vampires .

Life is difficult

In this ugly computer lab, it is as if thousands of lives stream past each other like a river over rocks. Our faces the stones, exposed and private. I pick up themes from postures and gestures. Do these belong to us? It’s like that feeling left behind after you finish a book – an impression or residue left behind on the palate of your mind. An echo. I wish that I could hold on to it, and label it. But I think its value lies in its opacity. I remember a quote by Joseph Conrad about The Heart of Darkness… it went something like ‘I wish to convey a dark resonance, a lingering feeling which remains after the fact’. It makes me think of that feeling left behind in the air after a good quote, actually.

“The seeds of transcendence are contained within the awareness of limits”

That’s lovely, isn’t it?

I finished an Anne Rice novel this morning, about vampires. My friend Zee calls it clitriture. But somehow I always manage to find some depth in the gloss. The idea of immortality is so well explored in her books. These vampires live for thousands of years, ironically in closer contact with death than most humans ever are. Yet, they always remain children like mortals tend to do. Children, because they are driven by their powerful, preternatural emotions to foolishly caper from one mistake to the next. Plagued by their respective histories and driven to transform humans to become their companions these litirary creations relfect that constant theme of loneliness and a search for an unselfish love (or perhaps to just understand love) that seems to keep step with mortal interests. The metaphor is quite simple, but it contains something so sincere:

how, in the same instant, life is always death.

 

Fundamentally, we are all scared.
Even the vampires

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