Dreadful Joy:
memoranda for the yinsane
#11
The Gravid Grave: Speculations on the Vampire
Infinity
is not a number. It's a process. Yinsanity fosters a creative
response to this process: human encounters with Infinity.
Literary
art, which originated in the Kingdom of the Earth [Mesopotamia]
as an expression of grain manifests and tax levies, evolved
into the sorcery of money, time intervals, geometry, astronomy,
weights and measures, and heaps of lists and catalogues -
and, only then, after describing the actual world, after creating
a coded picture of our specific material situation, only then
did this art become useful beyond the Kingdom, in exploring
the transcendental reality of Infinity through creative writing.
Where
events transpire that have nothing to do with the outer world
- dreams, hallucinations, imaginings - we find ourselves in
a chimerical domain, the badlands of heaven at the vagrant
frontier where the Kingdom of the Earth ends. The ability
to create coded pictures of this haunted place developed only
recently with the invention of literature.
Some
of the pictures from the wilderness of fantasy are startling.
Such as the journey of Gilgamesh, or that white whale - or
vampires. Literary figures partake of a truth confirmed by
21st century science, mathematics and philosophy: Like the
googolplex position of pi, or infinity, or God, they are real,
because they don't exist.
We
can learn a lot from what is real, we who merely exist. So,
for example, when vampires speak, we might listen:
You
say we are evil. And the fever mosquito? The tsetse fly? Where
else is the vertex of supernatural evil and human light but
in the heart of nature? Look out at the inexorable day. What
is it? This rock, that star, the emptiness between. Does the
confidence of your dreams lie in this? Evil comes to us as
reverence and truth shining through the brain's deceptions.
Embrace it. For, I tell you this in all sincerity, strife
and love are the workings of one design whose absence itself
is its presence.
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