Venus the Vampire

Dear reader,

You ever wanted something so damn bad its disgusts you? Or have you ever been repulsed by how soon you’d sacrifice your very self-definition for a love that was requited? Like a wolf loves a lamb, could you will such a renunciation? And how unceasingly do you search for catharsis? Has your craving made you cruel, crazed and bloodthirsty, like some monster of love that can’t stop looking for some essence of a self that’s no longer recognizable? Or would you rather embrace your kitten-fleshed destiny to be devoured and undone by love?

You let yourself love reluctantly. Your desire is driven by an atrocious loneliness and its so personally terrible because the more you feed it, only that much deeper does the pit get. You are your passion’s first victim.

Safer then to love without telling a soul. True romance is terrifying. This kind of love ruins the lover. How dare you dare to love, or to be loved. Your love inflicts loss. Your love is addicting, a greedy addiction. Your love leaves a hole, a gaping wound that won’t close.

And you kiss me to drink me till you drain me till the very threshold of death. My colluding conscience says suck on this wound all you want. There is no scar, just an abyss full of whetted appetites. And still, you want more. In the morning you’re repentant, crying and praying for love’s redemption but by night your every need is to be split open, tasted and unbraided.

To embrace the lover is to let yourself be swallowed whole for all you’ve ever wanted is the bite. So taste me, my love, take me into your open jaw and let me live there. With your teeth, punctuate yourself into my skin. Devour my golden flower. Bite me till I bleed and we will be the scandal of sacrament. From my body into your body, our one body is the first bleeding baptism.

Every instinct orients you toward absorption. You love this vampire because as he digs into your flesh, as he ravages you, he feeds your need. It stings but still you stay. That need that never ends is what’s dangerous within. Love, then, is a complicated complicity. The lover comes close but you tremble with fear. But bound in a double bind you start salivating. Still, one of you won’t likely survive this sharp swallowing. These are foreign lands of love where dark things in the woods are watching in wait. The terror is in their irresistibility.

Dokhtari dar šab tanhâ be xâne miravad (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night). 2014. USA. Written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour.

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There is a card that swallows. But it hides its open mouth because its ghostface has fangs. It’s abjection is indicated by its aloneness. It is pushed aside because it is primal. Forced across the other side of the bridge, on the other side of the river, and into an obscuring blackness is the head bowed down. It languishes at the edges of desire. Here hunger is so overwhelming, its insatiability is shattering. It probes the very nature of desire to determine the driving force of appetite as metonym for lack. This longing is Lacanian. From the pit of an absent other desire arises.

Here bodily consumption is overlaid with eroticism. Here is a he who hungers for himself till he’s left all alone in his longing for love. Left in utter disgust till it becomes disenchantment. Left with nothing but regret with how wholly he gorges himself on the other and yet he is perpetually unfulfilled. So ashamed, he shows us hardly anything of his grotesque body. Blood-sick in the aftermath of becoming anew, he stands estranged in an anonymizing black cloak. He only turns beckoning, summoning you to indulge his horrible, aching appetite. By then you’re well within the zone of tragedy, and transition.

Five of Cups: Mars in Scorpio, Scorpio 1

An open mouth is menacing. It is a portal, for within the many significations of a mouth agape is a moment that may be marked by terror, wonder or melody. But if it’s not to sing, then its to scream. This scream isn’t as much a sonic experience as it is a visual, psychic one. The scream is invisible so it is muted as physiological response. Its catatonic. Fallen cups cue questions of catharsis, of which a hollering jubilation bleeds into a wailing terror melting into a shrieking grief.

Yes, one screams in response to terror but in the anti-climax of the Five of the card, is the collapse of expressive, emotional boundaries. A scream may be born of rage, perhaps laughter, sometimes ecstasy and certainly sorrow.

I wonder what shakes loose on the other side of the scream. Screams are not often the source of horror but rather a response, as well as a dangerous conjuring. To scream is to refuse the cultural repression that so many silences signal. Its hard to ignore someone screaming or what provokes their uproar. So screams are as insistent as they are immediate. Yet, as Lea Anderson and Harmony Holiday describe, the Black disaporic scream is tragic for its inability to elicit care, that this black horror continues to be spectacle for white entertainment, a black being screaming is preoccupied with emancipation. Mass killing in the public square that is social media makes it all the more obvious that reproducing violence offers no meaningful catharsis or critical consciousness-raising. It functions only to naturalize violence in the wider collective psyche.

The personal psyche is provided the image of the Five of Cups as one to address, project, or reflect suffering, melancholy, anguish and despair. The fear of the stranger is given form herein. And within a pathologizing Western ideology the stranger conjures up cultural fears of trespass. Here is one willing to break borders, and symbolic order, able to disturb systems and identity scripts. A xenophobic culture has no interest in knowing the name, let alone the language that this blackened being brings or bears. The only title offered, terrorist, is rather an epithet. Trespassing isn’t an empty gesture but is meant to indicate the consumption of social welfare or the dissolution of a homogenized, eugenicist cultural project. Apart from the debase rhetoric of political propaganda, mostly all contemporary horror has an evident and distinct preoccupation with the social anxieties around consumption. Always a strange, alien devouring menace threatening human’s perceived sovereignty.

Lea Anderson has termed this the Swallowing, referring to “the occasion in horror where the abject (which is to say, the monster) appears as a form of devouring Other…Abjection, thus, is essentialized in the swallowing mouth—not just a hole, but a black hole.”¹

Jennifer’s Body, 2009

“The most important of all human features for the grotesque..the grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping mouth; the other features…only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss.” Mikhail Bakhtin