Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Vomitorium of thoughts.

Below is what I hammered out into Microsoft Word in attempts to inspire myself for the thought experiment. I’m having a hard time connecting thoughts or coming up with more ideas to expand on… and I don’t want to get too much into Countess Bathory because I’d love to research her for the longer TE #3.

I appreciate that we are all very busy; any comments are helpful. I’ve got to try to get my butt onto Wave so I don’t look ungrateful/selfish.

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A fever is the body’s natural defense against illness. That is to say, detected illness. Anything that slips by unnoticed, including many parasites, may not be subject to the unwelcome sauna of the body’s rising temperature.

nerbiotxiste posed the question on plurk: is human pregnancy parasitic? I would say that depends on the host. Unwanted pregnancy is; the baby is feeding but the mother gains nothing, in fact she loses nutrients and confidence and hope. In the case of miscarriage I could argue the pregnancy was parasitic, but the host and the parasite are interchangeable here. Sometimes a mother’s body cannot handle the stress of a baby, and in this case the fetus was parasitic as in an unwanted pregnancy, though the mother might well be devastated by the loss of the child. And sometimes a baby cannot live in the conditions of a mother’s body: perhaps one with an unhealthy lifestyle who over- or under-eats, who is alcoholic, who is addicted to drugs, and in that case I believe the mother is the parasite, taking over the baby’s body.

There are even cases of in-utero (more accurately, in-fallopian) mummification of fetuses. A woman was pregnant and went into labor lasting quite a few days. The pains stopped and the woman never delivered. It was an ectopic pregnancy, but she did not know it. (All this is from http://www.yourdiscovery.com/ontv_shocking/index.shtml) I’ve seen the show; the mother’s immune system treated the fetus as an organ, which sounds pretty docile. I feel her body actually attacked the fetus (likely having died as a result of not coming through the birth canal after several days of effort) as an invader, a parasite, and calcified it to render it useless. The immune system may have acted independently of the mother: whether or not the mother wanted the baby is inconsequential, as her body decided for her, and there may have been no external or internal way to influence that decision. She could have died from the pregnancy or the labor, but the body decided it was going to fight.

Humans are vulnerable creatures. We’re always trying to defend ourselves. It’s not always warranted. A lot of times we miss out on something out of fear or apprehension. Or we try to stop nature by bolstering our defenses. Sometimes this is successful and deemed socially appropriate: if nature gives you cancer you have every right to radiate it into submission. We believe that cancer is not a natural or acceptable part of the life cycle, perhaps because it doesn’t happen to everyone but it does lead to death. Maybe that’s the problem with murderers: murder doesn’t happen to everyone so it isn’t acceptable. Maybe that’s the problem with Countess Bathory: getting old happens to everyone; you can’t just cheat death by bathing in blood. That’s impolite.

Defense has a lot to do with ego too. I mean, why defend something you don’t care about? I swear that during his eulogy to nanotext, the_author said something along the lines of “Sacrificing yourself for a bad cause is useless.” But I absolutely can’t find it and I’m drowning in fortune cookies. So maybe I just made it up. I suppose it’s reasonable that being immersed in aphorisms would cause me to hallucinate ones that aren’t even there. My ego just told me, give the_author credit for that one… you don’t have to win everything. Anyway, my point being, we care for our own wellbeing far beyond survival. We buy clothes we LIKE, not just whatever is available. We live in houses we DESIGN or REDECORATE, not just whatever’s there. We don’t want to get old so we buy MAKE-UP or get SURGERY or BATHE IN THE BLOOD OF VIRGINS. It’s all an ego trip.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Things that go bleh in the night.

Things are getting tense on plurk. Self-expression is starting to get in the way. We are at each other’s throats like vampires, feeding off of everything the other says. Sometimes we are nourished by the blood we suck out of these expressions. Sometimes we are left with a bitter taste in our mouths. This plurk was not what we expected.

Ultimately, everyone likes to be in control. Most everyone likes to be in control of themselves and some like to have control of others. This can be subtle, by performing an act that incites others to react, or it can be more direct, as calling someone out by name. And all the time I keep coming back to Rickels, “no vampirism without the desire to be vampirized”. Truer words were never spoken.

Given that social networking is about ego (whether your own ego, part of your ego, or an alter ego), people prefer to post what will get a reaction. Even if the post is somewhat secretive in nature, and the plurker doesn’t want to reveal the ulterior motive for the plurk, s/he still wants the plurk world to react to her/his joyangerfrustrationsadnesselationsuccessfailurebeautypower. It’s a necessity to see your own emotions reflected back at you. It’s necessary to see that others react and sympathize with your situation. Otherwise, why would you post it in a public forum? Wouldn’t you just have a private journal?

Of course lucemart is not absolved of this sin either. She’s been known to post things in order to get a reaction. In fact, this blog post desperately seeks a reaction. We are all guilty of it, and as we know from Rickels the sinners are doomed to return as vampires. Plurk in the middle of the night is a different world. PVP. Plurker v. plurker. But vampires don’t dare walk in the daylight. The comforting silence of the plurklulls bolsters our confidence. Privacy becomes public.

It’s a plurker v. plurker world out there, people. Tread carefully. One plurker’s amusement is another plurker’s aggravation, and since we aren’t all on Skype, intonation is not a factor. An innocent plurk can become an attack without this context. Beware the bleh. It leaves you especially susceptible to misinterpretation. I suggest following my lead and hanging garlic around you as you plurk at night. Might want to keep a wooden stake handy, too.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Desire to be vampirized.

Vampirism in the media was once Nosferatu. Ugly and detestable and well, parasitic. Undesirable.


Enter Tom Cruise as a vampire; enter Twilight. I’m probably missing a wide range of other examples because I never really fell into the vampire thing. Enter the vampire as something lustful, something taboo but just so forbidden that you can’t stop wanting it. Rickels points out the common thread that began with Stoker’s novel, “the vampire can enter a home or household by invitation only. No vampirism without the desire to be vampirized” (19).

This desire must be what made the switch from ugly vampire to ridiculously good-looking vampire so natural. If you have to invite him in anyway… well, who would invite Nosferatu into their home? He might as well be hot.

The thing is that the blood-sucking has become so sexualized that what we’re drawn to aren’t really vampires. They’re just hot guys with sharp teeth and a blood fetish, which is of course always practiced through lusty neck-biting (or vicious hickey). Rickels mentions there are numerous places on the body where blood could be sucked; historically it was often through the ear, if you can imagine such a thing. But I don’t think they’d want Edward Cullen sucking Bella’s brain out through her ear canal. Unless ear fetishes are the new “in” thing.

Something happened that made that change. We talked in class about how things can be so ugly that they’re cute again. That we exercise this power over things we hate or fear, turning them into something to admire. Maybe so we don’t all feel so small and insignificant.

Then there’s Rickels’ quotation of Barber, on page 2 of The Vampire Lectures. It explains that the people likely to return as vampires are “different, unpopular or great sinners”. I’ve been watching the Canadian sci-fi series Sanctuary on Netflix, and in the middle of the first season we are introduced to our first vampiric character: Nikola Tesla (of Tesla coil fame). Although Tesla made great contributions to electrical and mechanical development, he allegedly had a very eccentric personality and a tendency to exaggerate or make weighty claims, which eventually distanced him from the scientific community. He and Edison butted heads in their community constantly. Tesla was dIfferent; unpopular. Good choice for a vampire, Sanctuary.



And what of a Christian reaction to this vampire culture of sinners and rejects? Well, I read through several Christian blogs commenting on Twilight, and it seemed that the problems weren’t with the unholiness of the idea of a vampire. The bigger problems were the moral implications of Bella and Edward’s love. To me that seems to show a greater acceptance of the culture, even when the bloggers are disapproving, because the Harry Potter scandal seemed to be all about how wizardry is ungodly. Here, the reaction is: “okay, he’s a vampire, whatever, that’s fine because his Dad’s a Christian in the movie and they have good intentions, but BELLA IS A WHORE!” Feminism, meet Christianity. Shake hands.

Maybe the lack of Christian (or at least Catholic) opposition to portrayals of vampirism has something to do with communion…? I mean, objectively, the ultimate form of blood-sucking is drinking the blood of Jesus Christ, now, isn’t it? There is “no vampirism without the desire to be vampirized” (Rickels 19). That has so many implications that I don’t think I can even get into it here. People might send mobs with torches to my apartment.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Thus, he masters men.

Our class discussion on February 5 about the parasitism of humanity with regards to itself, animals, nature, etc. sparked so much contemplation in me that I came home and immediately began to type this blog entry. Since I'm covering the Vietnam War in another one of my classes, the YouTube video about the Air Force pilot in Vietnam was unfortunately nothing new.

A classmate pointed out that if he were to run into this guy on the street, he wouldn't be afraid of the pilot. The things he's saying are rather grotesque, but are not cause for concern to the everyday American. This pilot is fixated on a particular target (his idea of a parasite): Victor Charlie, Viet Cong, Vietnamese people. And the point that faded from my mind as I was trying to speak in class was this: It is easy to kill the target if your target is homogeneous and inhuman.

Examples can be found from most wars worldwide. Since wars are often between people of different nationalities, races, cultures, tribes, etc. it is a common tactic to dehumanize the target by turning them into a caricature or an animal. This propaganda poster from 1942 depicts a Japanese person terrorizing an innocent young blonde woman… but this isn't a Japanese person at all. At first glance it looks rather like an ape, and it even has claws.


"…history hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. Always taking, never giving. He bends the logic of exchange and of giving in his favor when he is dealing with nature as a whole. When he is dealing with his kind, he continues to do so; he wants to be the parasite of man as well. And his kind want to be so too. Hence rivalry. Hence the sudden, explosive perception of animal humanity, hence the world of animals of the fables. If my kind were cattle, calves, pigs and poultry, I could quietly maintain with them the same relations I have with nature. Such is the peaceful dream of my contemporaries, descendants, and ancestors" (Serres 24-5).

Man bends logic in his favor. If logic told him that all men were created equal, he would bend the logic to determine that his enemy is not a man at all, but a beast. And men and beasts are not created equal. The aggressive human parasite here views all enemies as lesser beings, whether or not they are truly human. This sort of powerful reasoning is what allows for war. If your target is not an equal, it is easy to destroy. If you refer to everything as targets instead of people, it's easier to carry out your job. "The one who plays the position plays the relations between subjects; thus, he masters men" (Serres 38). But who is the parasite: the soldier or the people being bombed? That's context, but I've been over that already; you get the idea.

We also talked in class about the Animal Planet/Discovery Channel mentality of portraying animals as beautiful and somewhat sacred creatures. I brought up the point that in the media, this is how we convince ourselves that humanity is not a brutal parasite: see, we make these touching shows about animals; we LOVE nature! But in reality we go out and hunt, trap, kill all of these animals. There are certain exceptions for certain religions or nationalities (in India the cow is sacred, and in the United States we would never harm an eagle), but for the most part we feed on nature completely. We aren't just a parasite with which animals and the rest of humanity can coexist. No, we're determined to kill and feed off of them: we're parasitoid to our chosen targets, be they fellow human or otherwise.

And yet, if we listen to the screaming humanity buried in us, we can stop the parasite from within. If we disallow brainwashing, disallow those who "play the position" to dictate our actions, we could regain compassion. The following is a short passage from the book Why Are We In Vietnam? by Norman Mailer, which on the surface has nothing to do with war and Vietnam, but in its narrative of hunting in the wilderness of Alaska, you start to see parallels. That is, if you can understand what the fuck the narrator, D.J., is saying. The book is fraught with racism (it was written around the time of the war and is partly about D.J.'s closed-minded middle-aged Texan father). Each time they describe an animal, they relate it to a human of a non-white ethnicity performing some stereotyped action. This ties in with the war propaganda I mentioned earlier. I've only included part of a sentence because frankly, a sentence can go on for pages in this book. Plus D.J. talks in the third person, and there are a lot of typos and a lot of colloquialisms.

"…if you good, you're up there, up above Master Mountain Goat, and when you start to shoot on him, he does a step dance like an old Negro heel-and-toe tap man falling down stairs or flying up them, and the first animal D.J. got in Alaska was a mountain goat at two hundred and fifty yards, and with one shot, animal stood on its nose for one long beast of a second, and then did a running dying dance for fifty yards down the rocks like a fakir sprinting through flaming coals, and when he died, Wham! the pain of his exploding heart shot like an arrow into D.J.'s heart, and the animals had gotten him, they were talking all around him now, communicating the unspoken unseen unmeasurable electromagnetism and wave of all the psychic circuits of all the wild of Alaska, and he was only part of them, and part he was of gasoline of Texas, the asshole sulfur smell of money-oil clinging to the copter…" (Mailer 99-100).

"…it wasn't until that night when he was in the bunkhouse back at Dolly Ding Bat that D.J. relaxed enough to remember that goat picking his way up and down rocks like a slow motion of a skier through slalom, his legs and ass swinging opposite ways, carefree, like take one leg away, I'll do it on the other, and it hit D.J. with a second blow on his heart from the exploding heart of the goat and he sat up in bed…" (Mailer 101-2). This time he relates the goat to an athlete or soldier: something he respects rather than scorns. Hopefully we'll all start to feel that way with animals, and likewise stop relating other races and other humans to animals that are only there for us to kill.