely formed though she already yearned for a greater purpose, the fact that the Rangers were Raeth’s only police force, its only military filled her with dread, fear, and something acidic like bile. Where was the safety on that gun? Suppose, just suppose, that the Rangers ever went astray? Just suppose that they lost sight of their purpose, lost sight of their limits, lost sight of Raeth’s needs. What then? Who would be there to stop them? The Elementals didn’t bother themselves about Raethian business. The Mages were a scattered group of farmers’ helpers and wandering midwives. There was no one else.

Twenty years ago, Xev said, “Aye, you’ve got the right regardin’ this Ranger thing. We oughta do somethin’, change it, aye?” Xev was from N’zik, a small city surrounded by desert to one side and jungle to the other, previously the capital of an ancient Dragonfolk civilization, and now just one of the four Raethian settlements that could be properly called cities, one for each point of the compass. Unge was not terribly impressed with the southern city, though the use of sandstone was lovely.

“None ‘t all?” Xev, a Dog Raeth all of sleek water hound blacks and dewy brown eyes, melted over the arm of his chair. He seemed impossibly long, his arms trailing across the floor, his toes delicately brushing the ground.

“Well.” She paused, turning the thoughts over in her mind. “If you’ve got one organization in charge of everything, that’s a problem. But what if you had two?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Two?”

“Say you’ve got the Rangers, just as they are, but then you make, like, a second Rangers—‘cept call them something else obviously—“

“Obv’sly.”

“—Well then you task the second group with not only defending the peace and all that good stuff, but also with keeping an eye on the Rangers. Then you go to the Rangers and say, ‘Hey, keep an eye on the new guys.’ So now you’d have double the police force and both would be making sure the other one didn’t slip up and go evil on us all.”

Xev smiled and reached out to touch Unge’s tawny hair. “Well why not do that then?”

Unge blinked, and one of her canine ears twitched. “Well, I mean, that’s not something I can do.”

Xev merely shook his head and offered her his hand.

Within a year, the foundations of IMDP had been laid, and the year after that, they began recruiting. Five years following that conversation, IMDP was complete with secret agents, a business front, and the cooperation of P’tak’s local government. The time had not seemed prudent to reveal themselves to the Rangers—much more effective to merely spy on them for now, until IMDP was of equal strength at least—and so the organization remained in shadow, its business front slowly elevating it until its letters stood atop a skyscraper right at the opulent heart of P’tak, among the richest of the rich.

And then Xev died.

Here is something else about the characters and me. Nearly all of them are some part of myself, magnified over and over until perhaps you couldn’t tell they were ever me at all. Yet the fact remains that they are magnifications, and if you really, truly wanted, you could trace back their lineage. Kriamiss was a wish fulfillment fantasy on steroids, and forever and again, in the present, it is always a struggle to determine how to reduce an angsty enchanter-healer-angel-thing back into a person without upsetting the tender chronology of his entire story arc, of which Unge S. Chickt is but a small part. And so you have to look again and see what else they stole from you. For Kriamiss it is the angst. Specifically, the angst that flies in the face of all the talent, all the ability, all the good fortune, and all the love that has ever and will ever be showered upon his foolish, morose head. His is filled with suburban ennui in a place that has no suburbs—though obviously I have suburbs, roiling in my blood likr a bubbling tar pit. Arren Minetelle, great savior of not only Raeth but all of Khra—the world’s hero, defeating its personification of evil—has what in common with a girl from Canton, Massachusetts who can barely handle a stubbed toe, never mind ripping her own eye out— twice? For that you should look to Arren’s motives. Here is a woman whose cause is so just and so righteous that surely she must be the hero, surely she has saved us all, and yet she hunts down Kifer not because it is the right thing to do—so many had tried and failed over the thousands of years of his life—but because he killed the man she loved, a Ranger called Rusek who believed in due process. Arren enters in on a quest for revenge first—an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind—and on a quest for justice second, and therefore Arren is a cross-section of should and is, and if I don’t have that in common with her, then I don’t know myself.

But perhaps you don’t know these people, though now you must know Unge, and I’ve mentioned Xev, but as he is borne of Mare’s consciousness, not my own, I cannot tell you about him. I can tell you about Unge, but I think you will find it anticlimactic.

Unge is among the oldest of the bunch. I drew her before anime styling crept, poorly, into my artist’s hand. I drew her before there was a Khra or a Kriamiss or an Arren, at a time when Mare and I were only acquaintances who shared a school bus. Unge came out of Neopets.com, out of a time when anthropomorphic animals were new and exciting to me so that I took to drawing gelerts—strange, dog-like things—in skirts with big, lavender eyes—a terrible sight to behold. When I “adopted” a gelert someone had named Ungeschickt, the name disappointed me. I therefore had to make Ungeschickt—swiftly shortened to Unge for all intents, dues, and purposes—into the most badass of motherfuckers. And so, the first picture of Unge, ever, presented her as a femme fatale in a pink miniskirt and pearls, thoughtfully gesturing with her bloodied dagger. In this way, Unge was born of my love of 007, only to transmogrify, upon her entry into Khra, into a desire for a better world.

A knock, followed by Tarrin Carithelle, Rien Carithelle, and Arren Minetelle, all but Rien looking stoic. Unge turned, forty years of espionage squeezed into a tiny business suit, forty years of aggressive gaiety etched into her face. “Hello, my darlings.”

Tarrin and Arren sketched stiff salutes, each in their own style, and Tarrin pretended that she was not awed by Raeth’s Very Own Hero. Rien beamed, unfazed by the world’s going-ons, mind still tangling with gears and levers and electricity.

“What did Rhawen say?” Unge asked, settling into the plush chair behind her desk and gesturing for the trio to settle themselves where they saw fit.

Unge rolled a pen on her desk. “But we don’t get to know where to find her?”

“No?” The pen rolled off of Unge’s desk.

Tarrin grumbled but held her tongue.

“Yes, what is she?” Unge snapped, frustration surprising both her and the three women before her.

“Unge?” Rien squeaked. Unge shook her head.

One of the lines in Arren’s brow softened. “Rhawen is something of the world. Old. She has her reasons.”

“Well I’d feel a lot fuckin’ better about it if she’d just give us straight goddamn answers,” Tarrin growled.

The brow line reasserted itself. “Perhaps you should just get better at riddles then,” Arren said.

Unge pondered for a moment. She’d been working with Rhawen before Arren had killed Kifer, but the woman had never opened up to Unge the way she had to Arren, and even that was a chilly connection.

A wave of fatigue washed over her, and she missed Xev.

“Well thank you for trying, my lovelies,” Unge said, feeling herself sink onto her desk. “I suppose we’ll just do things the way we always have. We’ll wait.” Xev wouldn’t have tolerated this waiting. He’d have been trucking right up to Rhawen’s house and demanding answers, all with a pleasant smile.

One of the oddities of the internet is that every individual’s idea of it is discrete, separate from every other individual’s idea of it. My internet is different from yours is different from Steve’s is different from your little cousin’s even though we all can and do talk about the internet as if it were one thing—one place—when, in fact, it is a thousand tiny microcosms. My internet was a place for outsiders to hide and feel less alone. I spent time on Neopets, constructing, building, proposing characters and web pages and drawings and later yammering on to deviantArt and then role playing with Mare on AIM—all day, every day, talking around the character’s conversations as if we were at some sort of party—and on and on and on, until between Mare and I, we had produced an entire world filled with faces I knew and loved in a way I could not know or love the people around me because reality would never be anything but disappointing and no human being would ever feel as immediate, as present, as actual.

But what is strange is that when we left that world, all the other fictions out there were never enough for me either. So it was disappointing reality, disappointing fiction, and then before you know it, you’re what feels like a lifetime away from those socially reclusive days, and you find yourself starting to submerge yourself in all those old habits right back over again. And what’s more, Mare is too, though the methods are slightly different. Why, after abandoning deviantArt four years ago, have we returned to it, just as she graduates from MassArt? Why, four years after I set aside Khra, the KriamBook, the Pupcat Riley Story, the Asher Concept, and Arren’s Tale, have I found myself inexorably drawn towards them, fed up and disgusted with everything else that droops out of my fingertips, just when I’m meant to be serious about my work, my career, my life, and my future? What has caused us to come full circle, and why am I the only one questioning it?

Xev died on a mission of first contact.

Arren nodded, remaining eye closed. “Rhawen asked a favor of me.”

“Oh?”

Unge took it to the desk and broke the seal. Alongside the letter, Rhawen had inserted a pendant matching the seal impressed into the wax—one of those extinct dragons in flight. Unge ran her thumb over it, unsure of its connotation, though remembering that, on all the occasions she’d seen the woman, Rhawen had worn one such pendant. She glanced at Arren, a question in her eyes, but Arren did not meet her gaze, sipping her glass of water instead.

Unge settled into her chair and read the letter.

I reiterate: the characters are me.

Unge—

Some twenty years ago, I sat on a café veranda in N’zik, and I watched a young Dog Raeth with tawny hair and a full bosom chitter and laugh with another young Dog Raeth, this one a sea of blacks and browns constructed into a long, lithe, lingering body. They laughed with one another, at one another, at themselves, caught in what I shall call puppy love. I saw, at that time, their histories and their presents, and while I have never been known to predict the future, everything I could sense about them suggested that they were bound for greater things. When, ten years ago, one of the two passed from this world on to Ahrk, I knew of this too, and I thought for a long time about how to make things right.

I digress.

You have a dream.

With these thoughts in mind, I wish you well and tell you now that Xev died wishing for you.

Rhawen E. Fox

Unge choked and found, through her sobs, that Arren stood at her shoulder, merely holding it. The younger woman maintained that spot, one tired hand acknowledging Unge’s pain for the half hour it took the older woman to regain herself, her gaiety washed away by a ten-year-old memory of a dead man.

Unge nodded. “Xev was—he made this. All of this. Just by saying it was possible. Just ‘You can do it, Unge. This can be done.’ And then it was. That was all it took. He said I could do it, so I did.” Her breath rattled. “How do you come back from that? How do you answer for that death?”

Arren took her hand and gave it a squeeze. Unge could feel every crease, every callous in the hero’s hand. Here was where her sword had worn itself a home, and here at the finger tips the place for her bow. These tiny nicksfor every hour of traveling from one Raethian coast to the other and these weathered folds for every night spent alone beneath the stars formed a web in which to catch demons. Arren’s nails were dirty, but in spite of the usage written across her hands, Unge could see where once the delicate shape of a genteel woman’s glove may have fit, and Unge’s own palm felt suddenly fat and chubby in the grasp of one so conflictingly worked.

Unge closed her eyes, nodding her understanding, but found Arren leaning in when she’d opened them again.

“The boy. Maroc Baylinthe. He might be trouble.”

Unge considered the disappearing cloak and fingered the pendant. She laughed without laughing. “Dragonfolk symbols and the great hero feels compassion? Oh dear.” She’d have to have someone look deeper into these Baylinthes. Arren wasn’t the most intuitive of ladies, but Unge wasn’t about to dismiss her discomfit out of hand. The Rangers had completely failed to exhibit corruption, these past ten years. Perhaps now was the time?

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