Sunday Whatever – Why the Vampire an essay by Dale Barrigar

“The greatest of these is love.” – Paul

“Shedding off one more layer of skin.

Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within.” – Bob Dylan              

Hello to all, or almost all (not to those who are sleeping).

Today I begin with a brief reflection upon names, in a world where they are trying to turn us all into numbers.

Multiple names for an author can be seen as a metaphor for the multiple roles of the human writer. The practice of not just sticking to one name is inspired (for me) by Dylan calling himself Jack Frost as a producer, but it goes back centuries to the many ways Shakespeare’s name is spelled. I also realized that all of the names I sometimes use as a writer (both public, and private) are names that someone else has called me at some point before in the past. EVERYONE ALIVE IS LIKE THIS, which is why I’m making a point of it.

And a real writer must live the life of a real writer, no matter what you say; what that “life of a real writer” is, exactly, is up to him or her or who they say and the only requirement is that it be recognizably different from everyone else if you want it to be the best it can be. Because being different from everyone else is both the most natural and the hardest thing in the world, especially now. And the definition of a “real (human) writer” is more important now than ever before when they think the Machines can take over all this. Real writers explore the Human and they laud it, too, both in a way that ONLY HUMANS CAN DO. Let me repeat that: only humans can do. 

There is no final destination for the real writer. When Samuel Beckett was informed that he’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he cried “Oh no!” and immediately disappeared (as in vanished) from the scene. For the record, the most recent Nobel in Literature recipient, Anne Carson, is deserving of the prize far more than most recent winners have been.

On the other hand, she received the prize because she is Canadian more than for her actual achievements, without doubt. As if somehow they were sending us Americans a message that way. But we became what we are because the rest of the world has been using us as a financialized resource for decades (or that is one big reason why we became what we currently are). Once we are no longer running the global show, you may laugh all you want but someone else had better step into the breach very soon or there is going to be very big trouble. We (us Americans) haven’t always been perfect at all but there hasn’t been a world war in eighty years. Let this “someone else” be someone who believes in the inherent value of humanity. America now exits, stage left, pursued by a bear.

PART TWO.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first version of his opium-dream tale “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” alongside a bunch of Wordsworth’s poems in their revolutionary collection Lyrical Ballads of 1798, which was so revolutionary that by now it almost looks “normal” until you look deeper at it again. There really never has been anything so revolutionary in writing before, you will sometimes end up thinking to yourself. Take another look at “The Mad Mother” by Wordsworth.

STC was a corpulent fireball who often collapsed into a virtual puddle right in front of his audience (everyone was an audience for him, including Wordsworth). He was known to talk for many, many hours putting everyone else to sleep. He lived a sick-healthy life as a lifelong laudanum addict and understood his children (both girls and boys) better than their mother or grandmother did (far, far better) even though he didn’t live with them. He has numberless heirs who also broke completely free of him, which is the best kind of heir. They include Thomas de Quincy, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, and John Lennon.

But then Coleridge continued unhappy with his story-poem and decided it needed explanations, which are called glosses, which are brief explanations inserted within the text.

In so doing, he was (probably not without knowing it) at least a hundred years ahead of his time, at the same time that he was casting his lot back with Milton and Dante.

These days, too, even Robert Frost explains his own poems. And by that I mean you can still read him doing so, which means he (his spirit) is still here, I say. That makes me think he himself might still be here – in spirit, that is. These feelings naturally increase in October, the time of the coming darkness when more light is still here. We don’t understand how precious the sun is.

When Mr. Frost explains his own poems, he is more wily than RF in the poems themselves, if that is possible. At least as wily as Huck Finn. Robert Frost IS Huck Finn as an old man. Huck Finn was a kid who was smarter than all the adults around him; AND he was naïve, innocent, hopeful, exactly like a kid is. It is not good to grow up into an adult who doesn’t remember what it was like to be a kid. That is the message of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher.

He, Frost, almost never says what he means.

And when he does say what he means, he doesn’t mean it that way.

WS (Shakespeare) had the same habit.

And on one level, it is a very good definition for Poetry with a capital P, keeping in mind that there is never just one definition of anything, and that much of the best storytelling is none other than a form of poetry itself.

It also causes poets to talk that way (almost) all the time. But it is not lying. It is a deeper way of telling the truth. Not everyone is willing to go along with this. Even other poets (storytellers) who are doing it themselves are sometimes unwilling to go along with it in others, like Huck Finn. You can come up with a lie or an explanation for everything under the sun, and deliver it with such a straight face that they don’t even know you’re running on empty.

Harold Bloom said that Coleridge’s explanations (glosses) are as poetic/al as the dreamlike, opium-inspired story-poem of the Mariner itself is.

Indeed, for the modern reader, in many ways the prose glosses are almost more readable than the poem itself (sometimes). There are things in the Mariner that haunt the reader like November ghosts. You remember the story perhaps more than the language but the language is what created the story. I have read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” end to end exactly one time and the whole thing is seared into my memory. You will never go to a wedding again and feel the same way about it, whether it is your own or someone else’s.

Every time you return to a truly great poem or story it is never the thing it was when you first encountered it. If it were, it would not be (and could not be, by definition) a great story, or poem. I have read the Mariner end to end once, but I have read little pieces of it separately more times than I could ever count. For me, Coleridge himself is a kind of ghost who appears, disappears, and reappears in my life with alarming regularity, including sometimes in my night dreams (and even more often in my day dreams). It took me thirty years (very much on and off) before I understood “Kubla Khan,” his other great poem.

I remember standing on the side of the Atlantic Ocean at the age of ten and staring out at it as I could not believe my nose, ears, eyes or skin. I could even taste it. It washed over my senses, the ocean. And then it swallowed my spirit. And then I came out on the other side, like Jonah, more alive, somehow. THEY thought I had just been standing there staring at the ocean. I felt like I would never be the same again. This is a world where “doing nothing” is more doing something than anything else, IF you are doing the right kind of nothing.

Count Dracula, Dracula, D, The D, Drac, The Vampire and V are a few of the names Mr. D utilized for himself.

THE VERY FIRST THING A POET OR STORYTELLER NEEDS IS A THRIVING INNER LIFE.

DRACULA HAS A THRIVING INNER LIFE TO SUCH AN EXTENT THAT HE LITERALLY CAN’T GET AWAY FROM IT, EVER. HE HAS A THRIVING INNER LIFE FILLED WITH LOVE AND EVIL.

His character and appearance were directly modeled on (in an often inverted way) the American poet Walt Whitman.

Bram Stoker loved Walt Whitman. He loved Walt Whitman more than even he himself was able to say.

Whitman rarely, or almost never, receives credit for the way he inspired this character, this most-famous character who sits beside Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes in how well-known he is. (Many among us do not know who Hamlet and Falstaff are. But how many among us do not know who these three are. Shakespeare’s most famous characters are probably Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar. His most literary, philosophical and intellectual characters are Falstaff and Hamlet.) One reason we know who Dracula is based on is because of the Irish Englishman Bram Stoker himself, who often wrote and spoke about it. He never tried to hide his feelings for the great American, Walt Whitman.

But it doesn’t matter that Whitman himself never receives credit except among us, a very tiny elect.

Because that is not the way that literature works.

Dale