The incoherent ramblings of a
vampire
v Today,
2021-2022, the things I’ve learnt in Lifetime 14
I am looking
I am looking for a way to organise my thoughts.
Once again.
I’ll need a system.
I must limit myself to escape my prison
of constant liminality.
Find constants to anchor my fluid thoughts.
Even if it’s just a temporary stability.
We must start somewhere… don’t we?
“If people
believe a thing to be true, that believe has real consequences.”[1]
Portraits, objects, writings. They might all be
discovered by people. Humans, specifically. Hiding is becoming increasingly
difficult, I feel. To live without culture, is it possible? One might call it ‘free’,
but it’s a prison, this liminality.
I have no choice but to define and express myself
in human terms. I know there is more to me, something different, I’m full of
it, I feel empty.
I might as well live in plain sight. -Still in
the shadows, cause the sun scorches my skin. But I am done being serious,
secretive, act like I don’t exist. I know I do. At the same time, I know I
don’t… In human terms, I mean.
I’m performing, so I must be actor, so I must
be someone separate from my role… I want to be something. I’m acting, I want to
be funny. I’ll be living, breathing irony. Well, undead actually…
Something I lack. Somehow, I find myself
defined by cultural transmission, more than ever. All is a certain dichotomous
entity and I am stuck in betwixt and in between. Yet, outside of that. A
multiplicity.
That is the issue, I can’t put it into words. I
can taste that there is more; but I cannot describe the flavour. For that I
need language, and language is nothing but a cultural invention. Only when it
is shared it means something. It needs to be known, understood and excepted by
a community. I have no
community, I am alone. I am cursed to describe what is ‘new’ with only the
ability to rearrange what I already know. Endlessly.
I am a vampire. I am undead, immortal. I have
no ‘culture’ of my own. The way I experience ‘life’ and ‘time’ generally
remains the same, that of a human, I believe. I have to, I have no choice but to.
‘Being human’ is my way to be safe, as a vampire. Stuck inside the situation,
it’s hard to have any perspective on it. I wouldn’t know how to really shape a
different experience of the world. Yet I keep trying.
I take notes, you might call it a diary, in
order for me to try and grasp onto my humanity, my different lives, yet escape
it in a sense. As well as to create a space for the void that I am, to exist. Albeit
in between the lines.
I feel like an anthropologist, every time I go
out, I’m doing fieldwork. I’m immersing myself, participating, but also continuously
studying, observing. As if I’m researching my next role. Endless possibilities,
yet, I’m stuck inside a white Anglo-Western existence and view of the world. Is
it eurocentrism, ethnocentrism? I am stuck with defining myself through this
Western human vision. That is what I was born out of. Engrained, saturated,
hollowed out to be. I can’t really shake it, I can’t fully grow out of it, when
I mould, it’ll grow back. I must pretend that the new husk is something
different, endless possibilities, but not limited. I
will remain a product of Western culture.
I feel, I
know, there is more than I know, than I know how to describe! And for me it is
necessary to attempt finding a way of describing this. This inert existence.
This existential dread. This undead, cultureless state of immortality. Describing the unknown with the known.
No, these diaries won’t explain everything,
every aspect of existence, let alone humanity. They won’t bring new concepts or
radical insights. I simply lack the ability. They might not be useful at all.
They don’t have to be. I just need something, something to express… well, a nothing-something?
Get it out, in order to contain myself.
I will try,
again to,
I roll the dice, what subject
will it be?
I have to pick
I have to choose
I have no choice.
The die looks at me with its deep blackhole eyes.
Gender this
time.
Gender, I have been thinking more about it
lately. Quite the topic for me to play anthropologist about.
“The femininity or the
masculinity you adopt and endorse is no less fabricated than mine.”[2]
There are different views on gender, (of course)
In the West, they could be divided into tree mindsets: conservative, radical
and liberal. A conservative view would define gender as biological givens, a
dichotomy of male and female. A radical view would define the idea of masculine
and feminine as purely cultural.[3]
The liberal view would look to mesh biological, psychological and cultural
aspects.[4]
Why is the conservative view so conservative?
Many would agree with this, there are two genders, same as two sexes, and it
has always been this way, hasn’t it?
Well, if we dive deeper, we can see that before
the 19th century, we speak of something called a ‘mono-sexual’
paradigm. Women did not exist either anatomically or politically. They were a hierarchically
lesser version of the male, defined by what they lacked.[5]
So, simply put, the idea of “woman” was defined by the aspects associated with
the male that it didn’t have. “There were no women. There were only potential
mothers. Menstruation and the capacity for reproduction defined womanhood, not
the form of the genital organs.”[6]
The now very well-known binary sex-difference
system based on genitality and “aesthetics of anatomical difference”[7]
is a fairly new idea, and not something that was accepted in the snap of a
finger.
“When medicine and psychiatry discovered the
existence of a multiplicity of bodies and genital morphologies beyond the
binary, instead of changing the epistemology, they decided to modify the body,
to normalize sexualities and rectify identifications.[8]
Non-conforming bodies were defined as ‘intersex’.[9]
Non-binary and trans identities where pathologized as ’transsexuality’.” The
idea that a gender identity separate from sex would exist, let alone deviate
from it, was medicalised and defined as an mental illness to be cured.[10]
“By surgically correcting intersex people and
suppressing physical, psychosocial and cultural similarities among human beings
we create opposite sexes. One would say “there are two sexes”, which more
accurately translate to “there must be two sexes.””[11] A created view, creating a view. What one wants to
see will be seen.
v Unnecessary
and invasive intersex surgeries have not been fully banned in this lifetime.
v Gender
identity disorder was a diagnosis until 2013, renamed to gender dysphoria,
still in the DSM. Transgender people still need to “prove” their “transgenderness”
to the medical world. Gender dysphoria still needs to be in the DSM in order to
cover medical insurance.
v Non-binary
identities are overall not accepted, but a sensibility is growing.
The radical view on gender says that everything
is culturally defined. All systems of truth, including science are social
constructions, unquestioned axioms. Seeing two physical genders is as much a
socially constructed dichotomy as everything else. The radical view says there
is no reality, or constant identity. No world exists independently from our
presence.[12]
So, everything is unstable?
Judith Butler says that both sex and gender are
socially constructed, thus the same. She states that gender is a performance,
in essence always unstable. Something is performative if it is an act done repeatedly
and creates a series of effects. Gender, according to Butler, gender exists
only at the same time as gendered acts.[13] It’s only real to the extent that it is performed.[14]
If gender is socially constructed, are genders constructed by people, or people
constructed by gender?[15]
Butler says that there is no gender identity prior to the expression of gender.[16]
Identity is constructed by the very expressions that are said to be the result.
A created view, creating a view. A gaze. Gender becomes a shell, it does not
exist before gendered acts.[17] Does this mean that the extended self is a
simulation? Does this mean that an internal self does not really exist? But…
there has to be something to create this shell? An identity? There has to be ‘something’
expressing? ‘Something’ to compare to this expression? Is there really no individual
identity? Is identity defined by how it is interpreted by others?
The liberal view gender as a multiplicity; a
biological sex, an inner gender identity and gender expression. Expressing what
an internal gender identity consists of seems like an impossible, paradoxical
task. The language installed in the Western system does not (yet) seem fully equipped.
v In
this lifetime I compared my view on gender, on identity to this clam or
shellfish.
The idea of
a shell makes me think that something doesn’t exist prior to the idea of ‘proof’,
proof being this shell.
If I were to walk along the beach and find
shells, I wouldn’t say that only these shells have existed, sure that is the
only thing I can visibly tell exists, but I know there was a creature that
created it, lived inside this shell. It needed this shell in order to survive
in the word it lived in, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have an identity on
its own. Here is my issue with the idea of ‘separate or one’, the only way the
creature can exist is by ‘expressing’ itself through this shell, but it can
stick it’s head out and show there is more, that there is a body and insides. But
once you try to grab it, it pulls back.
I would be a hermit crab, in a world where no
one knows they exist. I have no choice but to focus on my shell, and I need to
find a new one, every so often. I am not equipped to make my own shell, and I
know I exist “separate” from it, but I cannot show this. In a way I am free, because
I know I am a separate existence, from this shell, and I know it is merely a
means of survival and expression. I can detach myself from it, but on the other
hand, I am stuck to it. In a sense it is both mine and not at all.
I wonder, in my human- vampire comparison,
would it be in the world of the one-sex or the two-sex, that I would be
intersex? In a world that does or doesn’t know gender as something separate,
that I would be non-binary? In comparison to the existing frame of reference,
how close would I be? Something beyond, or stuck in between? What do I stand
for in this analogy? I guess “androgyny”? I am not sure. I keep thinking.
I have thought of defining myself through the
practice of drag. I play a role, I distance myself from “the real me”, I tell
my audience: “I am this crazy outrages shell, that doesn’t really fit, that
isn’t actually mine, look at me!” The issue is, my audience doesn’t know I
didn’t make that shell, they don’t know that I’m not that shell, or that I’m
even in it! To them I am this simulation; this extension. I know I am
performing, but I do not know who my “real” audience is, is it “other
shellfish”? Hermit crabs, of which I do not know where they are? If they are. I
myself, do not know what a hermit crab is.
If there is only an expression we can define,
is life like a theatre?[18]
When researching gender and drag, I learnt that
queerness goes back to the ‘roots’ of theatre: “Gay men in theatre had become adept
at working this kind of legerdemain, sophisticated dramas, ostensibly
heterosexual”.[19]
I act for the “other immortals”, as a mortal,
without knowing where they are. When I come across those immortals, I will be
prepared to put on my greatest show, they might not even notice, we both might
not. Because on stage we are both acting, we know we are acting, that we are
acting. That we could get off stage. But once we do, there is no we, for the
system used to define each other is part of the act, and now it’s gone, we
don’t know how to see in the dark, as vampires. Ironically.
The drag, the act, the shell, it might be the
only real form of ‘stability’. A character is more ‘stable’ than a ‘real
identity’, so it seems. Because it can be perceived as ‘one thing’, it is that
illusion I have to live in. I have to split my identity and put forward a piece
of “certainty”.
What am I saying anyway… I know I won’t find
the words, but I have to talk. Because my existence can only be perceived if it
is defined in language. Even though it shouldn’t be, one could say.
A culture of silence.
Portraiture,
a weapon against oblivion.[20] A way of remembrance.
v Memory
is culturally constructed.[21]
Maybe it isn’t language that I should focus on, but the visual; the West
is a visualist society, it privileges vision over other senses. A hyperfixation
on film, video, photo, visual art. Pictures, pictures, pictures. The eye isn’t
innocent, we do not ‘know’ simply by looking.[22] But we are made to believe that it is the case, a
view constructed through a constructed view. ‘Proving’ the focus on the visual
is easy, look at the history of visual art! People have long been defined by
the visual, especially in the West.
In a way, a realistic portrait always tells the
truth and lies, it says “this is now”, and it is, because that is what you see,
but simultaneously it says “this is what is was”, for it is only be a
presentation of something that was… It is interpreted as “real”, which makes it
static, for there is no room for it to ‘be’ other than its depiction.
Portraits have this state of
being undead. They give off the idea that they are living and existing there
with you, though they remain distant and somewhat non-existent. They give the
illusion that existence is stable, that they are a depiction of how something
is seen now, while being constructed by how something was seen. To see is to
know[23], but we only ‘see’
what we know. The ‘individuality’ defined through the lense of physionomic
likeness in a traditional Western portraiture is said to make it ‘lively’. But that
doesn’t mean much in a culture where memory is not an active process. It is static,
not really evoking a pressence[24]. Passive, a
present-past. They are all merely images. Dead depicting life. Undead. Lively,
no. Lifelike? Maybe. In that sense I might be a type of ‘lifelike’ portrait. The
portrait, like gender, as it is defined earlier, is that shell that I can
change infinitely.
As if I where to be a 3D
object, free, but only percieved in 2D. I were to have all the time and space
in the world, but it’s a groundhog day. I will always be stuck with black and white,
and infinite shades of grey to try and define colour.
v Portraits
are an archive, they are not a representation of the past, they are a
(re)presentation of how we would like to look at the past.
v I
am a fantasy portrait consisting of the elements defined as reality.
v When
you are an intersex, nonbinary, androgynous forever-teen, you are both a blank
slate of possibilities, yet stuck in between.
To see is to
know, welcome to my imaginary freakshow
The thought of having ‘no culture’ makes me
think of what would be, if we were a ‘we’, discovered? Would we be known as
‘uncultured’? Would we be the monsters of a freakshow? It doesn’t seem that far
out of reach. When I look back on the idea of gender, am I the bearded woman in
this scenario?[25] Would I gaze or be gazed upon? Freak or visitor? Now
that I think about it, tte biggest freak is probably the “freak-owner”, the one
directing the gaze, if they are directing how the freaks should be looked at,
they can’t possibly be perceived as one. They are in between… a product of, and
creator of the system. I bet some of them must’ve been vampires.
I feel like I am acting like I am talking in
this position where I am high above the human world that I gaze upon. The narrator, hovering above the plot.[26] I need to stop.
I don’t want to think what side we would be on,
I get so angry when I think about those things. I don’t want to think about how
we would continue this history of othering. Whilst trying to distancing myself,
it is hard not to develop the idea of having a panoptic view. That ‘we’ could
be the one claiming evolutionary superiority. This is not a case of linear
development. There is no conclusion. I am not ahead, I am not further in the
state of ‘process’, I am not further in the stage of “human development’, I am
next to it. I am different, I just cannot express it. Am I really different? If
not expressed, it won’t be seen. I assume I’m save then. ‘Free’.
I guess nothing can say more about me than
talking about others.
“Others….”
Betwixt and
between, a spi-ritual fight against liminality
I’m a sucker for ritual. For myself I have to
create the illusion of a lifecycle. A ritual death and rebirth. In order to
come alive, I must ritually die, in between symbolic and actual suicide. In a
sense, “dying” saved “my life”.
I haven’t figured out any kind of drastic,
dramatic ritual. I write about the live(s) I’ve had, the things I’ve learnt,
the person I was, and then I pass on. I die, but also, in a way transfer my
knowledge to the next person I’ll be.
I guess I could describe it as a kind of rite of
passage, a ceremony designed to transition individuals between life stages. A
transition from one identity to the next. I split off an external identity,
going from room to room. I separate this identity in written notes. I sweep it
up like dust, the dust is burnt, my old identity absorbed by the fire. Gone. A
campfire could work. I get into the bright sunlight, let it all burn away. When
burnt I emulate a state of transition, ambiguity. Burnt to the ground,
everything is gone, new things will grow. In fact, the real me might not be
more than the vessel life is lived through. The earth. But I have no choice but
to say I am the plants from the seeds sown. I do not have my own seeds, so,
I’ll be those that are already known.
Insanity; to
a certain mental torture, a predictable and purposeful response[27]
If I escaped Plato’s cave, witnessed a whole
new world, a new dimension. I would have to come back to the grotto, because
the cave was still where I lived. In the outside I did not exist. Indescribable,
I would not be able to explain what I had experienced, I could only try and
compare it to language that exists. The others get upset when I’m too serious,
and threaten my existence for lying, for threatening theirs. If people believe
a thing to be true, that believe has real consequences.[28] Therefore I make my tone purposely obnoxious, they
make fun of my utter nonsense, as if it’s a fantasy, that my existence is
separated from. I keep using my humour, to entertain my personal truth, to keep
my reality safe. In the end I’m just like them; just a storyteller.
Does this sound right? I don’t
know.
I must end this
and try again.
The incoherent ramblings of a
vampire
I am not superior, no missionary.
I am not above, or below,
I am cast aside, closely passing.
Fleeting and forever.
Beyond.
Beyond definition, does not mean better.
For better is a definable term. A Western word.
The dust that accumulates is made of my truth,
all containing, yet a fragment, undefined.
For as much as I try and sweep my identity under the rug,
the broom that sweeps,
the room it lays in, will remain.
Confined.
A speck of dust, a bit of fluff,
I’ll say what object I am from, something different, every time.
If my identity was like gender,
would I be far beyond the binary?
Yet seen as the in between of androgyny?
If this is a show, am I a visitor-pretending freak?
Is my exterior the static portrait, of a living, yet undead memory?
In an attempt to be authentic,
I had to separate and look inside of me.[29]
I’ve
resorted to the behaviour of a schizophrenic
Retreating to an internal monologue, to escape the action-scene,
the world that is seen as real.[30]
All attempts of comparison are futile,
the best I could do, maybe,
imprisoned in a limited liminality,
is plea for insanity
Please, by all means, call me silly, lucid or crazy.
Please, by all means, don’t tke pay attention, don’t scrutinize,
it’s not serious, not weird, not scary, it’s funny, please just laugh.
I’m only joking! I’m only joking!
it’s comedy, it’s drag, it’s theatre, it’s not real…
it’s not real life.
I’m being theatrical, call me an artist.
looking for a ways to escape
a ways to express and play.
Undeadly facing life with my own created reality.
By separating myself, I feel more connected, ironically.
Art brute or a masterpiece?
This is a diary, or merely poetry,
purely symbolic, or an actuality?
I cannot stop comparing.
A constant gaze, who’s looking?
You, me, us, we?
Dichotomy.
Sight is not to be blamed on the naked eye,
It is sent through a lens, the view shaped by the brains
that depends on this lens in order to see.
creating view through
a created view
We must choose. There is no other choice.
in dualism I am stuck.
My insight?
we live in sight.
close your eyes
If you open a third one,
that sees nothing you’ve seen before,
would it be blind?
Therefore?
In the end I will not be panoptic.
In my own perception,
right in the middle I’ll be.
I am stuck expressing my three dimensional existence in 2D.
Pretending that is all there is to me.
A left and right is what can be seen,
whilst I know that the directions are countless.
I have made peace with my limited piece of expression
the epicentre of my hypocentre,
maybe one day perceived?
I am the posing of the question. Taking the asking as the answer.
In a world of black and white,
awake my value’s grey,
of colour I dream.
Notes
[1] Newton,
Margaret Mead Made Me Gay, 2000:192.
[2] Preciado,
Can the Monster Speak?, 2020:49.
[3] Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me
Gay, 2000:190.
[4] Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me
Gay, 2000:190.
[5]
Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?, 2020:59.
[6]
Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?, 2020:59.
[7] Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?,
2020:60.
[8] Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?,
2020:72-73.
[9] Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?,
2020:74.
[10] Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me
Gay, 2000:190. As cited in Stoller 1979.
[11] Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me
Gay, 2000:193.
[12]
Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay, 2000:192. As cited in Kessler and
McKenna 1985.
[13] Ton,
Judith Butler’s Notion of Gender Performativity, 2018:2. As cited in
Butler 1999,2004,2011.
[14] Ton, Judith Butler’s Notion of
Gender Performativity, 2018:9. As cited in Butler 1988.
[15] Ton, Judith Butler’s Notion of
Gender Performativity, 2018:8.
[16]Ton, Judith Butler’s Notion of
Gender Performativity, 2018:9. As cited in Butler as cited in Butler 1999.
[17] Ton, Judith Butler’s Notion of
Gender Performativity, 2018:9.
[18]
Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay, 2000:25. As cited in Sontaq 1964.
[19] Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me
Gay, 2000:48.
[20] Borgatti,
Constructed Identities, (s.d.):303. As cited in Jenkins 1947.
[21]
Borgatti, Constructed Identities, (s.d.):308. As cited in Roberts and
Roberts 1996.
[22] Corbey,
Ethnographic Showcases, 1993:360.
[23] Corbey, Ethnographic Showcases,
1993:362.
[24] Borgatti, Constructed Identities,
(s.d.):308. As cited in Roberts and Robers 1996.
[25] Corbey, Ethnographic Showcases,
1993:354.
[26] Corbey, Ethnographic Showcases,
1993:362.
[27]
Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay, 2000:94.
[28] Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me
Gay, 2000:192.
[29] Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay,
2000:94.
[30] Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me
Gay, 2000:94.
Bibliography
Physical
sources
Borgatti,
Jean M., Constructed Identities : Portraiture in World Art, (n.p.),
(s.d.).
Corbey,
Raymond, Ethnographic Showcases, 1870-1930, United States of America,
The American Anthropological Association on behalf of the Society for Cultural
Anthropology, 1993.
Newton,
Esther, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas, United
States of America, Duke University Press, 2000.
Preciado,
Paul B., Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts,
Paris, Éditions Grasset, 2020.
Digital
sources
Ton,
Jaurieke, Judith Butler’s Notion of Gender Performativity: To What
Extent Does Gender Performativity Exclude a Stable Gender Identity?, 2018.
Accessed 10 May 2022 on Gender and Feminism.pdf
The incoherent ramblings of a
vampire
Anthropology of Arts
Byron De Weerdt
3rd Bachelor Drawing and Printmaking
Luca School of Arts
2021-2022
