The figure of the vampire is “a source of both erotic anxiety and corrupt desire”. It is one of our most prevailing, adapting/able fictional figures and most enduring of narrative forms. It has been argued that the creature arose in mythology from early fears of plague and death and evolved through manifestations of Victorian fear of syphilis, to embody modern unease surrounding AIDS. The vampire has continually been the figure of an easy-fitting metaphor onto which contemporary social issues and fears can be grafted and expressed. And this widely accepted understanding of the evolution of the vampire, from historically specific social issues and relevancies does make sense because, as Fred Botting notes,
Dracula’s principle companions and alternate forms- rats, wolves, and bats- were associated with disease.
However, this theory of the cultural production of vampires can be considered historically determinate, a thesis of causality wherein subjectivity borne of society determines the nature of the vampire. This does not allow for the possibility that readerly subjectivity can inscribe random, intertextual effect. The relationship between our subjective selves and our fictional vampires is one then of continual rewriting. Trevor Holmes argues that
It may in fact be the case that vampire production itself determines what sorts of subjectivities are available to subsequent generations on both individual and historical levels.
The intertextual development of the vampire as a literary device has reached an apex in postmodernism. Postmodern thought stresses the questioning of notions of political, ethical, moral, aesthetic and conceptual truth; it decentralizes thought and celebrates difference, the validity of difference and the right of the Other(s) to speak in a language which they can claim as their own. It mourns homogenization in all its forms, by the very nature of its mandate. This has led to what some call a ‘legitimation crisis’; that all our overarching institutions, religion, the rule of law, sense of self, are revealed as being rooted in fraudulent systems. Sharing its concerns with post-structuralist thought, postmodernism critiques the binary relationships, which are always subject to power, to hierarchy, that structure our linguistics and therefore, our subjective selves. In this sense, the vampire has developed as our most postmodern of metaphors, the most deconstructive monster. Gina Wisker writes that
Whether used as the worst kind of terror to be exorcised or, in its contemporary form, as potential social/sexual transgressor to be celebrated, the vampire disrupts polarised systems of thought. It undermines and disempowers western logical tendencies to construct divisive, hierarchical, oppositional structures.
The most telling of these transgressions is rooted in the most essential facet of any vampire, the nature of their sustenance: blood. Using Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject (arbitrary objects which produce subconscious reactions of Othering or Otherness, which in turn exist to establish and reify definitions and boundaries of self), we can read the vampire’s dependence on blood as a metaphorical incorporation of aspects of the Other into self.
The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness, ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire…The abject has only one quality of the object- that of being opposed to I.
Our response to blood is similar to our response to the uncanny, because it is that which does not belong. It exists inside our bodies, underneath skin, in veins, hidden. Vampires, rupturing the veins of victims and surviving on the nourishment of drinking blood, this abject, profoundly disturb boundaries of inside and outside, of self/other.
It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s ‘own and clean self’ but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents.
As a metaphor suitable for postmodernity, vampires by their very nature transgress what we would consider boundaries and embody the doctrines (or anti-dogmatic principles) of postmodernism most effectively.
This deconstruction of boundaries helps to explain why the vampire is a monster-of-choice these days, since it is itself an inherently deconstructive figure: it is the monster that used to be human; it is the undead that used to be alive; it is the monster that looks like us. For this reason, the figure of the vampire always has the potential to jeopardise conventional distinctions between human and monster, between life and death, between ourselves and the Other.
This dissertation takes a study of three vampire fictions: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Angela Carter’s The Lady in the House of Love and Suzy McKee Charna’s The Unicorn Tapestry, and examines whether their vampires may or may not be termed ‘postmodern’, and the extent to which boundaries in subjectivity are transgressed through readings of these vampire texts.
Chapter One: Queering the Narrative Order and Desire in Carmilla
Sheridan Le Fanu's enchanting short story 'Carmilla', from the 1872 collection In A Glass Darkly is a gothic story of terrifying seduction, rendered uncanny through the deployment of the lesbian vampire. In making Carmilla both lesbian and vampire, and rendering the two synonymous, Le Fanu aimed to disturb the well-to-do readership of the time to great effect. Furthermore, the simple use of a female vampire was something that in itself, patriarchal Victorian society would find hard to swallow, and impossible not to reject almost entirely.
Onto the figure of the female vampire is loaded all her fear and loathing of libidinous enactment. Seen as potential castrator, she appears as dangerously powerful, sexually voracious and engulfing[…]
Carmilla is characterized in these terms through the establishment of a narrative patriarchal order, comprised of the male characters in the novella. Female vampires inherently serve to potentially disrupt hierarchies of power maintained by patriarchal systems. However, Le Fanu’s motive in the character of Carmilla was not to critique or distance himself from these power systems and patriarchal discourses, but to reify them, to shun the Other. It would be fair to say that Carmilla is a vampire that has been ‘created by and for the interests of males.’
The Victorian view of lesbianism conventionally saw it as ‘unnatural’, against Nature: the illness that overtakes Laura and the village is a nearby indication of this.
Through the coming together of male characters; Laura's father, General Spielsdorf, Dr Spielsberg, Baron Vordenburg and the narrator, Dr Hesselius (to whom Laura's case is referred), both in terms of argument (the scientific notation and examination given by Hesselius and Spielsberg) and the manifest action taken by Laura's father and the General, a patriarchal order is established, which the text posits as dominant and morally superior.
It is only through the descriptions of Laura’s father and the general, both patriarchal restrictive figures, that Carmilla is seen as ghostly, dangerous, to be destroyed.
This contrasts with descriptions of Carmilla as 'so beautiful and so indescribably engaging' and 'gentle and nice' given by Laura and a maid of the house. In making synonymous Carmilla’s contradictory status as both demonic and beautiful, as playful and deadly, the texts posits the feminine and the lesbian form embodied by Carmilla as a distinct threat to the men in the text, and their authority as men to identify and neutralise such potential threats. She threatens them with castration and the destruction of their power. After finding revelatatory evidence to suggest that Carmilla is a vampire, the men refer to her through her sixteenth century title, Countess Karnstein or as Millarca, her ancient name- invoking elements of the aristocratic vampire tradition, as made infamous by the vampire figure of Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s later text. In Millarca's case, the reign of the vampire Karnsteins is but a memory and she, the last of her family. It is clearly in the interests of the male order to name the vampire- to distinguish her from them, (a patriarchal act of colonising, in itself), and reify her threat at the plot’s conclusion. With the traditional stake-through-heart procedure, the General reasserts the dominance and authority of the patriarchal order and naturalises this gendered hierarchy and seemingly ending the vampire’s active subversion.
The men...form a kind of beaurocracy which signifies Carmilla as a vampire precisely in order to manage the threat- and eventually, to destroy it.
And this would seem like narrative closure: a patriarchal order is established and then threatened, reasserts its natural and essentialist dominion over all Others. This would be an adequate reading. Certainly, Laura remains haunted and disturbed, as do the readership, by the lingering images of the simultaneously enticing and repulsive vampire/lesbian. But she does not succumb to lesbianism or vampirism herself; as the patriarchal interests of the text construct this lesbian vampirism as wholly Other to Laura, and through her narration, to us. Turning again to Kristeva’s notion of the abject, Laura’s mixed feelings of disgust can be read as reification of the self in opposition to the Other, that she cast out the vampire. Kristeva notes that the abject
beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside, sickened, it rejects.
How, then, is Carmilla at all transgressive? I have established that Le Fanu held no sympathy with lesbianism, and used the vampire only to induce the horrors of the abject. But I believe that the text contains enough moments of ambiguity, through the confused but clear narration assigned to Laura to merit a contemporary re-reading. Roland Barthes’s infamous poststructuralist assertion that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” seems wholly relevant given that ‘every age embraces the vampire it needs’.
Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Laura are male generated narrative constructions. This is certainly not to suggest that there is some totalising meaning in them that we can therefore pin to them, but simply to point out that it is through their appropriation from a differently situated perspective that one configures these texts as lesbian narratives.
Far from naturalising the ideological and moral values of patriarchal discourse through its conclusion and narrative resolution, through Laura’s subjective position as narrator, a rereading shows that Carmilla offers instead open conclusions, bittersweet elegies and missed, confused desires. It is only through the biased speech of the men that Carmilla is construed as a threat. Although Carmilla makes Laura feel 'something of repulsion' this is portrayed as being felt simultaneously with an overwhelming sense of closeness and attraction. That Laura is 'charmed with her', that the 'sense of attraction immediately prevailed' is not surprising given Laura's condition in the deep isolation of the foreign and unforgiving lands of Styria is one of utter loneliness and desperate yearning for friendship. She is Laura's 'only available source of intimacy'. Regardless of these details of characterisation though, that Carmilla is recited through Laura's narrative (which is left largely untouched by Dr Hesselius) is fundamental. The text constructs reader subjectivity in such a way as to allow a valid queer reading of the pre-modernist text, despite the intentions of Le Fanu and how it was received initially. David Punter argues along this line when he says that
It is as though each new social crux-from class anxieties through late nineteenth century sexual liberation and on to later struggles around race and sexual orientation traces its own representation on the curious body of the vampire.
Reading as Laura, we feel all her attractions and repulsions, we understand her 'ambiguous feeling' as authentic documentary; and gain an understanding of Carmilla more intimate and expressive than the aggressive threat signification of the patriarchs in the text. In Vampires and Violets, Andrea Weiss argues that
The lesbian vampire is more than simply a negative stereotype. She is complex, at once an image of death and an object of desire, drawing on profound subconscious fears that the living have toward the dead and that men have toward women, while serving for repressed fantasies.
And it is perhaps notable that subsequent film adaptations of Carmilla, those films in which narrative is obviously influenced by Le Fanu’s novel, or even more explicitly, wherein the vampire is named Carmilla (most notably, The Vampire Lovers) are more pornographic male fantasy than potential egalitarian transgression metaphor. But reading Le Fanu’s text with the postmodern province of queer theory can affect such a reading. Writing on the postmodern vampire aesthetic, Trevor Holmes defines queer theory simply as “a varying set of texts and lived experiences that together work to produce turns of meaning in other texts and experiences.”. Queer theory operates within linguistics, that is; it posits gender and sexuality as social constructions, rooted essentially within the symbolic framework of signifier and signified. Nina Auerbach suggests that “the province of Queer Theory is language.” Therefore, the argument follows, our gendered and sexually orientated subjectivities, our identities are no more than illusory constructs, held together by strands of signification and continual renewal/reification. Suzanna Danuta Walter comments on the liberatory potential of queer theory when she says that
Queerness is theorised as somehow beyond gender, a vision of a sort of transcendent, polymorphous perversity deconstructing as it slips from one desiring/desired object to the other.
I do not wish to debate the shortcomings of queer theory, and by this I mean, the extra-linguistic effects on the construction of subjectivity and ego, the emotional stimuli that cannot be represented in signification. I do wish to highlight however that Laura’s narrative cannot be read as a necessarily feminine dialogue. Not for the reason that Le Fanu was obviously male, and therefore could not hope to ever transcend his biological sex and achieve a feminine semiotic, because what is paramount in our relationship to the text is how we read. Queer theory applies here, because gender is somewhat dismissed. We do not read Laura’s narrative as temporal female subjectivities because her character is female, nor am I, reading Carmilla, merely limited to voyeurism defined by exclusion from her biologically determined narrative. I suggest that we read not as only male or only female in spite of the narration, but that we read her experience inter-subjectively; we experience a temporal dis-location of our measured and taut sense of self: suspense of disbelief. In many ways, we read exactly for this pleasure, the desire not to experience ourselves. Ken Gelder states that
The story turns on the fact that the reader must know more than Laura does – or her father, for that matter...It also allows readers the privileged position of seeing what occurs in the privacy of Laura’s bedroom, which thus enables readerly knowledge to be contrasted with the ignorance of the otherwise self-satisfied ‘ paternal figures’ whose homes is literally their castle. Readers can identify with Carmilla...through the various erotic scenes and through her seductive powers of Laura
We are seduced as much as Laura is, and so the text foregrounds this intimate relationship, with all its confusions and desires, with adequate distance from the men's vampirisation narrative, which runs only to manage and eliminate the threat of same-sex desire. Even at the story's resolution, after Millarca's death, the text portrays Laura's (and our own) queer desire as unending:
It was long before the terror of recent events subsided, and to this hour the image
of Carmilla returns with ambiguous alternations— sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door.
The narrator’s ‘non-ending’ continues to license this queer desire against aggressive patriarchal reactionaries, the manifest return of the repressed. It is an affirmation, I believe, of the empowering potential of the postmodern that a text steeped in and read originally as celebration of patriarchal victory over the chaos of feminine desires can be read and in some ways claimed, as a sad soliloquy of missed queer desire. This in itself is transgressive, but this transgression is present by its absence, it is a latent potential of the text and so mirrors the missed desire that Laura experiences. Trevor Holmes notes that
At any given stage of cultural phenomena, there are multiple entry points for readings based on embedded genealogical codes, whether or not these codes were intentionally put there by anyone.
As Nina Auerbach observes, “Carmilla is one of the few self-accepting homosexuals in Victorian…literature.” , and though the reserved attitudes of Victorian culture would read of the seductive lesbian vampire with utmost terror and disgust, this says more about them than it does Carmilla. The same text, read with the postmodern validation of sites of difference, celebration of the Other, allows a quite transgressive reading. The queer lies dormant in the text, repressed by the violent acts of the male order against the vampire, but portrayed as ultimately unending through the juxtaposition of untrustworthy characters and Laura’s personal, affected narrative.
Chapter Two: The Loneliness of the Transgression in The Lady in the House of Love
Whereas a postmodern and queer reading of Carmilla actively disturbs polarities of gender and sexuality in subjectivity, providing ambiguous, unreliable narratives (the vampire is liberated as queer and never silence and killed completely, through Laura’s desire), Angela Carter’s 1979 short story The Lady of the House of Love portrays the vampire not as something inherently empowering and by its nature defiant, but as a creature haunted by reflections of itself, lost in loneliness and time, transgressing nothing, but regressing into fortune cards and perpetual sadness. Published in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber collection, The Lady of the House of Love has been described by Veronica Hollinger as
A self-reflexive allegory about the disappearance of the fantastic in the face of an intensely smug human rationality whose definitions of the Real are clear-cut and confident, leaving no room for creatures like vampires.
The lady of the title is the last of an ancient, fading dynasty of vampire lords, the line of Vlad the Impaler, and is solitary Countess to an ancient, imposing, cobweb-laden castle passed through generations of her family.
She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, her soulnessness.
Carter is ‘writing back’ to canonised literature throughout The Bloody Chamber collection. The characterisation of the Lady recalls Stoker’s seminal vampire text, Carter goes so far as to name the girl ‘Nosferatu’- an overt reference to the infamous Count. Moreover, the location of the Castle, ambiguously and somewhat playfully demarcated merely as ‘the land of vampires’ invokes the entire vampire genre as its literary point of reference. Similarly, elements of the vampire Countess’s isolation and the position of her elderly governess evoke images of Jane Eyre’s much discussed ‘madwoman in the attic’, Bertha, who is both a product of overarching patriarchy in characterisation and a feminist site of resistance for later rereadings. The vampire Lady remains inside the Castle at all times, the curtains are left permanently shut, and her fingernails are left to grow, as they are tools of her vampirism, the talons of a predator. The governess (who is mute) attends to the Countesses every need, luring those passing through the abandoned village at the castle’s foot toward her lady’s bedroom and feeding chamber. The Countess is not, however, a proud creature, and does not take pleasure in consummation of this essential vampiric act. Gina Wisker comments that female vampires, by and large,
…lurk seductively and dangerously…they chiefly act as a warning against being taken in by appearances and becoming victim of women’s active sexuality, equated with the demonic.
And this can be seen in the feeding patterns of the Lady, as evidenced in this passage:
She would like to caress their lean brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair. When she takes them by the hand and leads them to her bedroom, they can scarcely believe their luck.
Afterwards, the governess will tidy the remains into a neat pile and wrap it in its own discarded clothes. This mortal parcel she then discreetly buries in the garden. The blood on the Countess’s cheeks will be mixed with tears; her keeper probes her fingernails for her with a little silver toothpick, to get rid of the fragments of skin and bone that lodged there.
Carter demonstrates the erotic seduction through which the victims are brought to their deaths, the process which for the men signifies carnality, the prospect of this wiry but beautiful female body, guided and handed to them for their pleasure, their whim. But this is no erotic narrative and there is clearly no sexual inclination in the vampire’s intent; hers is a primal hunger drawn from her nature, built up from forced starvation, until the very point where she is ‘ravenous’. Although the luring of the victim turns on the process of erotic seduction (and so can be seen from the victim’s perspective as a cold and stern warning against the outward and immediate truth of how things appear to be), the vampire Lady’s sexuality is far from ‘active’ or ‘dangerous’, and instead the entire seduction, from wandering in the town below the castle and being retrieved by the dutiful governess, to being led by the hand to the maiden’s bed, is portrayed rather as a performance, an act of deceit and trickery to which the Lady is irrevocably tied and seemingly fated to repeat throughout her timeless existence, through which she is as much deceived, albeit knowingly, as her victim, captive and victim to her own desires. Carter uses the symbolic ritual of the Lady revealing of Tarot cards daily to signify her hopelessness, the futility and irreversible tragedy of her position.
She counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from the chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.
The ‘beautiful queen of the vampires’ as she is initially described is a creature of utter loneliness and absence, she does not even wish to claim her ancestry. She comprises everything a vampire by its nature should, and as a construct, fulfils the requirements of the vampire mode: she survives on blood, for example,the cultural connotations of which signify the intrusion of the inside, the private, Self, and so disturb the inner/outer, self/other boundaries through which we subconsciously define our subjective selves; but the vampire queen does not experience postmodern pleasure, or touch emotional plenitude or completion through transgression of this linguistically determined, culturally sacrosanct boundary. Hollinger argues that contemporary female vampires can often be considered postmodern
…to the extent that they themselves are victims of the self same absence they have come to represent; they are as trapped within the framework of meaningless as are their human counterparts.
If we consider queer theory briefly, in relation to The Lady of the House of Love, and specifically, the character of the Vampire Queen, the text appears to operate on a different, oppositional and far subtler mandate than say, Carmilla, whose narration proposes latent queer readings for postmodern audiences. Although the Lady of this novel can be described as heterosexual (and therefore, perhaps, of no interest to queer theorists), I would argue that this position can be considered ‘hetero-phobic’. Queer theory exists as a cultural mode through which to critique the often-essentialising marriages of gender and sexuality, and the cultural capital, or the hierarchical power relationships at play within these contesting modes of sexual and gender identification.
Despite postmodernism’s emphasis on the importance of the identity and voice of those at culture’s moral margins and recognition of the Other, mass media generally still propagates gender stereotypes, and helps to reinforce and naturalise largely heterosexual, patriarchal modes of discourse. These ideologies are; of course, wide open to critique and indeed, explosion- as Queer Theory bravely and nobly aims toward.
My point with regard to The Lady in the House of Love, and indeed, heterosexuality in general, as a signifier and as a trope of identity/ies, is that heterosexuality does not exist as one unified and common experience, that as with all defined sexual modes of practise, orientation and leisure and all gender definitions, is that they are all entirely rooted within a fraudulent system of empty signifiers.
The ‘subject’ is produced in language through an act of foreclosure…What is repudiated in the formation of the subject continues to determine that subject…The subject is, as a result, never coherent and never self-identical precisely because it is founded and indeed, continually refounded through a set of defining foreclosures that constitute the discontinuity and incompletion of the subject.
As such, constituted through semiotics, subjective experiences of heterosexuality are continually reified within (and largely subconsciously by) the subjective ‘heterosexual’ self, he/she who would define himself or herself as ‘heterosexual’ that is, not homosexual, or queer. Repressing fears regarding what they define as ‘Other’, they claim ownership over a myth (sexuality and gender constructions), and mythologise their own bodies and sexualities. In their online paper regarding gender and language, Janet Bing and Victoria Bergvall argue that
Because the terms male and female insufficiently categorise our experience, English also includes tomboy, sissy, cross-dresser, transvestite, bisexual, gay. lesbian, hermaphrodite, androgyny, etc. The negative connotations often associated with these words suggest that although such a multiplicity exists, these are aberrations and departures from a basic dichotomy: female and male.
Bing and Bergvall argue that despite many sites and points of identity existing and being recognised, it is precisely because of existence of a base binary from which all others stem, and can be considered of lesser importance; more to do with social construction than biologically determined essentialism, that the expression and evocation of these ‘grey areas’, the sites of experience which don’t so neatly fit into this overarching and disturbingly simple binary, male/female, is so necessary.
Much of our experience does not fit into binary categories but is much better described as a continuum with indistinct boundaries.
It is hard if not impossible to locate such ‘indistinct boundaries’ as conducive to the ordering and ‘essentially categorical’ structural properties of our linguistic interface. The ultimate desire of any queer transgression is that of escaping the political limits of language with regard to both the body and intimate sexuality. The search for cohesion between language and the body, then, can be read as a kind of search without an answer. The linguistic system constructs genders and sexualities as meta-archetypes, mirrors for self-identification or appropriation of self, and fundamentally misses the point; that continuums of experience and emotion can’t be expressed in a logically constructed, ordered system of categorical distinctions. Speaking for egalitarian purpose, the effect that a utopian queer theory would aim for is simply not conducive to systems ordered around relationships of power and clear boundaries. At best, queer theory then becomes a mode of counter-criticism, and although this is much needed to question the authority of defined meta-narratives, such as patriarchy, cannot possibly hope to overcome the over-mythologised and essentially empty desire toward transgression. Returning to The Lady in the House of Love, by creating a vampire character so beset by sadness and loneliness, who is both potential transgressor and victim simultaneously, Carter pre-emptively addresses these concerns within Queer Theory, the postmodern mode of discourse argued by some to be best manifest in the literary device of the vampire. When confronted with the possibility of love, Carter’s vampire withers and dies.
How can she bear the pain of becoming human? The end of exile is the end of being.
Whereas her exile is a loss of her humanity, and she would seek to transgress herself to attain this; ours is one from the imagined state of plenitude. By implicating this into the vampire’s death, the text suggests that transgression as a concern is one that has been wholly over-mythologised and articulated in a manner not unlike the possible search the mythical creature of the vampire itself: a futile and empty search through time. In Carter’s text, the fantastic- the transgressive is ‘an absence.’
Chapter Three: The Limits of Transgression in Unicorn Tapestry
In Suzy McKee Charna’s Unicorn Tapestry, vampirism is constructed as something entirely Other to human rationale and the space of human conceptual understanding. The text constructs the figure of the vampire, as embodied by Dr Edward Lewis Weyland, as a predator, whose sole instincts function as those of a predator (for survival) through a series of conversations and professional counselling sessions with Dr Floria Landauer, a New York psychotherapist, whom the third person narration makes it’s protagonist. The text, published originally as a short story, a novella unto itself- grew and became but a chapter in the chronicles of Edward Weyland, vampire. For the purposes of this dissertation, I wish to concentrate only on Unicorn Tapestry and not on the surrounding, and later added chapters in The Vampire Tapestry. Unicorn Tapestry has been referred to as ‘one of the most successful’ of the postmodern vampire fictions. It has been described retrospectively by its author as ‘in some respects an animal story, like The Call of the Wild or an inverse Lassie Come Home.’ Veronica Hollinger explores this suggestion:
Charnas defines the relationship between the vampire and its human victims as one of simple necessity, in which the hunter has no moral obligation to its prey. For her vampire, Weyland, this particular configuration is a necessary antidote to the dangers posed by empathy; the vampire who empathizes too strongly with its human victims risks starving to death.
The psychotherapist, Floria Landauer, is a women who is, from the outset, under a lot of pressure (which affects her subjective authority as a psychotherapist) a single professional working mother who is grossly overworked and stressed, before she acquires the vampire case. The seeming disbelief toward the prospect of real, live vampires drew her initially toward taking on the extra work, despite the protests of her narrative conscience, friend and fellow psychotherapist Lucille, whose voice is constructed as moral and rational, in whose view vampires are the creatures of fiction and nothing more. Initially, and as one would expect from someone of psychoanalytic training, Floria approaches Weyland’s case with strong suspicion, a kind of precious refusal to acknowledge vampires. In notes that she takes after the psychotherapy sessions, Floria records her professional opinion:
Surely his problem was a transmutation into ‘vampire’ fantasy of an unacceptable aspect of himself. For men of his generation the confrontation with homosexual drives could be devastating.
Drawing an analogy between the social positions of vampirism and homosexuality, the psychotherapist seeks to logically pull apart the vampire ‘fantasy’ which she believes Weyland has constructed, perhaps subconsciously. There are some obvious parallels between the social constructs of vampirism and homosexuality- their position as social Other to the moral code, but simultaneous apparently similar constitution. Indeed, much has been made of the aesthetic potential of the vampire to represent accurately the discursive figure of the homosexual, as Richard Dyer (quoted by Ken Gelder) suggests
The analogy with homosexuality as a secret erotic practise works in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, the point about sexual orientation is that it doesn’t ‘show’, you can’t tell who is who isn’t just by looking; but on the other hand, there is also a widespread discourse that there are tell-tale signs that someone ‘is
However, Charnas’ refuses to eroticise the vampire so completely, instead offering us a vampire who is ‘largely impotent’,
Once my hunger is active, sexual arousal is impossible. My physical unresponsiveness seems to surprise no one. Apparently, impotence is expected in a grey-haired man, which suits my intention.
And gradually, Floria becomes convinced that Weyland is indeed, the genuine article, a real vampire.
My purpose can’t be to cure him of what he is. Suppose vampirism isn’t a defence he has to learn to drop? Suppose it’s the core of his identity? Then what do I do?
Through the focus of the narration on the character of Floria, we gain a ‘human’ understanding, or perspective toward the figure of the vampire, which is constructed as a creature with extra-human attributes and the instincts of a predator.
One of the most deconstructive aspects of this story is that it manages to keep both vampire and human at the forefront of the narrative: the point of view character is the psychiatrist, while the subject, not the object of the analysis is the vampire.
Presumably, by approaching the vampire from this subjective human prerogative- that of Dr Floria Landauer, the text offers us a kind of understanding we can grasp- a human perspective, if you will, of something quite beyond the rational. In doing so, the text claims to validate this site of difference as authentic and real, not incorporate into ourselves, or be appropriated for personal, cultural or political ends, and thus destroyed. However, Floria constructs an eroticised image of Weyland as a means of validating him, and falls in repulsed attraction to the idea of this predatory Other. There was, she notes,
Something attractive in his purely selfish, predatory stance- the lure of the great outlaw.
Floria reaction is akin to that of the well-intentioned coloniser. Her attempt to validate and recognise the vampire merely eroticised his Otherness and reasserted the problematics of difference. In a tender final passage, Floria attempts to balance the polarities, break down and unify self/other. When Floria sleeps with Weyland, a creature whose sexual impulses are minimal and feels no more than the compulsion and drive for blood, she is trying to incorporate his difference in the only way she understands.
She lived the fantasy of sex with an utter stranger; there was no one stranger than he. Yet there was no one who knew him as well as she did either. If he was unique, so was she, and so was their confluence here.
Ultimately, I do not believe that one short lived and rather clichéd carnal encounter with the vampire merits the simultaneous recognition and inclusion of the vampire Other. For Dr Landauer, the encounter is highly sensual, an imaginary, fictionalised space to achieve narrative closure in her mind. For Weyland, the encounter appears not to move him; he remains cold and silent afterward and leaves almost immediately, in continued silence. Because of this, the text cannot hope to allow the vampire space to act as an metaphorical mirror of repressed desire, cannot allow for any more than a reinforcement of the self/other and good/evil binaries. Charnas clearly believes that her vampire
Shows up the monstrosity of true human evil, as well as calling forth to match that evil the full exercise of human virtue.
And that in doing so, exercises manifest postmodern action- critiquing the contradictory values of the human characters in the novel. But ultimately, the figure of the vampire remains distinctly Othered by the text. By reifying the otherness of the vampire, we cannot hope to possibly identify with the aesthetic qualities that the vampire construct has been embodied, as I have shown with the two previous texts.
Conclusion
Despite the best efforts of the patriarchal moral order, Carmilla allowed for unending queer desire in the protagonist and so disturbed the self/other dichotomy entirely. The Lady in the House of Love reveals reinforcements of good/evil and self/other to be severely problematised, dependant upon individual subjective experiences- through the innocent and ignorant figure of the soldier, with whom the vampire queen falls in love. To the soldier, she is a withered and desperately sick young girl, and taking pity on her, cannot possibly conceive of her vampirism. Furthermore, Charnas defines that vampires, indeed by their very nature, cannot operate successfully when female.
The predator-male identity is endowed with romantic trappings by women to make life in the world that is run by and for this identity bearable.
I would contest this point, on the very literal examples of Carmilla and the Vampire Queen of Carter’s text. I believe that female vampires are utterly essential to critiquing the very patriarchal order that would seek to demonise and destroy them. Moreover, our male vampires can, and to a degree should be feminised vampires. Weyland’s predator male vampire critiques nothing, and although the text validates his position- the help and ‘virtue’ he calls forth in Floria, the Other is not incorporated, merely recognised for his Otherness. Crucially, the vampire is allowed to exist but only to remind ourselves of what we are not. If the vampire is to mean anything significant within postmodernity; it has to be a two-way mirror, through which we see both our desires and fears manifested, simultaneously. Trevor Holmes argues that
Vampires function as more than just metaphors or archetypes in contemporary culture; in the case of at least some subjects in the boundary-crossing culture that is both queer and goth, vampires are sources of self-invention and the very much out-staging of the problematics of gender identification and sexuality.
Joan Gordon suggests that “the boundaries between ‘human’ and ‘monstrous’ become increasingly problematised” in our vampire stories, and arguably this metaphoricity is the very essence of postmodernist thought: the fundamental critique of normalising ideologies. Vampires must function as mirrors through which we can identity with ourselves, and seek consciously not to run from the discursive elements of this fictional monster, but to achieve more than an ironical symbolic validation of the Other. Such a representation, as found in Charna’s Unicorn Tapestry appears to recognise and include the Other, but is dismissive and accomplishes no more than a politically correct façade under which self continues to be construed through its direct opposition. The vampire is not validated and celebrated, but fetishised by both Floria and the text. Le Fanu’s Carmilla expresses the political dominance of patriarchy and the pain it can assert upon queer desire, which it poetically portrays as unending, missed and defiant in spite of the authority of the patriarchal order. Angela Carter’s Lady of the House of Love recognises that ultimately, the transgressive or postmodern potential of the literary vampire figure should be recognised in its metaphoricity for our own transgressions, or indeed, as the text explicitly suggests, our mythologies regarding transgression. Vampires may be the most suitable metaphor for postmodernism, but what can the vampire accomplish under postmodernism? When subjective human selves are defying boundaries and triumphing difference in themselves so constantly, what use is another undead transgressor? Despite its seeming ‘normality’ in postmodernism, I believe that our vampires will continue to grow with us and continue to reflect, challenge and indeed form modes of subjectivity.
Sunday, 10 May 2009
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
Offline: Tiny fragmented pieces w/ no cohesion (Bodies)
“Doctor, doctor! The patient, doctor…I think the patient is coming around.”
Amidst the brilliant white light that enveloped, confusion and screams, passing out, screams, sedatives, screams.
---
11.40 Curious enters ‘the cd café’
11.41 Madame: if that’s what you’re looking for, hun, pm me.
11.42 Rosy_cd: lol. Madame, I didn’t know you were into that.
11.42 Madame: I’m feeling open minded, Rosy love. I’ll be anything you want me to be.
11.43 Curious: hello all, I’m new here. First timer.
11.43 Echoeing: Where did Rob go?
11.44 SlaveinTights: l337
11.45 Rosy_cd: hey curious! Welcome to our café!
11.45 HornyboyUSA: any girls with strap-ons wanting to cyberfuck me hard? PM me and lets get it on.
11.45 Curious: that was subtle. Hey Rosy. Hows it going?
11.47 Private message from HornyboyUSA: hey curious. m/f?
11.47 Rosy_cd: Ok, thanks. What brings you to our confused and beautiful love den?
11.55 Curious: I’m not wholly sure, to be honest. Something to satisfy my urges, to explore the possibilities of what I am. What do you come here for? Are you a regular here?
11.55 SlaveinTights: does anyone wants photos of me in my tights?
11.56 Rosy_cd: For the sex, mostly! I’ve been coming here for 3 years now, and I’ve made some good friends here.
11.56 Vixen: oh go on then Slave, you twisted my arm. Pm them to me :)
11.57 PetiteSuzy: I thought I was your special one.
11.57 Vixen: Oh lord, you see what you’ve done Slave?! Suzy, PM.
11.58 Curious: hehe. I’m glad there’s a sense of community here. A place for people to discover themselves and support each other. A place to escape?
12.05 Curious: Rosy?
12.10 Rosy_cd: sorry hun, I’m a little busy at the moment! Teehee! xxx
12.11 Curious: speak to you another time, byebye.
12.12 Curious: *show users
users online in ‘the cd café’
Amber_bi
Curious
Cybernaut
Echoing
HornyboyUSA
PetiteSuzy
Madame
Rob_in_stockings
Rosy_cd
SlaveinTights
StuckInLovelessMarriage
TiedUP
Vixen
12:35 Curious: Its quiet here. Ill be back another time.
12.39: Curious leaves ‘the cd café’
12.43 SlaveinTights: Vix you’re such a tease. I wanted punishment from you. You’re too sweet.
---
“Delivery for Diane, Flat 36a, Mont Clement road?”
Shaking the sleep from my eyes, naked but for a bathrobe, I took a while to answer.
“Diane?” – a pause, “my housemate Diane, she’s out at the moment. Can I sign for it?”
---
police witness report tape #4 11/03/05
*hits play*
Name? Aulie Hrestky
Age? 23.
Alright Miss Hrestky, would you like to tell us what happened at the flat today.
Ok. I left the flat at 8:30 in the morning and returned at just after 12. I had been working at the Electric Dionysus bar and was due to restart at 1. I had been shopping in Tesco for something us to eat together. We had planned to meet at lunchtime. He said he’d be alone, that he wasn’t expecting anyone. When I got back to the flat, I knocked the door…and noone answered. I thought he must have been asleep, or at a push had gone out briefly to buy some milk. So, I used my key and went in and put my bags in the kitchen. The house smelt of cigarette smoke, which he knew I hated. That was when I saw him, through the kitchen door, his back to me, sat at the computer desk. I thought he had headphones on. *begins to cry* I called out to him, but he didn’t respond, he didn’t even move. I went over to him; put my arm on his shoulder. His eyes were open, staring vacantly, every now and then blinking; he was twitching, his face, his cheeks. He only had one headphone in. I shouted at him; Wake up! Wake up! *sobs* wake up... But he didn’t. He just stared. I went to his other side, there were lights on the wire, it wasn’t a headphone, it looked more like a computer cable for sending information. I didn’t know what the fuck it was. I pulled it out. Is he going to be ok? I thought he was dead, thought I’d killed him.
---
Private Message Window for PM from Vixen
Vixen: Hey Diane. You seem like a wandering earnest heart, akin to my own. Theres so much vulgarity here that it is rare to find someone as seemingly sweet as yourself.
Diane: Thanks. It seems that most people just come here for cybersex and to post extreme close up pictures of themselves!
Vixen: Lol, yeah, unfortunately that does happen. People come and go here, change their aliases all the time, but a few of us just like to be here, for a chance at a freer existence, perhaps? I don’t know. Its hard in RL to feel comfortable, trapped in that body, here, people can be whatever they want.
Diane: Because we’re just using words here, right? The occasional photograph caters for those with simpler desires, but essentially, people can create identities for themselves here, so you’re never sure who you’re really talking to, it could be anyone, but that doesn’t matter, because ‘I’ and whoever im talking to, they’re just words on a screen. So, within that, are we free to exist as our imagination desires?
Vixen: Hehe, if we can create ourselves and recreate ourselves at whim, to explore the nature of our true self, namely the thoughts and the body sat at your computer desk, what about cohesion, if any, between multiple online personalities? Well, they’re rooted in the one body, fundamentally. But that’s not important here, rooms like these are about emotion and feeling, ultimately your inference.
Diane: Im enjoying this. You’re the first person I’ve really *talked to* here, tho I’ve only been coming a while. How long have you been visiting here, and what for, if not cybersex, I take it?
Vixen: Well, don’t get me wrong, hun. I enjoy the sex too, but its just one element of what’s to be found and embraced here. Some of us enjoy chat, friendships, each others company. Ultimately, you’re exploring versions of yourself, so to deny the sexual element would be to deny something intimately tied in to your sense of self, no? No preconceptions misread in our bodies. Wouldn’t you agree?
Diane: Yeah, I would. I’m being extremely honest now, more honest than I’ve been to anyone here before (but you seem like the most intelligent person I’ve met here). Everything we are, is rooted in language and our bodies, isn’t it? Here, we’re just language. We can be anything we write. In RL, everything’s fraught with conflict and confusion, the space between language and my body, and down to things like conversation, there’s awkwardness, insecurity and uncertainty. I’ve been coming here under various aliases, some characters I’ve built (I’m talking as the core self here, the cohesive I between the disparate experiments and I play with here), differing sexualities and genders, its like play.
Vixen: I understand, but I am talking to Diane now, aren’t i?
Diane: Teehee, of course you are. I’m opening up to you. We’re lying on a sofa hugging and girl chatting about this.
Vixen: Going on what you’ve said before you, what do you mean by ‘girl chatting’? If the implication is that females use a different language, by means of a feminine semiotic, and that through here, whoever YOU are, can tap into and explore this language within yourself, isn’t that a myth constructed by the space between language and your body?
Diane: I’m not sure I understand what you mean.
Vixen: Well, you’d just be dividing your self up into little parts like a conscious schizophrenic. But you’ve already been doing that, logging on as different personalities with different sexual interests and genders. Exploring constructions of intangible feelings within you through pure language. Have you heard of Grayson Perry?
Diane: the turner prize winner?
Vixen: yeah, a transvestite. He calls his feminine side Claire, and he’s always talking about her in the third person, “Claire likes expensive clothes,” and so on. I think that in doing that, he’s denying what’s essentially so intrinsically himself, so very uniquely Grayson Perry, and yeah, it’s ok if you want to polarise these genders within you, and clearly define masculine and feminine in you- but that’s just succumbing to language and myth, isn’t it? Ok, so he’s a man (he has a penis, is XY) but he feels incredibly feminine at times, so he constructs this alter ego for himself. Which is essentially what you’re doing, right diane? But femininity is a social construct rooted in language; it applies to clothes, colours, what car you have! Haha. I just think that by doing that, you’re not doing a great deal to demarcate transvesticism as a site for existence post-gender semiotics. There’ll always be conflict in you between what you define as the male, the female, the homosexual or bisexual, as long as you hold these words up as Truths self evident you forget that all these things exist within YOU, and its YOU and not language that is the cohesion.
Diane: omg, that’s so true.
Vixen: For years, I lived under the resolute belief that spiritually, I was a fox trapped inside a human body. But my only understanding of what a fox was, was through my physical interaction with foxes, the body, and language, the connotations and definitions I held about foxes, the books I had read, etc. I’m just me, and if I’m particularly feral, its not because I’m a fox or anything (but that one did hold me for some time, I must admit!) but that that’s the closest language can come to defining me, or a means to express myself through language.
Diane: This conversation has invoked such a gravity of feeling in me that I yearn for a dream which would render this imagination lucid, or a place I could exist how I feel, and not be caged in by either language or my body, where I could transmute myself daily.
Vixen: I can do this. Wait for a parcel to arrive.
Diane: What do you mean? You don’t have my address.
The user Vixen is offline.
Diane: Vixen?
The user Vixen is offline.
---
I couldn’t see the postman’s eyes, his sunglasses hid them. The staircase window adjacent to him (out of my sight, stood in the doorway) lit his side up glorious yellow and contrasted to the shade and dust which steeped me and the hallway in relative darkness. He was a middle aged man, with Florida orange skin and a moustache showing signs of greying. His heart was not here. He shuffled, made a low huffling sound under his breath and reached for his pocket.
“Sure. All I need’s a signature ‘says it’s been delivered.”
Brushing the door shut behind me, my eyes were fixed on the small brown package held in my hands. Curious and fingering the parcel, tied up in string, I took to my computer desk, with scissors undone, unfolded the parceline wrapping, and saw a box, a white box, its lid half open, as if to invite prying. Covering top of the inside was a printed note, torn from A4 and seeming to have been typed in haste, reading:
‘Diane’ I got yr address thru net searching ;) don’t worry
This will be the answer to your needs, we will meet again, inside.
Vixen xxx
I lit a cigarette, with the window open. Behind the note was a length of computer cable about 5 metres long looped and tied, on one end was a standard USB cable and on the other, a strange plug like an headphone jack but make of tiny, interlinking plates of metal, so minuscule were they that the overall effect was like snakeskin. It was soft, almost organic, it moved and bended with pressure, but only to a point. I didn’t want to apply force to it, it was fragile and intricate. The nib was clear glass, it appeared, the inside of which under magnifying glass revealed itself to be like a light bulb, two infinitesimal protruding wires, joined by a filament of sorts. I had no idea what this was.
I loaded my pc with the cd in, and waiting for my doddery version of windows to eventually load, made a cup of tea.
-----
-From a lecture given on 24/10/05 on Patient #243 at the Institute For Regressed Memories by Dr Atlinger
“…It appears that when the patient entered the sudden coma, the cause of which we’re still not exactly sure of, I will return to this later, that in this moment, a regression of everything that was defined, learned and relied upon as a certainty, or a knowledge about who he was, his relation to everything else around him, in contact and in language, occurred. This state remained prevalent in the 7 months prior to this lecture, and I am pleased to say that the patient is making evident progress in retrieving, with our help, this essential information from the deepest chasms of his brain.
We have, as you know, for some time now been exposing the patient to a series of tests designed to stimulate old memories, which in turn could trigger a reawakening of self. These tests however, have yielded absolutely no results, an unprecedented fact for one of our most tried and tested practises.
However, a suggestion from my colleague, Dr Fiona Moss, to experiment with EST, or electro-shock treatment proved to have immediate and baffling effects. I must reiterate, the patient has been absolutely silent and devoid of response for 7 months now and we had made absolutely no progress. However, upon the very first, most delicate charge of electricity, which was applied through the teeth and the palms of his hands, as shown on the board, he patient began rambling, quite uncontrollably. I remember those first minutes; the sounds were those of slurred words barked out, of animal instincts subordinate to linguistics.
Since last Tuesday, the patient has developed his skills in communication and is now very vocal indeed.
We are, however, far from saving this tormented soul. Dr Moss, if you would play the tape.”
*hits play*
I don’t understand why I’m here. No, not here in this hospital.. Here, in this. This! This body. What happened to me? I was floating, and this seems like a dream. In dreams you’re always tied down, to certain things, to rigid lines and definite objects precise and THERE! And never ever ever ever EVER changing, but when you’re awake I can, WE won’t be defined by single visions, by choices or opposites or skin! You’re not what you appear to be, Mr or Misses whoever you are. I can see her flying in the sky, with colours you’ll never see and a delicacy and grace that warmed me to my bones. I still feel it. Ha ha! Imagine being imagination! You can’t! Imagine being liquid! She said I’d see her inside, and see her inside I did. And outside! Free from physical form, like the air in the electricity of water! If I shut my eyes, I feel so sad. Where is she now? Where is she?
*tape stops*
“Thank you Fiona. Now, with regard to the computer technology we found with the patient. our laboratories in Florida have analysed the wire that the patient’s girlfriend found, connecting the patient to his computer through the right ear. It appears that the wire, the origin of which we have traced to a group of radical thinkers at an electronics lab at the University of Alberta in Canada, when used in conjunction with the software provided on the accompanying and unmarked cdr, enabled entrance and participation in a world of virtual reality. Nothing extraordinary there, perhaps, except in the apparent purpose of the wire. We haven’t been able to enter the VR ourselves, as the wire was in an irreparable state when it was found, and to the avail of our finest technicians, has been rendered quite useless. Moreover, those responsible for creation of the software and the stable running of the online network have since vanished but for a list of names and abandoned science degrees, the mainframe too, has been removed from the internet. From piercing together fragments of the patient’s speech, (though we are still trying to establish in him the importance of a fact/fiction differentiation), we believe this virtual world to be one that was entirely sensory. It was a place of electronic impulse, transmitted directly to the brain via the connecting wire, and neuro-emotional response. Online, users form a network of consciousness, communicating not through language or computer generated representations of physical forms, but through the digital encryption of emotional response into electronic impulse, a process which is enabled through the two way nature of the wire and processed in the software. It was not designed to be inhabited in, as the coding implies, it seems to have been designed as more a social experiment, an idea first suggestion in discussions with Professor Albert Hyman, a lecturer in Computer Sciences and Beth Holloway, lecturer of Gender Studies, both at the Alberta institute, into the stability of representations of self grounded in physicality and language, basing their thinking around notions that gender definitions were in some way fraudulent in their all-encompassing nature. Of the computer software itself, however, we found a finely tuned program. It utilised technology entirely unique, and the students appear to have engineered the infamous wire for this purpose. We don’t know what the patient experienced while he existed in this place, but we know that when his girlfriend pulled the wire out, she wasn’t to know, the patient fell into the coma and continued existence in this world, which became restructured in his mind, albeit in a limited sense, void of outside influence or external stimuli, a world not dissimilar to lucid dreaming….”
Amidst the brilliant white light that enveloped, confusion and screams, passing out, screams, sedatives, screams.
---
11.40 Curious enters ‘the cd café’
11.41 Madame: if that’s what you’re looking for, hun, pm me.
11.42 Rosy_cd: lol. Madame, I didn’t know you were into that.
11.42 Madame: I’m feeling open minded, Rosy love. I’ll be anything you want me to be.
11.43 Curious: hello all, I’m new here. First timer.
11.43 Echoeing: Where did Rob go?
11.44 SlaveinTights: l337
11.45 Rosy_cd: hey curious! Welcome to our café!
11.45 HornyboyUSA: any girls with strap-ons wanting to cyberfuck me hard? PM me and lets get it on.
11.45 Curious: that was subtle. Hey Rosy. Hows it going?
11.47 Private message from HornyboyUSA: hey curious. m/f?
11.47 Rosy_cd: Ok, thanks. What brings you to our confused and beautiful love den?
11.55 Curious: I’m not wholly sure, to be honest. Something to satisfy my urges, to explore the possibilities of what I am. What do you come here for? Are you a regular here?
11.55 SlaveinTights: does anyone wants photos of me in my tights?
11.56 Rosy_cd: For the sex, mostly! I’ve been coming here for 3 years now, and I’ve made some good friends here.
11.56 Vixen: oh go on then Slave, you twisted my arm. Pm them to me :)
11.57 PetiteSuzy: I thought I was your special one.
11.57 Vixen: Oh lord, you see what you’ve done Slave?! Suzy, PM.
11.58 Curious: hehe. I’m glad there’s a sense of community here. A place for people to discover themselves and support each other. A place to escape?
12.05 Curious: Rosy?
12.10 Rosy_cd: sorry hun, I’m a little busy at the moment! Teehee! xxx
12.11 Curious: speak to you another time, byebye.
12.12 Curious: *show users
users online in ‘the cd café’
Amber_bi
Curious
Cybernaut
Echoing
HornyboyUSA
PetiteSuzy
Madame
Rob_in_stockings
Rosy_cd
SlaveinTights
StuckInLovelessMarriage
TiedUP
Vixen
12:35 Curious: Its quiet here. Ill be back another time.
12.39: Curious leaves ‘the cd café’
12.43 SlaveinTights: Vix you’re such a tease. I wanted punishment from you. You’re too sweet.
---
“Delivery for Diane, Flat 36a, Mont Clement road?”
Shaking the sleep from my eyes, naked but for a bathrobe, I took a while to answer.
“Diane?” – a pause, “my housemate Diane, she’s out at the moment. Can I sign for it?”
---
police witness report tape #4 11/03/05
*hits play*
Name? Aulie Hrestky
Age? 23.
Alright Miss Hrestky, would you like to tell us what happened at the flat today.
Ok. I left the flat at 8:30 in the morning and returned at just after 12. I had been working at the Electric Dionysus bar and was due to restart at 1. I had been shopping in Tesco for something us to eat together. We had planned to meet at lunchtime. He said he’d be alone, that he wasn’t expecting anyone. When I got back to the flat, I knocked the door…and noone answered. I thought he must have been asleep, or at a push had gone out briefly to buy some milk. So, I used my key and went in and put my bags in the kitchen. The house smelt of cigarette smoke, which he knew I hated. That was when I saw him, through the kitchen door, his back to me, sat at the computer desk. I thought he had headphones on. *begins to cry* I called out to him, but he didn’t respond, he didn’t even move. I went over to him; put my arm on his shoulder. His eyes were open, staring vacantly, every now and then blinking; he was twitching, his face, his cheeks. He only had one headphone in. I shouted at him; Wake up! Wake up! *sobs* wake up... But he didn’t. He just stared. I went to his other side, there were lights on the wire, it wasn’t a headphone, it looked more like a computer cable for sending information. I didn’t know what the fuck it was. I pulled it out. Is he going to be ok? I thought he was dead, thought I’d killed him.
---
Private Message Window for PM from Vixen
Vixen: Hey Diane. You seem like a wandering earnest heart, akin to my own. Theres so much vulgarity here that it is rare to find someone as seemingly sweet as yourself.
Diane: Thanks. It seems that most people just come here for cybersex and to post extreme close up pictures of themselves!
Vixen: Lol, yeah, unfortunately that does happen. People come and go here, change their aliases all the time, but a few of us just like to be here, for a chance at a freer existence, perhaps? I don’t know. Its hard in RL to feel comfortable, trapped in that body, here, people can be whatever they want.
Diane: Because we’re just using words here, right? The occasional photograph caters for those with simpler desires, but essentially, people can create identities for themselves here, so you’re never sure who you’re really talking to, it could be anyone, but that doesn’t matter, because ‘I’ and whoever im talking to, they’re just words on a screen. So, within that, are we free to exist as our imagination desires?
Vixen: Hehe, if we can create ourselves and recreate ourselves at whim, to explore the nature of our true self, namely the thoughts and the body sat at your computer desk, what about cohesion, if any, between multiple online personalities? Well, they’re rooted in the one body, fundamentally. But that’s not important here, rooms like these are about emotion and feeling, ultimately your inference.
Diane: Im enjoying this. You’re the first person I’ve really *talked to* here, tho I’ve only been coming a while. How long have you been visiting here, and what for, if not cybersex, I take it?
Vixen: Well, don’t get me wrong, hun. I enjoy the sex too, but its just one element of what’s to be found and embraced here. Some of us enjoy chat, friendships, each others company. Ultimately, you’re exploring versions of yourself, so to deny the sexual element would be to deny something intimately tied in to your sense of self, no? No preconceptions misread in our bodies. Wouldn’t you agree?
Diane: Yeah, I would. I’m being extremely honest now, more honest than I’ve been to anyone here before (but you seem like the most intelligent person I’ve met here). Everything we are, is rooted in language and our bodies, isn’t it? Here, we’re just language. We can be anything we write. In RL, everything’s fraught with conflict and confusion, the space between language and my body, and down to things like conversation, there’s awkwardness, insecurity and uncertainty. I’ve been coming here under various aliases, some characters I’ve built (I’m talking as the core self here, the cohesive I between the disparate experiments and I play with here), differing sexualities and genders, its like play.
Vixen: I understand, but I am talking to Diane now, aren’t i?
Diane: Teehee, of course you are. I’m opening up to you. We’re lying on a sofa hugging and girl chatting about this.
Vixen: Going on what you’ve said before you, what do you mean by ‘girl chatting’? If the implication is that females use a different language, by means of a feminine semiotic, and that through here, whoever YOU are, can tap into and explore this language within yourself, isn’t that a myth constructed by the space between language and your body?
Diane: I’m not sure I understand what you mean.
Vixen: Well, you’d just be dividing your self up into little parts like a conscious schizophrenic. But you’ve already been doing that, logging on as different personalities with different sexual interests and genders. Exploring constructions of intangible feelings within you through pure language. Have you heard of Grayson Perry?
Diane: the turner prize winner?
Vixen: yeah, a transvestite. He calls his feminine side Claire, and he’s always talking about her in the third person, “Claire likes expensive clothes,” and so on. I think that in doing that, he’s denying what’s essentially so intrinsically himself, so very uniquely Grayson Perry, and yeah, it’s ok if you want to polarise these genders within you, and clearly define masculine and feminine in you- but that’s just succumbing to language and myth, isn’t it? Ok, so he’s a man (he has a penis, is XY) but he feels incredibly feminine at times, so he constructs this alter ego for himself. Which is essentially what you’re doing, right diane? But femininity is a social construct rooted in language; it applies to clothes, colours, what car you have! Haha. I just think that by doing that, you’re not doing a great deal to demarcate transvesticism as a site for existence post-gender semiotics. There’ll always be conflict in you between what you define as the male, the female, the homosexual or bisexual, as long as you hold these words up as Truths self evident you forget that all these things exist within YOU, and its YOU and not language that is the cohesion.
Diane: omg, that’s so true.
Vixen: For years, I lived under the resolute belief that spiritually, I was a fox trapped inside a human body. But my only understanding of what a fox was, was through my physical interaction with foxes, the body, and language, the connotations and definitions I held about foxes, the books I had read, etc. I’m just me, and if I’m particularly feral, its not because I’m a fox or anything (but that one did hold me for some time, I must admit!) but that that’s the closest language can come to defining me, or a means to express myself through language.
Diane: This conversation has invoked such a gravity of feeling in me that I yearn for a dream which would render this imagination lucid, or a place I could exist how I feel, and not be caged in by either language or my body, where I could transmute myself daily.
Vixen: I can do this. Wait for a parcel to arrive.
Diane: What do you mean? You don’t have my address.
The user Vixen is offline.
Diane: Vixen?
The user Vixen is offline.
---
I couldn’t see the postman’s eyes, his sunglasses hid them. The staircase window adjacent to him (out of my sight, stood in the doorway) lit his side up glorious yellow and contrasted to the shade and dust which steeped me and the hallway in relative darkness. He was a middle aged man, with Florida orange skin and a moustache showing signs of greying. His heart was not here. He shuffled, made a low huffling sound under his breath and reached for his pocket.
“Sure. All I need’s a signature ‘says it’s been delivered.”
Brushing the door shut behind me, my eyes were fixed on the small brown package held in my hands. Curious and fingering the parcel, tied up in string, I took to my computer desk, with scissors undone, unfolded the parceline wrapping, and saw a box, a white box, its lid half open, as if to invite prying. Covering top of the inside was a printed note, torn from A4 and seeming to have been typed in haste, reading:
‘Diane’ I got yr address thru net searching ;) don’t worry
This will be the answer to your needs, we will meet again, inside.
Vixen xxx
I lit a cigarette, with the window open. Behind the note was a length of computer cable about 5 metres long looped and tied, on one end was a standard USB cable and on the other, a strange plug like an headphone jack but make of tiny, interlinking plates of metal, so minuscule were they that the overall effect was like snakeskin. It was soft, almost organic, it moved and bended with pressure, but only to a point. I didn’t want to apply force to it, it was fragile and intricate. The nib was clear glass, it appeared, the inside of which under magnifying glass revealed itself to be like a light bulb, two infinitesimal protruding wires, joined by a filament of sorts. I had no idea what this was.
I loaded my pc with the cd in, and waiting for my doddery version of windows to eventually load, made a cup of tea.
-----
-From a lecture given on 24/10/05 on Patient #243 at the Institute For Regressed Memories by Dr Atlinger
“…It appears that when the patient entered the sudden coma, the cause of which we’re still not exactly sure of, I will return to this later, that in this moment, a regression of everything that was defined, learned and relied upon as a certainty, or a knowledge about who he was, his relation to everything else around him, in contact and in language, occurred. This state remained prevalent in the 7 months prior to this lecture, and I am pleased to say that the patient is making evident progress in retrieving, with our help, this essential information from the deepest chasms of his brain.
We have, as you know, for some time now been exposing the patient to a series of tests designed to stimulate old memories, which in turn could trigger a reawakening of self. These tests however, have yielded absolutely no results, an unprecedented fact for one of our most tried and tested practises.
However, a suggestion from my colleague, Dr Fiona Moss, to experiment with EST, or electro-shock treatment proved to have immediate and baffling effects. I must reiterate, the patient has been absolutely silent and devoid of response for 7 months now and we had made absolutely no progress. However, upon the very first, most delicate charge of electricity, which was applied through the teeth and the palms of his hands, as shown on the board, he patient began rambling, quite uncontrollably. I remember those first minutes; the sounds were those of slurred words barked out, of animal instincts subordinate to linguistics.
Since last Tuesday, the patient has developed his skills in communication and is now very vocal indeed.
We are, however, far from saving this tormented soul. Dr Moss, if you would play the tape.”
*hits play*
I don’t understand why I’m here. No, not here in this hospital.. Here, in this. This! This body. What happened to me? I was floating, and this seems like a dream. In dreams you’re always tied down, to certain things, to rigid lines and definite objects precise and THERE! And never ever ever ever EVER changing, but when you’re awake I can, WE won’t be defined by single visions, by choices or opposites or skin! You’re not what you appear to be, Mr or Misses whoever you are. I can see her flying in the sky, with colours you’ll never see and a delicacy and grace that warmed me to my bones. I still feel it. Ha ha! Imagine being imagination! You can’t! Imagine being liquid! She said I’d see her inside, and see her inside I did. And outside! Free from physical form, like the air in the electricity of water! If I shut my eyes, I feel so sad. Where is she now? Where is she?
*tape stops*
“Thank you Fiona. Now, with regard to the computer technology we found with the patient. our laboratories in Florida have analysed the wire that the patient’s girlfriend found, connecting the patient to his computer through the right ear. It appears that the wire, the origin of which we have traced to a group of radical thinkers at an electronics lab at the University of Alberta in Canada, when used in conjunction with the software provided on the accompanying and unmarked cdr, enabled entrance and participation in a world of virtual reality. Nothing extraordinary there, perhaps, except in the apparent purpose of the wire. We haven’t been able to enter the VR ourselves, as the wire was in an irreparable state when it was found, and to the avail of our finest technicians, has been rendered quite useless. Moreover, those responsible for creation of the software and the stable running of the online network have since vanished but for a list of names and abandoned science degrees, the mainframe too, has been removed from the internet. From piercing together fragments of the patient’s speech, (though we are still trying to establish in him the importance of a fact/fiction differentiation), we believe this virtual world to be one that was entirely sensory. It was a place of electronic impulse, transmitted directly to the brain via the connecting wire, and neuro-emotional response. Online, users form a network of consciousness, communicating not through language or computer generated representations of physical forms, but through the digital encryption of emotional response into electronic impulse, a process which is enabled through the two way nature of the wire and processed in the software. It was not designed to be inhabited in, as the coding implies, it seems to have been designed as more a social experiment, an idea first suggestion in discussions with Professor Albert Hyman, a lecturer in Computer Sciences and Beth Holloway, lecturer of Gender Studies, both at the Alberta institute, into the stability of representations of self grounded in physicality and language, basing their thinking around notions that gender definitions were in some way fraudulent in their all-encompassing nature. Of the computer software itself, however, we found a finely tuned program. It utilised technology entirely unique, and the students appear to have engineered the infamous wire for this purpose. We don’t know what the patient experienced while he existed in this place, but we know that when his girlfriend pulled the wire out, she wasn’t to know, the patient fell into the coma and continued existence in this world, which became restructured in his mind, albeit in a limited sense, void of outside influence or external stimuli, a world not dissimilar to lucid dreaming….”
Friday, 24 April 2009
Florence
My parents separated just after I was born. I grew up in a council flat in Brighton with my mother, who worked two jobs to afford to pay our way. I only see photos of my father. Mum was a waitress by day (10-4 at Handsome Joe’s Family Diner) and an NHS nurse by night (7-3, Brighton General Hospital). She would take me with her, to the hospital, and set me sleeping in the crèche, at ease, while she went about her work.
She slept in the free time she had, but she had Sundays off entirely, and loved taking me for walks on these days, to the park, to feed the geese, to tell me about the hospital. Inside, beyond the necessity of it, she cherished her work at the hospital. While others dismissed it as a graveyard shift that left her tired eyed and weary, she took great pleasure, even solace in walking the dead corridors (quiet), caring for sleepless patients (there there, go back to sleep) and the easy coffee and free conversation known only to middle aged night shift female single parents.
Between falling and waking, in that dreamy, weightless pool, where mother carried my comfortable, limp body through the endless corridors to her car, an intangible bond was strengthened, between mother (nurse) and child. Vague orange lights warmed her cheeks like an angel, like a rose in blossom. Through the exhaustion, her eyes shone with simple orange love. She smiled warmly and held me to her.
(...)
I remember that I had a fever... I was about 9 years old and asleep in the crèche.
I’d taken the day off school (oh, you have got a temperature. you’d better stay in bed today) and sat watching ‘Channel 4: Learning’ all day, bored senseless and worn out from sneezing, waiting forever for my mother to return. Curled up on the sofa, in my duvet, watched the TV man read out other children’s birthdays, watched historical programs about war and medicine, the Crimean War, a lady who looked after the soldiers, healed them. Like my mother, I supposed. The lady was called Florence Nightingale, and she had saved a lot of lives during that war. She was angelic. When my mother came home (about 4:30), I told her about Florence Nightingale, and how she reminded me of her. Mother smiled and said that Florence Nightingale probably worked under more difficult conditions than her, and that there was really no comparison. Regardless, since then, whenever I would see my mother in nurse’s attire, I would call her Florence Nightingale, and she would blush with delight.
The crèche: my temperature sky-high and rocketing still. Waking in sweat, in shock, confused and vulnerable. The jovial nature of this place (where am I?), its walls and colours and the animals and pirates (Disney style, not to scare) grew dark and contorted, bastard nightmares, twisted and feverish. Shadows loomed and angles reared rigid and precise, wordless questions for which I could offer no answer, just run in painful circles, without end, without beginning. Lost. And the quiet is deafening, the air thick and restless with the silence spinning, at once instant and abrupt and echoes forever. Left here, bathing in chaos. Left here alone.
From this whirlpool of senses (all wrong) that held me captive, my sweet mother, Florence Nightingale, came bearing hope and orange candlelight. Administering reassurance and comfort, she took my hand in hers and stayed with me, in that dark place. She eased me from apparitions and into her light. We said a prayer together and the room became holy. She kissed my forehead (like only a mother can) and lay me down at peace. She stayed with me for nearly half an hour before I fell asleep, and she left me (for it was only 1 am) basking in her reflection.
(...)
She wheeled him from his bed. Between two others, opposite three more. They were asleep- everyone else was asleep. In that moment, unmoving and out of speech or thought, he gave himself to her. She wiped the dribble from his bottom lip, looked into his vacant eyes, and smiled. They continued. The left wheel was in need of repair, or oiling, or changing (she wasn’t sure which). It became stiff with revolution, like treacle, momentary and sticking. The right wheel rolled smoothly. She pushed him along the dead corridors with only the creaking of the wheel and the reverb from faraway footsteps for company. Bold, uniform windows allowed an orange light to illuminate the art that adorned the endless corridor walls. Generic seafronts and kites and suchlike. The chapel is on the left, the canteen on the right. She eased him into that holy place: along the aisle, to an elevated Christ. Magnolia and pine were gentle on him and the veil was an easy fit. He lowered himself before The Lord and prayed.
They took this journey every night. Always the same time. Always her. Always in silence.
She waited at the chapel door, and thought of her Lord. She thought of her patient, as he knelt there, in awesome silence. She thought of him as a child, and how he had aged. He’d told her that his mother was a nurse, in this same hospital, before she’d died. They’d had many conversations as she’d routinely dosed out hot chocolate. She thought he was quirky, but adorable, and she took pleasure in caring for him, seeing him heal. He’d been in for a few weeks now, since being hit by the car. She felt a sharp sense of pity for him, for he had no family alive, nor had any of his friends (of which he spoke regularly, often the same stories repeated, added to, strengthened) visited him once. She had felt he was becoming lonely, desperate, without hope...so she begun taking him, once a night, to the chapel, to share in her prayers. He had latched onto this attention, and swallowed it whole. This journey was now expected, concrete and secure. Their Lord put smiles on their faces, made them amiable and removed them from their situations. Her mind wandered and she let her eyes lose focus.
His prayer was beautiful. His prayers were always beautiful. His eyes were closed tightly and She could hear him whispering, but not what he was whispering. He thought of his mother, the caring nurse, his mother, Florence Nightingale, his love. He thought of the nurse stood behind him. He thought of these things as he prayed, and they were included in his prayers. As he whispered ‘Amen’, his mind became a tool of its own use; the lines between truth and fiction disappeared and...and...He turned his head to her, and she saw the character in his eyes. The recognition. Florence Nightingale, he thought. Mother. My Love. She cares for me. She’s always been here for me, since I was young. Mother. Here. Now. Florence Nightingale.
He lifted himself to his wheelchair (as the prayer had been lifted to their Lord) and, in silence, she led him back down the same, sombre corridors, (the window revealed to them the downpour) to his bed. Between two others, opposite three more.
(...)
Those who wander the streets aimlessly, in search of something long gone or something never there... Those who tell stories over and over, real-life factions as they live... You can’t see where the transmission ends and the receiver begins. What consequence have these people, who wield memory like a tool, for what purpose, why? Consuming truth and input and moulding them to a lifestyle blurred in search of....
(...)
I had been sat at the bus stop for about 20 minutes, waiting for the 380 and seeking shelter from the rain. I saw him walking in this direction from about 200 yards away. He was soaked. After a while, he had reached the bus stop and came inside. He asked if I’d mind if he sat next to me, I didn’t, so he did. He was eager for conversation, but conversation was stunted, one way. He wasn’t listening to my responses, my points...There was a deluge of information, of stories linked somehow to the next, the last. I got the feeling he’d told them before. Some contradicted each other, and some made no sense at all- but they all focused around one central theme, that of Florence Nightingale.
He said that he was very sad, and I could see that he had been crying. Not wanting to be insensitive, I tried comforting him. He told me of how he had recently been taken to hospital (though he never mentioned why), and there, he had met and fallen in love with Florence Nightingale. At the mention of her name, he lifted his face to me and spoke, staring into me, through me. He was sure that his love was requited, and that he didn’t think they would see each other again. I didn’t know what to make of this story.
(Bus shelters can be treasure chests of conversation. He was clearly mad. Too many drugs, I thought, fucked up and forgotten about. Lives encouraged in the rain, amplified by alcohol... It’s easy for them to flip. Best be polite. Best listen.)
He was crying again, sobbing uncontrollably. After 5 minutes of his wailing, and my uncomfortable silence, he wiped his eyes and got up. Something in him had changed, his tears had ceased and there was a new vitality in his eyes. A hope previously unthere. He smiled at me and laughed. His eyes were wide and luminous, maddening. He strode out, into the rain, and looked up at the sky. He held out his arms, turned his face to the sky and cried “Florence! I’m coming back!”. Then he ran into the road, into the oncoming traffic.
She slept in the free time she had, but she had Sundays off entirely, and loved taking me for walks on these days, to the park, to feed the geese, to tell me about the hospital. Inside, beyond the necessity of it, she cherished her work at the hospital. While others dismissed it as a graveyard shift that left her tired eyed and weary, she took great pleasure, even solace in walking the dead corridors (quiet), caring for sleepless patients (there there, go back to sleep) and the easy coffee and free conversation known only to middle aged night shift female single parents.
Between falling and waking, in that dreamy, weightless pool, where mother carried my comfortable, limp body through the endless corridors to her car, an intangible bond was strengthened, between mother (nurse) and child. Vague orange lights warmed her cheeks like an angel, like a rose in blossom. Through the exhaustion, her eyes shone with simple orange love. She smiled warmly and held me to her.
(...)
I remember that I had a fever... I was about 9 years old and asleep in the crèche.
I’d taken the day off school (oh, you have got a temperature. you’d better stay in bed today) and sat watching ‘Channel 4: Learning’ all day, bored senseless and worn out from sneezing, waiting forever for my mother to return. Curled up on the sofa, in my duvet, watched the TV man read out other children’s birthdays, watched historical programs about war and medicine, the Crimean War, a lady who looked after the soldiers, healed them. Like my mother, I supposed. The lady was called Florence Nightingale, and she had saved a lot of lives during that war. She was angelic. When my mother came home (about 4:30), I told her about Florence Nightingale, and how she reminded me of her. Mother smiled and said that Florence Nightingale probably worked under more difficult conditions than her, and that there was really no comparison. Regardless, since then, whenever I would see my mother in nurse’s attire, I would call her Florence Nightingale, and she would blush with delight.
The crèche: my temperature sky-high and rocketing still. Waking in sweat, in shock, confused and vulnerable. The jovial nature of this place (where am I?), its walls and colours and the animals and pirates (Disney style, not to scare) grew dark and contorted, bastard nightmares, twisted and feverish. Shadows loomed and angles reared rigid and precise, wordless questions for which I could offer no answer, just run in painful circles, without end, without beginning. Lost. And the quiet is deafening, the air thick and restless with the silence spinning, at once instant and abrupt and echoes forever. Left here, bathing in chaos. Left here alone.
From this whirlpool of senses (all wrong) that held me captive, my sweet mother, Florence Nightingale, came bearing hope and orange candlelight. Administering reassurance and comfort, she took my hand in hers and stayed with me, in that dark place. She eased me from apparitions and into her light. We said a prayer together and the room became holy. She kissed my forehead (like only a mother can) and lay me down at peace. She stayed with me for nearly half an hour before I fell asleep, and she left me (for it was only 1 am) basking in her reflection.
(...)
She wheeled him from his bed. Between two others, opposite three more. They were asleep- everyone else was asleep. In that moment, unmoving and out of speech or thought, he gave himself to her. She wiped the dribble from his bottom lip, looked into his vacant eyes, and smiled. They continued. The left wheel was in need of repair, or oiling, or changing (she wasn’t sure which). It became stiff with revolution, like treacle, momentary and sticking. The right wheel rolled smoothly. She pushed him along the dead corridors with only the creaking of the wheel and the reverb from faraway footsteps for company. Bold, uniform windows allowed an orange light to illuminate the art that adorned the endless corridor walls. Generic seafronts and kites and suchlike. The chapel is on the left, the canteen on the right. She eased him into that holy place: along the aisle, to an elevated Christ. Magnolia and pine were gentle on him and the veil was an easy fit. He lowered himself before The Lord and prayed.
They took this journey every night. Always the same time. Always her. Always in silence.
She waited at the chapel door, and thought of her Lord. She thought of her patient, as he knelt there, in awesome silence. She thought of him as a child, and how he had aged. He’d told her that his mother was a nurse, in this same hospital, before she’d died. They’d had many conversations as she’d routinely dosed out hot chocolate. She thought he was quirky, but adorable, and she took pleasure in caring for him, seeing him heal. He’d been in for a few weeks now, since being hit by the car. She felt a sharp sense of pity for him, for he had no family alive, nor had any of his friends (of which he spoke regularly, often the same stories repeated, added to, strengthened) visited him once. She had felt he was becoming lonely, desperate, without hope...so she begun taking him, once a night, to the chapel, to share in her prayers. He had latched onto this attention, and swallowed it whole. This journey was now expected, concrete and secure. Their Lord put smiles on their faces, made them amiable and removed them from their situations. Her mind wandered and she let her eyes lose focus.
His prayer was beautiful. His prayers were always beautiful. His eyes were closed tightly and She could hear him whispering, but not what he was whispering. He thought of his mother, the caring nurse, his mother, Florence Nightingale, his love. He thought of the nurse stood behind him. He thought of these things as he prayed, and they were included in his prayers. As he whispered ‘Amen’, his mind became a tool of its own use; the lines between truth and fiction disappeared and...and...He turned his head to her, and she saw the character in his eyes. The recognition. Florence Nightingale, he thought. Mother. My Love. She cares for me. She’s always been here for me, since I was young. Mother. Here. Now. Florence Nightingale.
He lifted himself to his wheelchair (as the prayer had been lifted to their Lord) and, in silence, she led him back down the same, sombre corridors, (the window revealed to them the downpour) to his bed. Between two others, opposite three more.
(...)
Those who wander the streets aimlessly, in search of something long gone or something never there... Those who tell stories over and over, real-life factions as they live... You can’t see where the transmission ends and the receiver begins. What consequence have these people, who wield memory like a tool, for what purpose, why? Consuming truth and input and moulding them to a lifestyle blurred in search of....
(...)
I had been sat at the bus stop for about 20 minutes, waiting for the 380 and seeking shelter from the rain. I saw him walking in this direction from about 200 yards away. He was soaked. After a while, he had reached the bus stop and came inside. He asked if I’d mind if he sat next to me, I didn’t, so he did. He was eager for conversation, but conversation was stunted, one way. He wasn’t listening to my responses, my points...There was a deluge of information, of stories linked somehow to the next, the last. I got the feeling he’d told them before. Some contradicted each other, and some made no sense at all- but they all focused around one central theme, that of Florence Nightingale.
He said that he was very sad, and I could see that he had been crying. Not wanting to be insensitive, I tried comforting him. He told me of how he had recently been taken to hospital (though he never mentioned why), and there, he had met and fallen in love with Florence Nightingale. At the mention of her name, he lifted his face to me and spoke, staring into me, through me. He was sure that his love was requited, and that he didn’t think they would see each other again. I didn’t know what to make of this story.
(Bus shelters can be treasure chests of conversation. He was clearly mad. Too many drugs, I thought, fucked up and forgotten about. Lives encouraged in the rain, amplified by alcohol... It’s easy for them to flip. Best be polite. Best listen.)
He was crying again, sobbing uncontrollably. After 5 minutes of his wailing, and my uncomfortable silence, he wiped his eyes and got up. Something in him had changed, his tears had ceased and there was a new vitality in his eyes. A hope previously unthere. He smiled at me and laughed. His eyes were wide and luminous, maddening. He strode out, into the rain, and looked up at the sky. He held out his arms, turned his face to the sky and cried “Florence! I’m coming back!”. Then he ran into the road, into the oncoming traffic.
Without
“Just like the tide out at sea, We lower and rise again.”
I am writing from my bedroom flat in Cardiff, where it is 3 am and I am awake drinking tea and smoking cigarettes and writing from my bedroom flat. I remember how I got it, but I don’t understand why. What had happened there, that day, has without any doubt, changed the course of my life. I have been writing from my bedroom flat since then. This lighter... It’s a brick wall ten hundred miles long that I have been perfectly comfortable with. The stairs to this room have gathered dust. The post isn’t delivered anymore. I miss the voices...I miss the eyes, the kaleidoscope sun and their eyes. I used to despise that condition, my utter reliance on them and what they had. And this lighter here, this lighter I’ve been lighting with all night...all year...has for a time stunted my growth, that much is clear, but now I think I understand a little better, I can make choices more consciously. I am going for a walk.
--------------
“Ooh yes. Now, see, there are lots of different types of lighters”
He said, with bayou tongue,
“Y’can get your throwaway kind, they’re a lot cheaper. You can get your Clipper lighter, which has this neat pokey gizmo thing- I don’t know, its quite useful. Then you can get your Zippo lighter. Now these are the best lighters of them all.”
And he leaned into me; sweat running down his red face, the whites of his eyes. He whispered.
“Whilst these may not carry the pokey do-wah which the Clippers proudly bear, these beauties can-“
And he got up from the porch bench, walked down into his swamp garden and motioned for me to follow. When I reached the bottom of the porch stairs, he indicated for me to stop. He glowed with excitement. The evening grew moist and lazy. I could hear the hum of the creek. He flicked open the Zippo and struck it. It lit.
He pointed, laughing to himself a little. He shouted.
“These things can withstand the strongest gales! Ain’t that incredible?”
I realised to myself then how windy it was out here. We headed inside.
--------------
This morning, I went for a walk out to the beach. While I was there, I had to ask this old man if I could use his lighter. I knew he had a lighter because I saw him lighting his own cigarette with it. He obliged and I lit up, looking at him, and how he looked at the lighter. There you are, I said. Thanks. I walked away. We left it at that.
--------------
It rained for hours, like a thousand darts on the corrugated roof of this lousy motel room. The wind howling through the air vents, blowing my smoke about me like a ribbon. A candle and a match gave me light enough to roll a cigarette and lie with this intolerable bed and the punishing cold, puffing clouds into the still room.
The curtains upset, the candle went out: a wind tore through the room. The last of my matches gone. I saved the remainder of the cigarette on the dresser, half-off. Disorientated and uncomfortable, I moved from the bed, across the room. I pulled back the curtains and straightened them. Outside looked miserable. Just cars, to-ing and fro-ing from the car park and the main road then ran adjacent to it.
I shut the top window. It was bitterly cold, and felt fragile, tense- like the storm could shatter it. Rain had collected against the pane, and my hand was made wet. I brushed it against my trousers, and returned to what should have been the warmth of my bed. I shut my eyes and, eventually, went to sleep, pining for a lighter. I had a sleepless night, and left town again that next morning.
--------------
You know, I can’t remember the last time I had one. I’d like to think that I had one once, but it must have been a long time ago, because I can’t remember it...
--------------
Tokyo is a strange place. The sun is bright and white and...Everybody shines. Standing in a busy street in Tokyo, with a skyscraper in front of me. The city, with life of its own, breathes over my shoulder. Across the road, I notice a Zen water garden. It looks lovely. Quaint Japanese businessmen shuffle past me on either side, forever checking their Blackberries. I stand, briefcase in hand, confused in the middle of this techni-colour hi-fi vortex. Business, go. I see this child across the street, through the suited men. She’s got red hair and a bright green t-shirt. It has a panda on it. There’s a black and white cat hugging her legs. She disappears, and I realises she’s pulling at my trouser leg, and talking, mouthing inextricable Japanese. What am I doing in Japan? And she’s still pulling, she’s looking at me and smiling and going ‘Hey Mister, hey Mister...’
--------------
My friends are always saying that I should invest in a lighter, seeing as how I never have one, and so am forced into asking strangers, asking them. They say I should keep one around my neck, like a crucifix, or an ornament displaying a faded photograph of a late wife. Forever running out, to be replaced. I don’t know. It doesn't seem relevant. I don't have much of an idea what it is, what it feels like. How would one keep such a thing?
--------------
It was the first night of October. We were set against a cafe in evening time. My eyes followed small candlelight to the walls, the deep red of Sanguine Oranges, adorned in simple wood frame by inoffensive chalk and oil offerings of rock conquistors Hendrix and Clapton and, in the Men’s Room, I discovered, Fidel Castro.
My male friends and I debated over the supposed painting that hung in the female toilets. Were the occurrences familiar to that toilet carried out Castro’s name too? To what overall narrative did these disparate portraits belong? We’d never know, we knew this much. So, we guessed openly, with the inevitable conclusion that one brave soul would venture into the Ladies to discover the identity of the portraiture, if there were one at all. We took turns in our guessing: Bono. Trotsky. A figurative Picasso. One of those paintings by the young girl from the end of Fear and Loathing. God...
None of my present friends cared much for smoking. It was after much liquor, and my having just returned from having a cigarette outside, where I had seen local boys on their scooters and Hawaiian shirts, that Gustavo lost a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and in he went, where no man had gone before, and returned not 10 seconds later, visibly suppressing fits of giggles.
“It’s Yoko Ono.”
“What?”
There she was, opposite the mirror, in all glory, Yoko Ono, standing atop a hill. A beam of sunlight bathed her, but you weren’t sure whether she was reflecting it or shining outwardly herself.
We decided to leave the bar then, and head into the centre of town. On our leaving, I called over to Agõstín, who was half in his car. He'd voted to adjourn, and was due home to a girlfriend for whom favours and apologies would be forthcoming. We wished him the best of luck as a group, and as my friends strolled towards what they thought was the direction of the nearest bus stop, I called over to Agõstín, fumbling in my pockets.
He hesitated. Looked at the floor, sighed, looked up and wiped his forehead. He replied that I could. With thanks. As I walked home, my cigarette went out, and I couldn’t re-light it at all.
--------------
It can be so frustrating. I feel like I’m living this life but I’m not entirely in control of it.... I can’t remember the amount of times I’ve asked, been forthright, assured of self... Breaking that silence. Meeting this new person, new entirely. So many faces, so many I’ve touched fleetingly. Excuse me? Whats up, could I... This is a curse, if ever I knew one.
--------------
“Thanks. Yeah, could I have a lighter as well, please? Oh, ok, that’s ok. Nevermind. Just that, then. Thanks anyway. ”
--------------
So we're sat at the breakfast bar waiting for my breakfast bun at the breakfast bar and I'm drinking my second coffee. It's about eight thirty in the morning, say. I got tobacco and papers in my jacket, but no lighter, see. So, I'm looking around the room for possibilities, you know. Anyone smoking? Damn. I hate this waiting...This pointless obstacle which...Anyway, so there I am. And this guy across the diner can see I've got a cigarette in my hands and I'm not doing anything about it. He starts coming over. Yeah, thanks, I say.. I gets the lighter and I'm about to spark it, and it's yellow but... when you turn it in the light, it shines green. Cute. For a minute there, I was lost. What? Oh. That’s better. Thanks again. He doesn't look at me again.
--------------
It was right I left my old girlfriend, whatever. I was around her place, her flat near the cathedral outside town. She’d phoned that afternoon and asked that I come over. It wasn’t the nice kind of ‘come over, baby’ resonated in soft voice; the kind where you would wake and think 'How did this happen, again?' and shafts of sunlight through your curtains illuminate her face... no no no no no no no no no no no no. You could tell by her tone. Anyway, perhaps this was best.
I had driven with haste, the weight of doubt in my eyes. A mist borne of my own mind. Driving. The Who playing a session on Radio 2. After I had arrived, and after I had said what I had, and after she had listened, and after we decided to separate... I decided to leave. Mutually beneficial. A short drive later. And I’m outside, and it’s raining lightly through the warmth in the air. Afternoon had given way to evening, evening to night. I leave my car where it is. I walk openly in the delicate shower to the Cathedral green, and there, a nice spot.
I stared at the pond, in the odd patch of moonlight, as the rain skimmed it's crystalline surface. I wasn’t hurt by what had happened, not in the truest sense, hurt lasts and reminds and aches. I knew this wouldn't last. It was nostalgia for the passing present, for sure. Or, the recently departed. The old cathedral, a proud monument to the efforts of men, enlightened or blind, or both, still stands.
Finding scant materials on me, I made a thin consiliatory cigarette to the future, and sat in that awesome place, as the rain eventually soaked me through. Not to forget, nor to remember. Something in between, if that were possible. I’d like to choose that. That this comforting cigarette renders me comfortable in my sadness. I placed my hope in that cigarette, and did I have a lighter? Did I fuck.
--------------
I was travelling through Chiapas with an assortment of vagabonds and no-hopers I'd become associated with. I call them friends to their faces, and I'm sure they extend the same limits of courtesy to me. e arrived, after a morning hiking down from hills into a valley, at this quite beautiful little village that didn’t look in such a desperate state as the other places we’d seen. We reached a town square of some kind, small and informal but surrounded on all sides by houses in varying states of disrepair and poverty. In the centre of this was a circular area of grass, about 30 ft in diameter. We could see a local market further down the street. The others made themselves comfortable on the grass, sat against trees, and I walked to the market.
It was crowded, but not hectic. It reminded me of the hive of activity that is often found at the kind of Village jumble sales I’d been to as a child. Grabbing and taking and impatient unsharing. Comparitively, this was a colourful and yet well mannered place. Gentle bartering and genuine politeness earned me 4 cups of a red Tea. I returned to my friends after a little browsing, tea in my palm, a new poncho slung across my shoulder and a handful of bananas for a make-shift meal.
We were sat against a tree, amongst a group of trees. My friends had fallen into sleep in my absence.
Across from our tree, against another, sat another fairly Western traveller. His clothes gave him away. That, and the red of his sun burn. He was alone, and was writing into a pad of paper, barely concious of the lit cigarette hanging from his mouth. I sat and peeled a banana. Our eyes met frequently across this dusty road. I rummaged in my pockets and pulled out the half-smoked cigar I had been savouring, infrequently, since our arrival in Mexico. Rubbing banana peel off my boots, I walked across the road and introduced myself.
“Oh, don’t you have one?”
I stopped briefly and thought about that and answered his question “No, I can’t remember the last time I had a lighter.”
“Really?” He laughed, a little stunned...
“Well, It's not something I’m particularly happy about.”
“You can have mine.” He offered.
Our conversations were going well, and it seemed appropriate to express the overwhelming gratitude I felt for his kind gesture. We smoked together, for a while.
--------------
The red and white pattern plastic tablecloth and the canary yellow curtains of the by-now familiar breakfast bar. The faux plants here and there around and about, about as real as the coffee. No, you parasite, get off me, get your own damned lighter. I’m trying to have my breakfast.
--------------
I was walking through an area of London. It was quite expensive, very well kept. To my left were flats of the highest quality and to my right, a calm river, which I assume met up, said Hi, and kicked the bull with the Thames at some point. It was an evening in early August, the leaves were beginning to fall but they were still a lush green. I was here alone, visiting my parents. They had called me back after a summer without seeing them, I felt obliged but I’d rather not have been there. I'd quit smoking years ago, after meeting the woman who would become my wife. Two hours to kill. My parents had moved to this apartment to retire, it overlooked the park I was strolling through. I sat on a bench facing into the fauna, and pulled the first proof of my colleague's recent study from my briefcase. I pulled reading glasses from my coat pocket and opened the journal.
I am writing from my bedroom flat in Cardiff, where it is 3 am and I am awake drinking tea and smoking cigarettes and writing from my bedroom flat. I remember how I got it, but I don’t understand why. What had happened there, that day, has without any doubt, changed the course of my life. I have been writing from my bedroom flat since then. This lighter... It’s a brick wall ten hundred miles long that I have been perfectly comfortable with. The stairs to this room have gathered dust. The post isn’t delivered anymore. I miss the voices...I miss the eyes, the kaleidoscope sun and their eyes. I used to despise that condition, my utter reliance on them and what they had. And this lighter here, this lighter I’ve been lighting with all night...all year...has for a time stunted my growth, that much is clear, but now I think I understand a little better, I can make choices more consciously. I am going for a walk.
--------------
“Ooh yes. Now, see, there are lots of different types of lighters”
He said, with bayou tongue,
“Y’can get your throwaway kind, they’re a lot cheaper. You can get your Clipper lighter, which has this neat pokey gizmo thing- I don’t know, its quite useful. Then you can get your Zippo lighter. Now these are the best lighters of them all.”
And he leaned into me; sweat running down his red face, the whites of his eyes. He whispered.
“Whilst these may not carry the pokey do-wah which the Clippers proudly bear, these beauties can-“
And he got up from the porch bench, walked down into his swamp garden and motioned for me to follow. When I reached the bottom of the porch stairs, he indicated for me to stop. He glowed with excitement. The evening grew moist and lazy. I could hear the hum of the creek. He flicked open the Zippo and struck it. It lit.
He pointed, laughing to himself a little. He shouted.
“These things can withstand the strongest gales! Ain’t that incredible?”
I realised to myself then how windy it was out here. We headed inside.
--------------
This morning, I went for a walk out to the beach. While I was there, I had to ask this old man if I could use his lighter. I knew he had a lighter because I saw him lighting his own cigarette with it. He obliged and I lit up, looking at him, and how he looked at the lighter. There you are, I said. Thanks. I walked away. We left it at that.
--------------
It rained for hours, like a thousand darts on the corrugated roof of this lousy motel room. The wind howling through the air vents, blowing my smoke about me like a ribbon. A candle and a match gave me light enough to roll a cigarette and lie with this intolerable bed and the punishing cold, puffing clouds into the still room.
The curtains upset, the candle went out: a wind tore through the room. The last of my matches gone. I saved the remainder of the cigarette on the dresser, half-off. Disorientated and uncomfortable, I moved from the bed, across the room. I pulled back the curtains and straightened them. Outside looked miserable. Just cars, to-ing and fro-ing from the car park and the main road then ran adjacent to it.
I shut the top window. It was bitterly cold, and felt fragile, tense- like the storm could shatter it. Rain had collected against the pane, and my hand was made wet. I brushed it against my trousers, and returned to what should have been the warmth of my bed. I shut my eyes and, eventually, went to sleep, pining for a lighter. I had a sleepless night, and left town again that next morning.
--------------
You know, I can’t remember the last time I had one. I’d like to think that I had one once, but it must have been a long time ago, because I can’t remember it...
--------------
Tokyo is a strange place. The sun is bright and white and...Everybody shines. Standing in a busy street in Tokyo, with a skyscraper in front of me. The city, with life of its own, breathes over my shoulder. Across the road, I notice a Zen water garden. It looks lovely. Quaint Japanese businessmen shuffle past me on either side, forever checking their Blackberries. I stand, briefcase in hand, confused in the middle of this techni-colour hi-fi vortex. Business, go. I see this child across the street, through the suited men. She’s got red hair and a bright green t-shirt. It has a panda on it. There’s a black and white cat hugging her legs. She disappears, and I realises she’s pulling at my trouser leg, and talking, mouthing inextricable Japanese. What am I doing in Japan? And she’s still pulling, she’s looking at me and smiling and going ‘Hey Mister, hey Mister...’
--------------
My friends are always saying that I should invest in a lighter, seeing as how I never have one, and so am forced into asking strangers, asking them. They say I should keep one around my neck, like a crucifix, or an ornament displaying a faded photograph of a late wife. Forever running out, to be replaced. I don’t know. It doesn't seem relevant. I don't have much of an idea what it is, what it feels like. How would one keep such a thing?
--------------
It was the first night of October. We were set against a cafe in evening time. My eyes followed small candlelight to the walls, the deep red of Sanguine Oranges, adorned in simple wood frame by inoffensive chalk and oil offerings of rock conquistors Hendrix and Clapton and, in the Men’s Room, I discovered, Fidel Castro.
My male friends and I debated over the supposed painting that hung in the female toilets. Were the occurrences familiar to that toilet carried out Castro’s name too? To what overall narrative did these disparate portraits belong? We’d never know, we knew this much. So, we guessed openly, with the inevitable conclusion that one brave soul would venture into the Ladies to discover the identity of the portraiture, if there were one at all. We took turns in our guessing: Bono. Trotsky. A figurative Picasso. One of those paintings by the young girl from the end of Fear and Loathing. God...
None of my present friends cared much for smoking. It was after much liquor, and my having just returned from having a cigarette outside, where I had seen local boys on their scooters and Hawaiian shirts, that Gustavo lost a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and in he went, where no man had gone before, and returned not 10 seconds later, visibly suppressing fits of giggles.
“It’s Yoko Ono.”
“What?”
There she was, opposite the mirror, in all glory, Yoko Ono, standing atop a hill. A beam of sunlight bathed her, but you weren’t sure whether she was reflecting it or shining outwardly herself.
We decided to leave the bar then, and head into the centre of town. On our leaving, I called over to Agõstín, who was half in his car. He'd voted to adjourn, and was due home to a girlfriend for whom favours and apologies would be forthcoming. We wished him the best of luck as a group, and as my friends strolled towards what they thought was the direction of the nearest bus stop, I called over to Agõstín, fumbling in my pockets.
He hesitated. Looked at the floor, sighed, looked up and wiped his forehead. He replied that I could. With thanks. As I walked home, my cigarette went out, and I couldn’t re-light it at all.
--------------
It can be so frustrating. I feel like I’m living this life but I’m not entirely in control of it.... I can’t remember the amount of times I’ve asked, been forthright, assured of self... Breaking that silence. Meeting this new person, new entirely. So many faces, so many I’ve touched fleetingly. Excuse me? Whats up, could I... This is a curse, if ever I knew one.
--------------
“Thanks. Yeah, could I have a lighter as well, please? Oh, ok, that’s ok. Nevermind. Just that, then. Thanks anyway. ”
--------------
So we're sat at the breakfast bar waiting for my breakfast bun at the breakfast bar and I'm drinking my second coffee. It's about eight thirty in the morning, say. I got tobacco and papers in my jacket, but no lighter, see. So, I'm looking around the room for possibilities, you know. Anyone smoking? Damn. I hate this waiting...This pointless obstacle which...Anyway, so there I am. And this guy across the diner can see I've got a cigarette in my hands and I'm not doing anything about it. He starts coming over. Yeah, thanks, I say.. I gets the lighter and I'm about to spark it, and it's yellow but... when you turn it in the light, it shines green. Cute. For a minute there, I was lost. What? Oh. That’s better. Thanks again. He doesn't look at me again.
--------------
It was right I left my old girlfriend, whatever. I was around her place, her flat near the cathedral outside town. She’d phoned that afternoon and asked that I come over. It wasn’t the nice kind of ‘come over, baby’ resonated in soft voice; the kind where you would wake and think 'How did this happen, again?' and shafts of sunlight through your curtains illuminate her face... no no no no no no no no no no no no. You could tell by her tone. Anyway, perhaps this was best.
I had driven with haste, the weight of doubt in my eyes. A mist borne of my own mind. Driving. The Who playing a session on Radio 2. After I had arrived, and after I had said what I had, and after she had listened, and after we decided to separate... I decided to leave. Mutually beneficial. A short drive later. And I’m outside, and it’s raining lightly through the warmth in the air. Afternoon had given way to evening, evening to night. I leave my car where it is. I walk openly in the delicate shower to the Cathedral green, and there, a nice spot.
I stared at the pond, in the odd patch of moonlight, as the rain skimmed it's crystalline surface. I wasn’t hurt by what had happened, not in the truest sense, hurt lasts and reminds and aches. I knew this wouldn't last. It was nostalgia for the passing present, for sure. Or, the recently departed. The old cathedral, a proud monument to the efforts of men, enlightened or blind, or both, still stands.
Finding scant materials on me, I made a thin consiliatory cigarette to the future, and sat in that awesome place, as the rain eventually soaked me through. Not to forget, nor to remember. Something in between, if that were possible. I’d like to choose that. That this comforting cigarette renders me comfortable in my sadness. I placed my hope in that cigarette, and did I have a lighter? Did I fuck.
--------------
I was travelling through Chiapas with an assortment of vagabonds and no-hopers I'd become associated with. I call them friends to their faces, and I'm sure they extend the same limits of courtesy to me. e arrived, after a morning hiking down from hills into a valley, at this quite beautiful little village that didn’t look in such a desperate state as the other places we’d seen. We reached a town square of some kind, small and informal but surrounded on all sides by houses in varying states of disrepair and poverty. In the centre of this was a circular area of grass, about 30 ft in diameter. We could see a local market further down the street. The others made themselves comfortable on the grass, sat against trees, and I walked to the market.
It was crowded, but not hectic. It reminded me of the hive of activity that is often found at the kind of Village jumble sales I’d been to as a child. Grabbing and taking and impatient unsharing. Comparitively, this was a colourful and yet well mannered place. Gentle bartering and genuine politeness earned me 4 cups of a red Tea. I returned to my friends after a little browsing, tea in my palm, a new poncho slung across my shoulder and a handful of bananas for a make-shift meal.
We were sat against a tree, amongst a group of trees. My friends had fallen into sleep in my absence.
Across from our tree, against another, sat another fairly Western traveller. His clothes gave him away. That, and the red of his sun burn. He was alone, and was writing into a pad of paper, barely concious of the lit cigarette hanging from his mouth. I sat and peeled a banana. Our eyes met frequently across this dusty road. I rummaged in my pockets and pulled out the half-smoked cigar I had been savouring, infrequently, since our arrival in Mexico. Rubbing banana peel off my boots, I walked across the road and introduced myself.
“Oh, don’t you have one?”
I stopped briefly and thought about that and answered his question “No, I can’t remember the last time I had a lighter.”
“Really?” He laughed, a little stunned...
“Well, It's not something I’m particularly happy about.”
“You can have mine.” He offered.
Our conversations were going well, and it seemed appropriate to express the overwhelming gratitude I felt for his kind gesture. We smoked together, for a while.
--------------
The red and white pattern plastic tablecloth and the canary yellow curtains of the by-now familiar breakfast bar. The faux plants here and there around and about, about as real as the coffee. No, you parasite, get off me, get your own damned lighter. I’m trying to have my breakfast.
--------------
I was walking through an area of London. It was quite expensive, very well kept. To my left were flats of the highest quality and to my right, a calm river, which I assume met up, said Hi, and kicked the bull with the Thames at some point. It was an evening in early August, the leaves were beginning to fall but they were still a lush green. I was here alone, visiting my parents. They had called me back after a summer without seeing them, I felt obliged but I’d rather not have been there. I'd quit smoking years ago, after meeting the woman who would become my wife. Two hours to kill. My parents had moved to this apartment to retire, it overlooked the park I was strolling through. I sat on a bench facing into the fauna, and pulled the first proof of my colleague's recent study from my briefcase. I pulled reading glasses from my coat pocket and opened the journal.
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
Though she with giants fights: Research
Flying Triangles of the Aurora Program, work started 1980s after recovery of Alien Technology at Roswell, New Mexico 1947. Sightings of TR3B however date back as early as 1924. International UFO Congress Laughlin, Nevada 1998 former Area 51 worker Edgar Rothschild Fouche stated development of Aurora funded by NSA, CIA and NRO. Moon landing filmed Area 51, replicant moon's environment near exact. Reverse Engineer Aurora from crashed Roswell ship. Dec 21st 2012 Baktun: "the end of 13th 400 year era"; but not destruction of the Earth, so to speak.
Monday, 23 March 2009
Though she with giants fights: Mise en scene
Anica is a 17 year old biology student from Tokyo. She was first taken in 1996, and again in 98. It is unclear what the project sees in young Anica, but their tests are conducted with a pressing sense of urgency. The scientists aboard the craft treat her with great care and attention. Anica understands her own importance to these people, perhaps to everyone.
Whilst a part of her knows that she is borne of a greater purpose, Anica just wants what other 17 year olds want: friendship, love, enjoyment. A simpler life than being wanted and needed for scientific purposes. Though she acknowledges this worldly responsibility, Anica is still young. When the time comes for her ascension, will Anica rise and challenge the amassing hoards? Will she protect all of us? Or will she shy away, risking everything for the love of a girl? Such dichotomies are not meant to be answered. Anica has not asked for this power, nor does she desire to use it to fight the giants; but the whole world depends on her.
Whilst a part of her knows that she is borne of a greater purpose, Anica just wants what other 17 year olds want: friendship, love, enjoyment. A simpler life than being wanted and needed for scientific purposes. Though she acknowledges this worldly responsibility, Anica is still young. When the time comes for her ascension, will Anica rise and challenge the amassing hoards? Will she protect all of us? Or will she shy away, risking everything for the love of a girl? Such dichotomies are not meant to be answered. Anica has not asked for this power, nor does she desire to use it to fight the giants; but the whole world depends on her.
Thursday, 5 March 2009
Though she with giants fights: Tests
Piercing white lights in the corner. Distant voices barely audible through the dreamy lull of whirring machinery, humming movement, repercussive coronary of the speeds at which their unidentifiable craft was travelling; now 300 feet over the cool desert which hung like a scar across the American midwest.
Anica regained snapshots of herself and choked on the tubes which infiltrated her small, trembling mouth. The lights scorched her retinas, and she could not open her eyes. Movement perceived to her right, a dizzy fumbling and a skin tingling stab at her side. The chemicals took hold again: more tests, more tests. Held in the chair aloft 20 feet of creaking noise, and voices of God's spine-crushing thunderstorms in her ears which could take no more. They kept her awake for 32 hours, her senses heightened artificially: wires, electrodes and chemicals.
Anica had not the strength to uplift jarring against them; caught in this ulterior Zen trance and held there, bound like a kite caught tight in a sudden breeze, tethered to a string despite it's inclination to fly fast away and never look back.
Anica regained snapshots of herself and choked on the tubes which infiltrated her small, trembling mouth. The lights scorched her retinas, and she could not open her eyes. Movement perceived to her right, a dizzy fumbling and a skin tingling stab at her side. The chemicals took hold again: more tests, more tests. Held in the chair aloft 20 feet of creaking noise, and voices of God's spine-crushing thunderstorms in her ears which could take no more. They kept her awake for 32 hours, her senses heightened artificially: wires, electrodes and chemicals.
Anica had not the strength to uplift jarring against them; caught in this ulterior Zen trance and held there, bound like a kite caught tight in a sudden breeze, tethered to a string despite it's inclination to fly fast away and never look back.
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
Though she with giants fights: Final abduction
"Help! I'm being strong-armed by a voice that seems to speak from right in front of me!" yelled Anica, desperately informing through bewildered, fevered screams, "Behind me!"
Hundreds of feet below her, Lara could barely make her beautiful and gifted schoolfriend out. She was a dot in the sky, her voice timbred through the lashing winds and downpour and arriving muted and distant to his ears. There was, at any rate, little she could do. Anica was rising higher still, held taught and ratcheted precisely to that invisible force. It was happening again, and Lara knew now, and believed in Anica's survival stories, her yarns of abduction that noone had taken seriously.
But Lara had become close to Anica in the two months since her arrival at the city's state funded elementary college, and as she was being taken now her powerlessness bore down as frustration and anger. She swore for her return as Anica disappeared entirely. Lightning cracked around. In this moment of loss Lara would have sworn to anyone that she loved her.
Hundreds of feet below her, Lara could barely make her beautiful and gifted schoolfriend out. She was a dot in the sky, her voice timbred through the lashing winds and downpour and arriving muted and distant to his ears. There was, at any rate, little she could do. Anica was rising higher still, held taught and ratcheted precisely to that invisible force. It was happening again, and Lara knew now, and believed in Anica's survival stories, her yarns of abduction that noone had taken seriously.
But Lara had become close to Anica in the two months since her arrival at the city's state funded elementary college, and as she was being taken now her powerlessness bore down as frustration and anger. She swore for her return as Anica disappeared entirely. Lightning cracked around. In this moment of loss Lara would have sworn to anyone that she loved her.
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