fragments

“It’s terrible when you can’t make something OK. As a hypochondriac, the typical response when I’m panicking is to acknowledge it will end. At some point, I will cease to be convinced that I have a brain tumour, or a stomach ulcer, or some degenerative condition of the nerves, and so at some point, the bad thing will end. When something bad is actually happening, it’s easy to underreact, because a part of you is wired to assume it isn’t real. When you stop underreacting, the horror is unique because it is, unfortunately, endless.”

Tomorrow is International Women's Day. Here are a few writings from women that I personally love & enjoy that maybe you can pick up during this time if you've never heard of them before ^_^; or not... it's all fine

“December. This heart full of tears and of night.”

“Imagine that the world is a circle, that God is the center, and that the radii are the different ways human beings live. When those who wish to come closer to God walk towards the center of the circle, they come closer to one another at the same time as to God. The closer they come to God, the closer they come to one another. And the closer they come to one another, the closer they come to God.”

Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities. 

What are your favourite vampire stories in all medias — books, movies, anime, non fiction? Love your blog!

“It is equally clear that, in practical terms, the vampire is not that difficult to recognise. The Byronic figure, seductive, erotic, possessing a hypnotic power which makes its questionable charms seem irresistible to its victims is still the starting point for all but a few film characterisations. Most often, as the revenant in order to extend its existence offers sexual pleasure and, coincidentally, appeals to the death wish of its prey, the dramatic interplay between the vampire and its lovers becomes a fusion of basic human instincts, not just self-preservative libidinal but also self-destructive, a ritual of ‘seeking to’ as Freud suggests, ‘bring them back to their primeval, inorganic states.’ The bride and groom of the vampire are, like the lists of unfortunates who have captured the fancy of the Greek gods, confronted by a potent metaphysical entity and, without the knowledge of ceremonial or symbolic defenses, killed by advances which are overwhelming by their sheer physical and sexual power. The key to the mythical qualities of Reynardine, Ruthven, Dracula and all those who follow after them in film is in this super-humanness. In a totemic sense these undead represent the arch-need of man to purge himself of his severest repressions, they are tokens through which vicariously the most sacred of taboos may be violated and sins that cry to heaven for vengeance committed. They rise up out of men’s hidden fears and desires, glorying in their revulsive appetites and endowed with an epic quality like that of Milton’s striding, primordial Death:

“… [T]he vampire film is defined neither by a unity of vision nor by a cultural context. When interest in the phenomenon first swept through Western Europe during the Age of Reason, it was not only the aspects of the perverse and risqué that appealed to ‘reasonable’ men but also the forbidden, preternatural frisson. While Bram Stoker or Baudelaire may be the first who come to mind in association with vampire fiction, the wide range of poets, philosophers, and artists that have been linked to the vampire from Byron or Rousseau to Goethe or Edvard Munch is ample evidence of the breadth of interest. On film, the vampire has a graphic reality that is both liberating and limiting. But no amount of rubber bats, stage blood, or plastic fangs can frighten or amaze a viewer without imagination. Many recent portrayals of this creature of the night have attempted to be more tragic than terrifying, focusing on the plight of a being whom, like Tennyson’s Tithonus, ‘cruel immortality consumes.’ In the end, it is the vampire’s humanity, his or her alienation and despair, which most appeals to the Romantic and Existentialist alike. From that combination of rapacity and wretchedness, the image of the vampire often coincides with that of Shelley’s Medusa:

“Nothing has changed. The body is a reservoir of pain; it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep; it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it; it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails; its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched. In tortures, all of this is considered. Nothing has changed. The body still trembles as it trembled before Rome was founded and after, in the twentieth century before and after Christ. Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk and whatever goes on sounds as if it’s just a room away. Nothing has changed. Except there are more people, and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones— real, make-believe, short-lived, and nonexistent. But the cry with which the body answers for them was, is, and will be a cry of innocence in keeping with the age-old scale and pitch. Nothing has changed. Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances. The gesture of the hands shielding the head has nonetheless remained the same. The body writhes, jerks, and tugs, falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees, bruises, swells, drools, and bleeds. Nothing has changed. Except the run of rivers, the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers. The little soul roams among those landscapes, disappears, returns, draws near, moves away, evasive and a stranger to itself, now sure, now uncertain of its own existence, whereas the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go.”