The Godless Vampire Next Door.

Ethan Hawke, the sensitive, noir vampire.

Spoiler Alert.

I saw Daybreakers last night.  It’s a vampire movie with no Christianity in it, whatsoever.  No crucifixes, no holy water, no battles over souls, no talk of damnation to hell, and . . . no sexuality.  A vampire movie without any hint of Christianity or sexuality.  How did we get here?

I love vampire stories and I enjoy metaphors.  Daybreakers uses vampirism as a metaphor for the effects of capitalism–about how capitalism transforms us all into bloodsuckers metaphorically as well as literally.  Here’s the premise (if you missed the publicity onslaught).  It’s 2019.  Almost all of humanity has been turned into vampires, except for those rare humans who cling to their, well, humanity.  These humans have been forced into hiding as enemies of the “vampire state”–as terrorists, really–but the war on terror is actually cover for the military-corporate complex to capture humans and put them into suspended animation, where they’re strung up and farmed for blood instead of electricity, à la The Matrix.  If vampires don’t get blood, eventually their frontal lobes deteriorate and they revert atavistically into giant super-strong bat monsters.  Imagine Gary Oldman-as-bat in the bedroom scene in Coppola’s Dracula movie, but with the temperament of one of the infected in 28 Days Later, and you have a pretty good idea of where the species is headed when the blood runs out.  And it’s running out fast.

Ethan Hawke is trying to invent a usable blood substitute before many more vampires get to that point, but he’s not having much luck.  His blood substitutes tend to make a vampire’s head explode all over the place like in that famous Scanners scene, but with about 40 times the gore.  But Ethan’s a nice guy, and he wishes he were still human, and he only drinks pig blood, and he’s looking for a blood substitute so that no more humans need to die to feed vampires, so we like him and we root for him although we’re human and he’s a vampire.  Meanwhile his boss, Sam Neil, loves being a vampire and loves the money to be made off of farming humans for gourmand vampires once a blood substitute is invented.

But Ethan gets recruited by the humans to help save humanity and . . . . well, you can guess what happens to Sam Neill’s big agrocorp plans.

Peppered throughout is Willem Dafoe as a Van Helsing-esque figure spouting folkloric wisdom like, “Living in a world where vampires are the dominate species is about as safe as bare backing a 5 dollar whore.”   He speaks in a very strange dialect; I think it’s supposed to be Southern. A Southerner with a wired-shut jaw and a very, very bad cold.

In any case.  The movie has a lot of fun with the metaphorical potential of this approach.  The movie gets downright slaphappy with it, in fact.  Over the course of ninety minutes or so, the vampires-on-the-brink-of-starvation, humans-on-the-brink-of extinction plot gets thrown not only at capitalism, class, and corporate greed, but also political science (Hobbes or Rousseau?), racial discrimination, the war on terror, the oil crisis, genocide, ecological disaster (extinction of a big species), pandemic disease, agrobusiness, vivisection, vegetarianism, addiction, and patriarchy.  Whew.

But there’s no Christianity, no God, no discussion of what happens to your soul when you eat a human, or whether you’re buying earthly immortality with eternal damnation.  I’m not saying that’s an inherently bad thing, like, “Damn those heathen movie makers!”.  No.  I’m just saying, the absence of God in a vampire movie is remarkable.  Ethan Hawke is tortured by the cruelty perpetrated against humans and is a kind of vampire vegetarian as a consequence . . . but the movie’s moral system never gets more specific than that.  Vampirism is treated almost purely as a disease, as a physiological condition that, like most plagues, results in exploitation of one kind or another and global crisis.  So the thing is, Daybreakers is a vampire movie where the idea of being made into a vampire just isn’t very scary, at least not until all the blood’s gone.

In fact, as an (ex-)smoker, I found it somewhat alluring that Ethan Hawke as a vampire chain smoked with wild abandon.  And that new source of vampiric allure got me thinking about all the vampire movies I’ve seen, and how they used to frighten me.  They frightened me because being made into a vampire stripped you of your authentic self; it was akin to being a zombie, except an intelligent one that never died and God abandoned.  Take Salem’s Lot.  That TV movie scared the beejesus out of me as a little kid, because in that movie vampirism was like demonic possession.  One evening you’re walking through the woods in the dark, headed home for supper, and the next thing you know you’re levitating outside your best friend’s bedroom window, scratching at the glass with your new claws and hissing with your newly fanged mouth, your newly red eyes bulging out of their blackened sockets, hellbent on tearing out her jugular.  Good grief that idea scared me so bad I went to bed for months with a little crucifix resting right on my neck.

Then there was Frank Langella’s Dracula, the one with Eleni in it.  Frank turns Lucy and that means we soon find her wandering around an underground crypt in a murderous daze, slobbering over the delectable baby corpse she’d just unearthed.  And in most of Christopher Lee’s movies (as I recall), a woman who succumbed to Christopher’s magnetic gaze and allowed herself the ecstacy of being bitten would soon find herself converted into a sexually voracious strumpet.  In Robert McCannon’s They Thirst, a novel set in Los Angeles in (as I recall) the seventies, vampires are terrifying because they will make you one of them, they will make you into a hungry, slithering, perpetually dissastisfied addict with no thought for anything but the blood.

But in Daybreakers?  Become a vampire and all you lose is the sight of the sun.  Sure, things get uglier when the globe runs out of blood, but things get ugly whenever you run out of an essential resource, regardless of whether you’re a vampire.  In Twilight, too, become a vampire and all you lose is the sight of the sun, but for unlimited wealth, travel, beauty and the coolest family on earth that seems like a not unreasonable trade-off.   I guess we have Interview with a Vampire to blame for the emergence of sensitive vampires.   That movie showed us the vampire’s side of the story and taught us that vampires are people, too. You just feel so sorry for rich, immortal, beautiful Brad Pitt, who travels the world in luxury suffering night in and night out from guilt and loneliness, with no relief in sight, the weight of eternity in this dismal earthly paradise heavy on his shoulders.  I cried when Claudia died.

Now we only rarely, and under extreme conditions, see vampires as scary.   Now they’re all tortured Southern gentlemen, lonely girls next door, jaded aristocrats, angst-ridden teenagers, or saviors of the human species.  Since it’s argued that the vampire myth is a metaphor for xenophobia, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; maybe we’re learning how to get more comfortable living shoulder-to-shoulder with difference.  Or maybe deep down we know we’re already monsters,  but without the courage it takes to face that fact.  But these vampires do.  They face it with a vengeance.  Maybe that’s one reason why vampires have become the heros.

What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

“Who art thou, then?”
“Part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”
—–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

“He who sees the infinite in all things, sees God.  He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.”
—–William Blake, There is No Natural Religion

“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.”
—–William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Blake believed that God, being entirely good, could only create that which is good.  This includes Man, whose creative drives are thereby divine and echo on a human scale God’s creative powers on the cosmic one.  According to this view, evil doesn’t come from the Devil.  Evil is the effect of what disciplines our divinely creative capacity into accepting as real that which is, in fact, only perceptual and conditional.  Good and evil, material and spiritual, real and imagined, emotion and reason: these are manmade categories of perception that might help us to organize our experience of reality, but should not codify and define it.  Consequently, these categories must be applied carefully, with humility.

Without evil, there is no good.  Without shadows, there is no beauty.  Without contraries there can be no progression.

We are a jaded people.  We’ve been liberated from the myth that innocence is exalted, but we’re haunted by the perpetual threat of spiritual disappointment and emotional disaster that experience has taught us to expect.  It’s not all bad, though.  The innocent may perceive more clearly, but they don’t know what they’re looking for.

Auld Lang Syne

If like me you ever needed to see the words written down so that, for once, you can sing the song properly at midnight:

by Robert Burns

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne!

Chorus:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

Chorus

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pou’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
Sin’ auld lang syne.

Chorus

We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin’ auld lang syne.

Chorus

And there’s a hand, my trusty fere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.

Chorus

Makes me cry every time. In fact, pasting the lyrics here, I think of you and fear tonight I’ll weep like a little babe.

Oh, and here’s another New Year’s poem, by one of my favorite authors, Thomas Hardy. That man understood sadness. He wrote this poem for December 31, 1899.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

May the New Year bring you all wisdom, peace, and love.

Imagining Theseus & Ariadne

Last spring, with a friend I researched the life of mythic Greek hero Theseus of Athens, and I became fascinated by his heroine Ariadne, princess of Minos.  Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and gave him the secrets he needed to destroy the Minotaur and end the Athenian tribute (their best youths every nine years sent over on a black-sailed ship to be eaten alive by the monster), in exchange for his promise to marry her.  He agreed, took her away from her homeland, and abandoned her on the tiny island of Naxos.  He sailed off while she was sleeping.

Wikipedia on Ariadne

Ariadne on the Greek Mythology Link

I try to imagine Theseus’s shipride to Crete–how he and his fellow travellers were stripped of their weapons as soon as they boarded ship, and then forced to row, side by side, the long voyage to the land of the enemy. How close they must have grown as every day and every league drew them nearer to the end of so many things. Did they talk about their youths? their mothers? their sweethearts? Maybe they confided in each other their plans for farming peaceably or fighting well or nurturing families, plans that they had fostered since they were little. These futures were to be sacrificed, and the sweeter the future, the greater the sacrifice. I wonder if this comforted them. I wonder if they recognized themselves in the throes of their fear and grief, stripped of time like that, taken from their homes, their families and their pasts, sent off to a strange place where time for them would end, and that end was absolutely knowable and terrifying. And even as they grew closer and grew to love each other in their misery, and learned how to comfort the ones who were always crying, they were also growing nearer to the end of that closeness, the end of comfort, the end of love.

Did they dream? Did they have nightmares of running in slow motion through a pitch-black labyrinth, pounding against walls and tripping over stairs while their ears were flooded by the roar of the monster coming closer, coming to tear them into pieces and eat them alive?

Then they landed, maybe they were enchained, maybe they cried, most likely they went into shock at the naked imminence of their deaths. I imagine them divided from the Cretans by hatred, by fear, by language . . . . a babbling and antagonistic crowd gathered around them, poking, prodding, leering, doing as we do when we are about to knowingly hurt somebody: blaming it on them. Theseus would have kept a brave face. He’d already proven himself a fearless hero, and the experience had made him cocksure. He believed in his blood that he was meant for great things.

The myths say that Ariadne was made by one of the goddesses to fall in love with Theseus, but if there are no goddesses than this is a fiction and Ariadne fell in love for the usual reasons. I can see how standing on the dock in the middle of all that rabble, commanding everyone’s attention with his strength and beauty, that Theseus was magnetic. So maybe it started with a spark of attraction and awe. Or maybe Ariadne saw Theseus and immediately recognized him as a kindred soul, someone she had known in past lives and who was therefore instantly knowable and lovable to her. Or it could have been pity for the Athenians that inspired her to help them, and she just chose Theseus to help directly because he was their leader, and fell in love from there. Maybe she just didn’t like being alone, or maybe she was rebelling against her Dad. Maybe she was simply ambitious, or tired of Crete, or hungry for adventure. Maybe maybe maybe. I’m not sure it matters, because the result is the same: she loved him suddenly and passionately.

I think of her faith in love, and I’m touched or appalled. She loved Theseus so much that she threw away her father, her mother, her family, her throne, and her home. She loved him so much that she trusted him completely. “If I help you, will you take me away with you and make me your wife?” she asked. Theseus said, “Yes.” She didn’t hold anything for ransom: right up front she gave him the thread, the sword, and the directions through the labyrinth. Because he said he loved her, she gave him everything.

Edward Burne-Jones, tile design for Theseus and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, 1861.

So what about Theseus? Did he mean it when he said, “yes,” or was he saying whatever it took to survive and become the hero of his people? Maybe he was sincere when he said yes, I love you, and just as sincere at Naxos when he said to himself, no, I don’t want to take her home. What was the value of his word? Having said yes, even if he’d tired of Ariadne by the time they got to Naxos, shouldn’t he have kept his promise so that his word remained a true and constant thing? Or was it vanity and cowardice? Was he too afraid of Athenian opinion to remain loyal to the daughter of the enemy, even if she did save his life?  Or was it hypocrisy: some scholars say that, as a rule, Greek heroes in the end find it unforgivable that a woman would betray her own kind, even if it’s to save the Greek hero, and the Greek hero inevitably punishes her for the betrayal after he’s benefited from it.

Did Theseus believe in love? A man who would risk sacrificing his life to save his people but not consider sacrificing any freedom, pride, or pleasure to save the woman who saved him. It’s possible, then, that he didn’t believe in love. I guess Athenians to this day, though, are grateful for the lie that saved their legendary King and preserved Athens. What they will never know is whether Theseus might have been even greater, and Athens even more wonderful, had Theseus kept his word to Ariadne despite the cost. Perhaps a future was lost in which a powerful and brave woman inspired and influenced a great king. Perhaps a future was lost wherein Theseus let nothing, especially not the betrayal of a woman who loved and helped him, chip away at his integrity. In that future, maybe Theseus feels bold and pure for longer and therefore rules with greater integrity and confidence. Because maybe abandoning Ariadne put a crack in his virtue that gradually opened into a fissure.  And thus he matured into the kind of man who on a lark, with his best friend Pirthouous, would abduct a seven-year-old Helen and have his mother keep the little girl prisoner until she was old enough to marry, who became the kind of man who would help his best friend try to steal another man’s wife–a god’s wife, in fact.

John Waterhouse, Ariadne (1898)

Ariadne alone on Naxos and abandoned, maybe pregnant or maybe rescued by Dionysus, cursed Theseus in her grief.¹ She cursed him to forget to change the sail from black to white to signal victory to his father. So when poor Aegeus, who had kept watch on that cliff for months, finally saw a speck on the horizon, he held his breath until it came close enough to make out. The anticipation he must have felt! Because he’d missed his son so much, and worried over him, grieved for him, prayed for him, imagined this moment. . . and here he came at last. . .. Then it took one split second for Aegeus to see the black sail, to feel his heart break in two, and to let go of life and fall into the sea. Suddenly, just like that, Theseus became King.

When he was an old man himself, Theseus would stand on that same cliff and look out at the ocean, imagining Naxos just beyond the horizon. He would allow himself for a few seconds to imagine Ariadne years ago waking up from her dream on the beach all alone, with Theseus completely gone. The weeping and the pacing and the shocked disbelief, the torturous helplessnees of loving somebody who doesn’t love you. The lamenting. The heart-crushing pain. Did she drown herself? Grow old and bitter? Marry somebody else? He would never know anything for certain except that he’d done her harm. He would think this, and maybe remorse would clench his chest, because the guilt engendered by that decision might have flavored everything that came after it: his rule of Athens, his adventures abroad, his subsequent love affairs.  Maybe he felt regret.  But the abandonment left the sail black, which killed his father, which made him king. Power and adventure or love and sacrifice? If Theseus had it to do all over again, would he have chosen differently?

And that’s why he’s like the ship of Theseus. Over time, it doesn’t really change. It’s the same ship, and like the ship, Theseus would have made the same choices. Or the ship only looks the same but actually has been fundamentally transformed over time. And like the ship, Theseus with the wisdom of age knows now he might not have betrayed Ariadne, he might’ve saved his father’s life, and had time to grow wiser before becoming king. And thus he might have become an old man standing on a high cliff without this regret, guilt, or anguish in his heart.

Interestingly, legend has it that the next great love of Theseus’s life was Antiope, an Amazon warrior — sister to the queen of the Amazons, in fact.  She was killed fighting in battle by Theseus’s side.

_________________________________________

¹Ovid imagined Ariadne waking up on Naxos thusly:

What am I to do? Whither shall I take myself – I am alone, and the isle untilled. Of human traces I see none; of cattle, none. On every side the land is girt by sea; nowhere a sailor, no craft to make its way over the dubious paths. And suppose I did find those to go with me, and winds, and ship – yet where am I to go? My father’s realm forbids me to approach. Grant I do glide with fortunate keel over peaceful seas, that Aeolus tempers the winds – I still shall be an exile! ‘Tis not for me, O Crete composed of the hundred cities, to look upon thee, land known to the infant Jove! No, for my father and the land ruled by my righteous father – dear names! – were betrayed by my deed¹ when, to keep you, after your victory, from death in the winding halls, I gave into your hand the thread to direct your steps in place of guide – when you said to me: “By these very perils of mine, I swear that, so long as both of us shall live, thou shalt be mine!”  Ovid, Heroides X.

Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

Cover image for William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_and_of_Experience

Poppy’s & Djuna’s stories

Narrated by Poppy to Mama for transcription:

Once there lived a little brother sun that lived with his father sun.  And mother moon and her darlings . . . she had so many darlings that father sun did not like it.  So the father sun made his husband go to find out why she got so many darlings.  The end.

Written by Djuna herself, with some spelling assistance:

The Monkey

One day the mom monkey and her baby monkey went for a swing on a branch.  They had fun.  The end.

The Little Rainbow

One day a little rainbow had a bad day.  She had a very very bad day.  She was sad, very very sad.  The end.

Holding onto Santa Claus

Djuna is 7 and probably on the verge of discovering that Santa is not real–if she doesn’t know already.  She might.  She’s the kind of girl who would hold on by sheer strength of will, who would know but pretend to herself and others not to.  Or who would know but be afraid of disappointing others by knowing, so would tell herself she doesn’t know and act accordingly.

I’ve had a few conversations with other parents who have advised me that I’m lying to her by perpetuating the myth of Santa, and who warn me that she’ll resent me in the end.  I tend to disagree.  She has the rest of her life to live with the truth, I respond.  Let her have as much magic now as she can . . . belief is a gift that just keeps right on giving.

But as I’ve been reflecting on this position, I’ve wondered about its application to adult existence.  I have always maintained that I want nothing but the truth, but lately I question if that itself is really true.  Who among us wants to be disabused of our illusions?  Just today a friend asked me what I ultimately wanted from a difficult situation, and I was vehement: “I want the truth.  Just the truth.  Without distortion or equivocation.”  “Well,” she said calmly, “they’re never going to give you that.  If they haven’t already, they won’t now.  The real truth is already in the writing on the wall.”

And of course she was right.  The truth was hiding in plain sight.  It always had been.  I just wanted to keep believing in Santa.

Which got me thinking about other times I’d projected responsibility for the truth onto other people.  My unconscious assumption had been that I was allowed to believe what I wanted unless they told me otherwise.  Take my marriage.  My ex hadn’t loved me a for while.  He was having an affair right under my nose.  These are things I should’ve known already, from the way he behaved and from how well I knew him.  And maybe deep down, I did.  But I convinced myself that it was okay to continue operating under the “default” assumption: I would believe we were happily married until notified of a change in status.  This would allow me both to bury my head in the sand and, when events ripped me right out the dune and hurled me through space, blame my husband for letting me bury my head in the first place.

And maybe this connects back to Santa.  When we first learn that Santa is a myth, we blame our parents.  We’re angry at them.  We say it’s for having let us believe in a lie, but actually I think we’re mad at them for not having done a better job of protecting us from the truth.  We blame them for the pain of discovery.  We blame them for the fact that our fears and suspicions have been confirmed when we’d really hoped our skepticism was ill-founded.  Hope is fierce–it’s kind of amazing how blindly and sometimes viciously it reacts to external threat.  That’s why it’s best to let hope die quietly in its sleep.  Because if you try to kill it while it’s awake and alert, it will take you down with it, if it can.

The Hounds of Love Are Hunting

I played the second side of Hounds of Love for the girls this week, and Djuna could not stop talking about it–like, a mile a minute for about 45 minutes.  She had “The Ninth Wave” (the second side of the album, from when albums had two sides) all figured out.

“Mama,” she says, “see, the little girl was on the boat and then she wasn’t, and she was in the water, holding on tight, and this is the part where her mother and father come rescue her, and there are five seats in the helicoptor, one for her sister, one for her brother, and one for her.”

“Who’re the other two for?”

“Her mom and dad!”

“What’s her dad doing?”

“Driving the helicoptor!”

“What’s her mother doing?”

“Oh, she’s sitting in the very front waiting for her to get on the helicoptor.  She’s got a towel because she’s all wet. “

Now, granted, I’d given them some general guidelines for interpreting “The Ninth Wave,” which I’ve been waiting  my entire adult life to share with the children I would someday have.  I told my daughters that it was about a girl whose boat had sunk, and she was all alone in the water, and she was trying to get through the night until she was rescued in the morning, and she was very very cold, and it was hard to stay awake, and sometimes she fell asleep into nightmares.  They ate it up like candy.  Poppy, especially, loved the two spooky songs “Under the Ice” and “Waking the Witch,” especially when that devilish voice yells “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”  When she’d asked me what the girl was dreaming about, I told her she was having a nightmare in which everyone thought she was a witch.  That was all Poppy needed to hear.  She asks me to play it over and over again.

Ah, Kate Bush and Hounds of  Love.  Does anybody but me still listen to it?  Yes, the way it uses the Fairlight CMI dates the sound a bit, but it’s an amazing album to me nonetheless, what with its “Side A” of single stand-along songs followed by the high-concept Side B, “The Ninth Wave,” which is in fact the narrative of a woman all alone at sea, in the nighttime, after some inexplicable catastrophe.  She’s trying to stay awake “(“And Dream of Sheeop”), but instead dozes off into fantastical nightmares that register the cold enfolding her body (“Under the Ica” and “Waking the Witch”).  She starts to lose hope and  imagines her family/lover at home thinking of her, wondering about her, searching for her, or perhaps already resigned to her death (“Watching You without Me”).  It’s the darkness before the dawn: she’s despairing, but then the will to live is rekindled by the idea of her future self (“Jig of Life”).  Finally morning comes (“Hello Earth” and “The Morning Fog”) and — well, here’s the lyric for the last song, “The Morning Fog.”

The light
Begin to bleed,
Begin to breathe,
Begin to speak.
D’you know what?
I love you better now.

I am falling
Like a stone,
Like a storm,
Being born again
Into the sweet morning fog.
D’you know what?
I love you better now.

I’m falling,
And I’d love to hold you know.
I’ll kiss the ground.
I’ll tell my mother,
I’ll tell my father,
I’ll tell my loved one,
I’ll tell my brothers
How much I love them.

But neither the description of the album’s concept nor looking at the lyrics alone can give you much  idea of how rich and otherworldly “The Ninth Wave” sounds.  It’s not just an adventure tale, and there’s very little melodrama to it.  It’s a narrative of rebirth, which is maybe one of the reasons I have always vaguely categorized it in my mind under “Break-up Albums.”  To give you an idea of Kate Bush’s ambition: the title of Side B was taken from nothing less than the scene of King Arthur’s birth in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Coming of Arthur.”

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame:
And down the wave and in the flame was borne
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin’s feet,
Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried “The King!

The more I’ve listened to this album this week, the more I’ve fixated on Kate Bush’s metaphors.  “The Ninth Wave” takes the epic birth of a mythic king and applies it to something entirely internal and solitary — you can’t really get more inside yourself without distraction than to find yourself at sea alone in the middle of the night with no clear expectation of rescue.   And the set-up allows Kate to move through the whole cycle of self-pity, terror, despair, resignation, and hope that accompanies loss, but without having to resort to romantic or erotic love, or even much mention of the opposite sex, for that matter.  And I admire how evocative and indirect her lyrics can be.  She never tells you what to think or feel, she hardly even leads you there.  As a very visual representation of a completely internal subjective experience, the logic of “The Ninth Wave” is imagistic and associative rather than expository  That’s part of what makes it so Romantic (in the same way that Tennyson was Romantic) and so British — presenting ideas and powerful emotions sideways, so you can think about them while you feel them, rather than with direct confrontation that makes you reactive instead.

Side “A” is great, too, but as a series of single stand-alone songs it’s a little less poetic.  A little.  The images are still great.  Each song introduces a central metaphor and then just runs with it, runs and runs and runs.  Maybe that’s why I can keep returning to them again and again — I’ve got a thing for metaphors.  “Running Up that Hill” is the one everybody knows: “If I only could, I’d make a deal with God/ And get him to swap our places.  I’d be running up that road, running up that hill, with no prah-buh-lems . . . “  It’s not my favorite; I think the production sounds too clinical and eighties, which has dated the song and almost, by association, the album.   But then you get “The Hounds of Love,” an exuberant song about the fear of commitment — to living fully as well as loving fully — a fear that grows in direct proportion to the thrilling experiences it promises.  It’s such an unexpected image (to me), this picture of dogs chasing her and scaring her as a child:

When I was a child:
Running in the night,
Afraid of what might be

Hiding in the dark,
Hiding in the street,
And of what was following me…

the hounds of love are hunting me
I’ve always been a coward,
And I don’t know what’s good for me.

(Well) Here I go!
It’s coming for me through the trees.
Help me, someone!
Help me, please!

It’s hard to resist quoting the entire song, with its images of the beating little heart of a dying fox and of throwing your shoes upon the lake (to put you two steps on the water, without getting the least bit wet . . . again, a great metaphor for how some of us would like to test out love before plunging in).

But my favorite–and Poppy’s favorite–is “Cloudbusting,” the story of a creative man beaten down by small-mindedness, as seen through the eyes of his devoted child.  Literally, the song is about the arrest and imprisonment of Wilhelm Reich . . . but I don’t care about the literal.  If you’ve ever seen anybody you really loved have to release a dream–somebody with a lot of potential who squanders it, or who gets it beaten out of him, or  lets time pass, or who just can’t get generally catch a break–then maybe you’ll find this song moving, too.  Or if you’ve ever had to let go of somebody you loved while you still loved them — well, then, maybe you’ll like it for that, too.  Or if you can remember somebody who, when they spent time with you, somehow evoked a heart-bursting sense of possibility or anticipation . . . and still do, even after they’re gone, whenever you really think of them.  So in some ways it’s very simply a song about missing somebody:

Every time it rains
You’re here in my head
Like the sun coming out
I just know that something good is going to happen
I don’t know when
But just saying it could even make it happen . . .

Love it, love it.

And finally, there’s that voice of hers–high-pitched, and sort of like she’s been classically trained in a choir.   It makes her sound extremely like a little girl, no matter what she’s singing about, and the implied innocence lets her get away with lyrics about hounds and foxes and shoes thrown on a lake and the clouds changing in the big sky.  If anybody else were to sing this lyric, I might giggle at it.  But the way she sings it, like a child, she pulls it off with perfect gravity: “You’re like my yo-yo that glowed in the dark / What made it special, made it dangerous / So I bury it and forget.”

Ah, Kate.  When I was 16 and 17, there was you, and there was Stevie Nicks.  Funny to think of you as a pair:.  There’s Stevie with her Jimmy-Iovine produced pop-rock melodramas, in her flagrantly flowing cloaks, letting rip emotionally and vocally in songs like “Edge of Seventeen” with this almost self-congratulatory regard for the immensity of her feelings.  And then there’s you, Kate, with your aesthetic and lyrical discipline, your complete control in the studio, your almost cerebral regard for the feelings you sing about, the precision of your lyrics.  One’s all love and guts; the other’s more like delicate porcelain.   I like to imagine a girls-only pajama party where we stay up late into the night waxing philosophical and painting each other’s nails, arguing over the wisdom of listening to one’s heart.  Sensibility versus reason.  Yes, m’am.

Protected: On a friend’s wedding day.

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Five Annoying Things in “THE TWIILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON”

So I went and saw The Twlight Saga: New Moon, and I’ve read all the books. Not just because I have kitschy taste (although I often do), but because when I’m speeding down the 405 and a cop car with lights flashing starts weaving back and forth in front of us to slow down the flow of traffic, I tend to think it’s foolhardy to just keep motoring along like nothing’s happened. I keep an eye out for the car wreck that I would otherwise have slammed into.

I can’t say New Moon was very good.  Parts of it annoyed me.  Here’s some of them.

1. Jacob’s teeth.

It’s an old, old convention: the vampires are the aristocrats, the werewolves are the working-class salt of the earth. Seen Underworld? It’s just that in most versions of the convention, both are white folks and so it’s a class thing more than a race thing. I’m shocked that everyone went ballistic over the racial stereotyping embodied by Jar Jar Bing in that George Lucas movie but no one remarks upon how the poor, slovenly Redskins play the canine protectors of the white girl and her kin. With their little disheveled shacks and fixer-upper cars and trash everywhere, they’re like the janitors or security guards of the Monster world.

It’s weird, how the movie essentializes these roles. Vampires are made, but werewolves are born. And while vampires are refined and deft at self-control, the werewolves can only barely discipline their natures—they’re more like animals, prone to erupting into fur and teeth whenever they lose their tempers. “Don’t make me angry! You don’t want to see me angry!” In both the book and the film, too, one of the conflicts between Bella and Jacob emerges over his inability to tell her he’s a werewolf because Alpha Dog (Sam) has forbidden it . . . and werewolves can’t defy Alpha, even when they want to. While you’ve got a slew of Cullen bloodsuckers who elect to go vegetarian and, miraculously, succeed, those poor Indian werewolves can’t elect to do anything. That’s just their nature.

In any case, poor Jacob—too uneducated and culturally innocent to know he doesn’t have a chance against privileged, refined white boy Edward. The rich kids always get the girl (or boy). Always. It’s a marriage plot, after all, this whole Twilight saga. And we all know from our Jane Austen novels that the pretty people will marry the rich people. No matter how smart or spunky or iconoclastic Bella may be, she’s going to go for the owner of the nice big house on the hill. With loads of money. And nice cars. And good taste in music. She may play around with the red boy in the white boy’s absence, but when old whitey returns then red boy is history.

Stephanie Meyer tries to mute this classicism/racism by making Jacob younger (thus the cougar jokes), giving him bleached teeth (because without cosmetic dentistry the class divide is too obvious), and playing up the mythic love element of Edward and Bella’s fated chemistry, but still . . . she chose to make the “wet dogs” (which is what Alice calls Jacob at one point) impoverished Injuns. It’s kind of creepy.

2. Cullen family politics.

Bella demands that the Cullens vote on whether or not she should be made into a vampire. When it’s time for Carlisle to weigh in, he announces patronizingly, “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to lose my son. Edward, I will not have you suicidal again over the possible death of Bella. I vote yes.” The wise Carlisle has spoken. Fine. The thing that makes me crazy about this dynamic is how inconsistently the movie portrays the maturity of its vampires. Is Edward 109 or not? And if he is – why is Carlisle talking to him and about him like he’s a teenager?

At casa Cullens, all these 100+-year-old vampire “children” revel in acting obnoxiously immature.  The big one—Emmet—wears a sideways baseball cap, for goodness sake! He’s about 80 years old and wears a sideways baseball cap like to the manor born. I don’t buy for one minute that it’s a self-aware stab at fooling mortals into thinking he’s only 18. He wears it like he means it.  And coven politics aside, I think at about 80 you should start acting and thinking like a bona fide grown-up no matter how much older than you your father is. Carlisle and Esme are not parents, even. They’re just older vampires, like 200 years older. At what point is age just a number? Only when the 109-year-old Edward wants to bed an 18-year-old girl, I guess.

3. Bella’s grief.

It probably says more about me than Bella, but my favorite part of the book was her grief. It fascinated me. I’ve been through the ringer, and while at one point (or mor than one), I may have worried that I wasn’t going to make it, deep down I knew I would.  And I’m talking about major loss—like years and years of intimacy down the tubes, child-rearing together, or being so connected to somebody that I can’t breathe without thinking about him.  And yet in each case, I dealt. Not Bella. Nope. She’s been with Edward (without sex, mind you!) for all of, what, 1.5 years, and upon his departure she collapses in the woods in order to die of exposure until one of those redskin canines finds her and carries her home to Daddy. Then she sits in front of the window for months—literally, months, the subtitles read from September to February–staring into space like she’s just not going to make it. What a cheap way to convey love and grief. Complete immobilization. Why not have her read some poetry?  Take up painting? Drinking? Talk to a friend? Learn something, anything, from the experience? Something a little less passive? Nope. There she is, bottomed out with grief, waiting to die.

Until she discovers that by actually courting death she can “summon” Edward’s voice. Cut me a break. It’s the unhealthiest, most self-indulgent fantasy of grief I’ve ever seen: “I’m going to suffer so deeply and be so suicidal that my ex-lover will sense my proximity to death and therefore try to recall me back from the brink, because in truth he really does still love me, even though he threw me away.” As if. Somebody needs to make a satire wherein when Bella goes racing headlong toward a tree on her new motorbike, there’s a spectre of Edward beside her not pleading with her to stay safe, but laughing his ass off at how pathetic she is.

Oh, wait, I forgot: Edward abandoned Bella because he loves her so damn much. Right. Never mind.

4. Bella’s rebound.

I’m not a huge fan of Jacob—his teeth are too white and, until he crops his hair, his extensions are too annoying—but he deserves better than this rebound shit that Bella pulls on him. In effect, she uses Jacob to get over Edward, then dumps Jacob as soon as Edward reappears. And we’re supposed to think it’s cool because it’s in the name of Mythic Love. Which may be it is. And, okay, so maybe she and Edward belong together. But somebody, somewhere in the movie world should at least acknowledge that using your best friend in this manner is not cool. She should at least apologize. Instead, it’s all part of the vanity game: oh, look how cool and irresistible Bella is, what with TWO monsters in love with her. And Stephanie Meyer has the gall to represent Bella as completely unaware of this vanity game. “Who, little old me with the cutely arched eyebrows, adored by not one but TWO monsters? I just don’t know why or how that happened!” I’ll tell you why and how, Bella. You spent every afternoon of the week with the boy you know has had a crush on you since you were ten, all the while perfectly aware that he had a crush on you, but also all the while choosing to ignore this fact because you were too absorbed in your own pain to give a shit. The fact that you’re pretty and act super-nice, with that self-deprecating false modesty where you shrug your shoulders all the time, does not entitle you to cause unnecessary heartbreak.

5. Werewolf transformation.

Watch closely when Jacob becomes a werewolf. He’ll be running along in his cut-offs and then suddenly he’s a naked wolf. What happened to his clothes? Like I said, watch closely: they disintegrate into a cloud of little blue denim bits that hover around his face for a second like a swarm of indigo flies before evaporating into thin air. Annoying. And we never do get to see Jacob when he returns to human form without shorts on. It’s a rip-off. And that’s not just a pun.