Yesterday, with the help of my tech-savvy son-in-law, I explored Google Bloggspot "stats" to see how my new readership is doing and to my shock discovered that 90% of my "hits" originate from a single website: vampirestat.com, which is a site that tracks search trends for vampires. Imagine how I felt- learning that almost all my readers are vampires! I have little choice but to reach out to them as the prime supporters of my blog. Vampires are fascinating, after all. How couldn't they be? At a time when "civilization" is dragging us into the muck, vampires represent a human branch that left us- just as we left the gibbering chimps- to evolve into an alternative humanhood. Anyway, to promote my blog and justify my belief that I have something intensely important to say, I have resolved to write for this audience, these vampires, who have apparently found in my ideas some affinity with their own philosophical searching. I know a bit about vampires, having studied them for years. I know they hate paragraphs, and never use them. They are at ease with small fonts, finding larger fonts, given their excellent eyesight, insulting, though they are fond of bold. I have sought to accomodate these preferences here. Popular culture and media give us some insight into vampire life. Bram Stoker and Anne Rice portray the vampire association with decayed gentry or aristocracy. The Twilight series brings us the vampire pathos of isolation, though the books are flawed with the incessant iteration of teenagers' first love- a common pitfall in the Young Adult genre, and not particularly germane to the vampire experience (vampires do not develop their sexual organs until the age of thirty- more on that later). But popular culture and media do not work towards a full view of vampires or anything else, the primary goal in the media's case being to keep your attention long enough for you to learn how white your sheets can be. I accept the fragments of reality scattered through the media, but I found years ago that I could study first-hand any number of allegedly supernatural and/or non-existent things just by paying attention. I have communicated with vampires (and have also had rather hasty encounters with werewolves, witches and wizards). Of course, vampires look entirely human, and are, in certain senses, human. It's a Jungian thing, as many things are. Back to history: After the chimps retreated from us, numbed and awed by our dangerous and inscrutable powers, we reached another bifurcation. One direction led to the submission of the animal soul- first to village life and then large cities- via what we call "civilization," which can be defined as, "A system that keeps coherent the overall efficiencies of community- even while the individuals in that community seek non communal ends." The vampires were appalled at what they saw as subjugation of basic individuality and free-will, and with the loss of "natural" environments suited to an organism's nature that all earthly life-forms other than ours take as a sine qua non in biology's covenant with existence. Vampires were after all aristocrats, and that's how aristocrats think. So they gravitated towards an "alternative" humanhood, and then…never saw what hit them. They hadn't known that proto-humans were obsessed with exterminating any and all primate cousins- first, second or twice removed- who sought another way, even the highway. Some vampires avoided extinction by accepting the bonds of "civilization," and found their strongest appetites and desires forever thwarted. And I'm not talking about the desire to bite people and suck their blood- that was just part of it (and not an issue with all vampires). This is where it gets Jungian. The vampire appetites I'm talking about served a desire for actual presence in the world, for contact with others of one’s kind. Humans do not engage in close contact with one another. They can’t because they are in the enforced confinement of civilization, and you never know when some emotional revelation will upset the apple cart and slow sales of detergent. The vampires are with us in our Jungian communal dreams. Welcome to my blog, you of vampirestat.com and whoever else you are. I look forward to writing about our shared goals and worlds. I also invite vampires, scholars and seekers to write me and encourage my efforts. Let me know which aspects of vampire life you’d like to hear more about. Regarding the sexual practices of vampires, I will not write of that unless requested, and will not be responsible for any ensuing upset or panic. Please send requests to doug.lasken@gmail.com or comment below.
