Vampires ... and Birthdays?

Image copyright Sandra Ormandy 2012 All Rights Reserved

What do vampires say to each other on their birthdays? Happy birthday seems so utterly human?

Options seem to include:

Happy UnBirthday? But then I have the Mad Hatter's song from Alice in Wonderland running through my head where it is firmly mind-wormed. This sort of destroys and counters the whole idea of a vampire not aging after their human-death.

Happy Undeath-day?  While this does not make the Mad Hatter's song run through my head, it doesn't really answer either. I am, still, thoroughly human,  and thus each day I celebrate not having yet endured death.

Happy Turn-day? I have seen this used in various author created mythos, and in many ways it does meet the criteria,celebrating the day one turns from human to vampire through whatever process is necessary for that change to occur. And yet being a creative and odd sort of person, I hear my mother telling me that if I did something or other, my father would be rolling over (turning over) in his grave. I do not think that this is quite what my mother referenced (darn it!), but nonetheless, not quite what a celebration of another year of not meeting the sun, or meeting a stake, deserves.

So if any of you ghosts in the internet machine have better suggestions, I am open to discussion. What does one say to a vampire on his rebirth day?

Metaphoric Reality

Oregon Lottery Poster 2014

Sucking blood from a stone?

Over the past several years I have been musing upon the usage of metaphors. They inundate our daily life: rain = sorrow, a rose = love, a wedding ring = eternal love, and yes, I could continue for a very long time; I possess a (economically useless) Masters in English Literature. The question for the day is if the constant, longstanding use of a metaphor -- such as that of a blood-sucking vampire -- as a stand-in for a regular Jane/Joe human behaving in a way which denudes the impacted "victim"-- somehow waters down the original word / idea / entity.

The secondary question would be, if the word "vampire" as metaphor does indeed water down the idea/word/entity, why would it matter? Science tells us, empirically, that real undead, revivified, returned to life vampires do not exist.

Certainly a wide field of literature and media play with this willful assumption of disbelief. Most notably (if my memory serves), Bram Stoker had Helsing argue in Dracula that the most effective way to hide ones existence was to make people believe you are fiction. I do not think he took it the concept far enough. Far to say one is hiding ones existence is still to posit that one exists.

 I have thought, for a fair length of time as I've worked on the idea of vampire as a metaphor, that the best way to hide ones existence it to water it down, to make the very idea of ones existence so used as an everyday noun/verb that it no longer refers to anything specific. The noun "vampire" becomes synonymous with any person sucking the life -- economically, physically, or emotionally -- from another person. 

They are behaving "vampirically" (adverb describing a verb). And if any Joe/Jane can be a metaphoric vampire; pouf goes any concept whatsoever that these fictional beings might actually share the earth with us for we are all, at one time or another, vampires ourselves.

I will pause to reassure anyone who happens upon this post -- I am not positing the existence of the real creature. Nor do I discount it. I am just noting that one function of a cliche is to water down the power of the idea being cliched. Let's look at an almost useless, but very societally meaningful, cliche: The dark and stormy night. Does the rendering of the concept into an overused, almost meaningless cliche actually water down, make less valid -- less real -- the torrential downpour pushed by high winds that the cliche represents?I do suggest that the overuse of the metaphor is rendering it a cliche with a check-list attached, and that the overuse of the metaphor waters down the original in our collective consciousness. We humanize our concept of the vampire, taming them in our minds, and then use it as a pejorative name for each other.

What do you think? Does overuse of a metaphor water down the reality of the vampire?

Vampire Hunter pt. 1

I crept into the cemetery after dark through a narrow opening between the fence and the bushes. It was creepy, but my rent was due and my landlord was not too fond of people of my persuasion; vampire photographers.

I stumbled over the rough ground past tombstones which glowed pale under the strobe of the moonlight filtering though the threatening clouds. It was a bad night to be entering such a place, but I'd heard rumors through the Twitterverse that vampires frequented this particular mausoleum. And if they were there, I needed to immortalize them in digital to pay my rent. The tabloids paid well for "authentic" vampire pictures, even if the vampire was not the hunky sort.

The skull partially buried in mulch but still managing to grin at me gave me pause; and I wondered if this was the right profession for me. But in my biz, it was produce or perish, right? So I crept on as stealthily as possible between the decaying gravestones while trying to find my location on the little map of the cemetery the kind lady at the desk had given me that morning. I kicked myself now for not having taken the time to figure out the right spot in daylight, but the map had made it look deceptively easy.

I almost died when I heard the eerie moaning sound of squeaking metal. I froze in place unwilling to alert any listeners to my presence, even while knowing that if it were the vampire I sought, my heart-beat would be a loud pounding bass drum in the otherwise deserted area.

Tune in again for the next segment.later this week.. (copyright Leslie Ormandy)

Attractive Nuisance or Dehumanized Predatory Vampire

Sweet Goth has been lucky enough to get to vamp out every Tuesday night with a group of like-minded students. We have been looking at the representation of child vampires (and the motif occurs with all ages of vampire in literature) as they morph from human into vampire. In the Claudia section of Interview with a Vampire -- the film -- she changes from a scruffy human child into a beautiful child vampire. I never really wondered about the function of this oft-depicted change, writing it off as just offering the vampire better access to food sources (prey).  Then one of my students' speculated that this alteration in appearance, this metamorphosis, could function as a de-humanizing moment, marking the transition from living human to undead human. It was a good catch on the student's part, and one that bears considering. (Perhaps my next conference paper?)

Of course, there is nothing to say that both could not be occurring -- access to prey and dehumanization. We see these "make-overs" all the time on television as a "sow's ear" gets turned into a "silks purse" as the Cinderella sheds her old tattered and torn clothing and changes into a bright shining gown fit for the handsome prince and the ball. This metaphor is of course flawed since it likens the living human to a "sow's ear" and the newly emerged vampire into the "silk purse."  And attractive folks do get preferential treatment in society -- you know, the 4 doesn't go out with the 10 sort of treatment. As a vampire, I'd like to move closer to a 10.

Then randomly throw in the even more modern vampire representation in which one is stuck with the body one "died" in. And toss in the newish MTV series Teen Wolf where new-made werewolves not only are healed of any preexisting illnesses but are turned into 10's, and one sees the werewolf genre appropriating the idea even as the vampire genre releases it.

So this week I am offering no answers, just a pool of sort of random observations, and ask, are vampires an attractive nuisance (like a dangerous swimming pool in the neighbor's back yard), or is this "death" and "rebirth" a representation of dehumanization?

Eternal Life = Eternal Life

Eternal life is both a blessing and a curse for a vampire, especially if they must spend part of it coffin bound, but it does offer them the opportunity to do lots of studying or reading. They could study Computer Engineering or sociology, or perhaps learn a new language, but really, human or previously-human, the attraction of a Gothic novel remains.

In this case we see the vampire reading Risen From the Grave: Varney the Vampyre part 1: The Feast of Blood, a penny dreadful from the Victorian period. Of course, while the story is the original the edition is not. This is the nicely modernized version offering a younger vampire -- one not a century and a half old -- a look at the un-life and adventures of Varney.

I guess this is an old-fashioned vampire or the book would be an e-version and not nearly as much fun in the picture. (Taken at Washington County Fair by Grave Images llc)