Saturday 6/1/24
As I said, most of this book is written. It's about the ordering now and writing two or three more things for it. The topics covered include films, stories, poems, paintings, TV shows, a public service announcement, music, and radio programs. Quite the book to dip one's head in. It's me doing what I always do with nonfiction in that it's about the given subject and about more than the given subject. Expertise regarding subject, and real world, real life, utility.
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The drawing room showdown between Lugosi’s Dracula and Edward Van Sloan’s Professor Van Helsing (“For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are a wise man, Van Helsing”) excited me to greater degree than the climatic lightsaber battle of The Empire Strikes Back. Cave people with a fire and a rock wall could have provided superior special effects. Didn’t matter. This was human and post-human, natural order v. unnatural, and the stakes were the show. Plus, you weren’t sure who to root for. Dracula talked a big game—note how he qualifies the line about lifetimes. In the scene, he concedes defeat for now, but he’s confident that Van Helsing will also join the ranks of the undead, which is the victory that matters. I thought nothing was awry in Dracula desiring to use his mouth on this other man and hoped he’d get to it, in part because I didn’t know what Van Helsing would do.
No boundaries nor borders existed here. There were rituals, yes, but not ceremonies to stand upon. What was formal was informal—the Count attends the opera, then sleeps in the dirt—and vice versa. Life was death, death was life. What you learn is that life isn’t always life. It can be death-like. Death in all but name. Being alive is not automatically living a life. Existence isn’t living. It’s not being dead—which is hauntingly similar to being undead.
I didn’t consciously have these thoughts. But they stirred within me, on some level, because that’s how it is with us. As humans, we have a preexistence in that we come with these aspects that are indivisible from human life. They’re in the box, so to speak—the life-box of parts rather than the earthen one. Dracula is such a nighttime picture. Do we ever see the sun in it? And yet, it switches on all of these lights inside of us. Gets us to venture up into a previously unexplored attic, or to seek a secret chamber behind a hidden door where we explore, learn, and realize more. Imagination isn’t just crucial for creativity; you have to put it to use to know who you are.
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