Notes to follow up, this subject of vampires.
How did Nosferatu strike horror into the hearts of readers and viewers? Why does a skinny guy who drinks blood frighten people? Especially modern people?
I'm serious. Either the vampire is an ancient phenomena, or, it strikes a chord with the modern imagination for some essential reason. Why now, why in the age of film especially? Why did Bram Stoker's novel come so late, after centuries of novel writing? How does one explain this particular notion of horror?
The vampire's the kid next to you in school who doesn't eat right. He lives off potato chips. He craves steak, or sautéed liver. His life blood is drained by the food he doesn't get.
Vampires are victims!
Consider one of the Indian demoness, Putana:
Putana (Sanskrit: Pūtanā, lit. "putrefaction") is a Rakshasi (demoness), . . is killed by the infant-god Krishna. Putana is also considered as a foster-mother of Krishna as she breast-fed him, though it was with the motive of killing Krishna by poisoned milk.
Pūtanā nourishes Krishna, hoping to kill him. But then she dies, when he sucks the life out of her through her breasts!
By offering her milk, Putana had performed "the supreme act of maternal devotion", [cit.] in the shadow of her evil motives. The myth is told and retold in Hindu scriptures and some Indian books, which portray her variously as an evil hag or a demoness who surrendered herself to Krishna, though she initially came with evil motives. [fr. Wikipedia]
Now you must admit Krishna is not unlike a vampire himself, having out sucked the vampiress who sought to destroy him with the lethal power of her blood . . . correction, milk.
How useful to depict cold, heartless maniacs and cast them as schoolmates and neighbors. This is good business. There's nothing for the rest of us to complain about. Compared to that immortal guy you've got it good! At least you're getting iron supplements from a pill. Hey, you complain about heart disease? Would you rather be a vampire?
Maybe the real vampires are corporations, sucking us all dry!
From a literary standpoint vamps are victims; they've had their blood sucked dry by media.
The vampire myth powers endlessly tired solutions to the problem: how to get more bangs for the fang.
True, we want to fear for our lives, as if fear itself would bear fruit, as if fear itself were the blood we all need, through a promise of future survival. We all want to LIVE.
Fear is a valuable sentiment, an expression of the will to live.
Is the computer, a vampire? Is it sucking dry my emotion, my right to live directly, or my ability to relate to others, to create, procreate, love?
We want to feel awe, reverence, respect for the dead, for our ancestors.
But we have lost this.
We also want to recover love . . . true love, whatever that is, or was found.
Emotions are hopelessly mixed up in a parody of creative works past. Yet I am drawn like a mosquito, to this topic, as if it were a flame.
I'm goin' down! I've drunk my blood,
To another town, and a bed of mud.
Concepts:
a) The poet seeks to condense love (life) so as to give it.
b) The vampire seeks the condensed milk/blood (life) of the poet.
c) The extraction, bleeding, feeding, is essentially spiritual. Not physical.
d) Our blood today, in it’s gruesome physicality, has lost all content.
If blood is no longer the metaphor for life, what has taken it's place.
The act of drinking another’s blood, must be transformed or replaced, with spiritual content. Blood itself needs a transfusion!
Time for a Savior who heals with spiritual blood!
The truest vampire sucks the bearer dry, yet never quenches his own thirst. What's in our blood, the blood of you and me?
Am I speaking of poetic vampirism, wherein the physical body is literature itself? In this instance my Muse Goddess, Mnemosyne, is the vampire of all vampires. Memory/Mammory is it! A life giving vampire-ess!
How might I craft her character so that she is terrifying beyond all proportion, and yet inspiring?
"Alas, a bloodless word did make us tire,
Of a gutless world that went vampire."
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