Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy

by Richard Greene; K. Silem Mohammad

  I am certainly pleased that you are willing to be my “niece.” One truth in the novel of Mrs. Rice is that, as the mysterious “Armand” says, the world changes but we do not.

  It is an effort to connect with every new age. There is something both familiar and disturbing about the character of Armand, but I cannot place my finger upon it. In any case, thank you for extending the hand of mutual benefit, and I can take care of Dan Christensen. He cannot move to a new locale without leave from me. As you will gradually learn, the “reward” for remaining active in every new age is that power accrues to him who does. What, then, are your wishes relative to your maker? I can see to most any reasonable request.

  Well, Paulie, my dear, there is too much to tell for a letter of polite length, but I will commence a story that can be resumed, perhaps, in another missive. Our society mirrors that of mortal life in ways the mortals cannot see or quite fathom. But just as we have our scientists, we have our statesmen, our artists, and even our philosophers. Usually our immortal vocations follow something of our mortal proclivities, talents, and interests. That is why you still like to draw--you are something of an artist, I think you mentioned when we met. I encourage you to continue developing that interest. It is not so much desirable that we cling to our human passions, but the opportunity you have been given is for the development of beauty, knowledge, and power indefinitely. As you are coming to suspect, mortals are at a great disadvantage relative to us, since we have time to assimilate our learning indefinitely, and to refine our techniques and talents. Most innovations in the arts, the sciences, and even philosophy, begin with our kind and spread gradually into the lower quarters. The exceptions to this are few indeed.

  In my case, I was a student of philosophy, and in those days pursuing any academic field meant taking on an official place in the Church, including vows of celibacy (that no one kept, of course). In time I rose to Master, but my Doctor, the finest mind in Paris, quite unbeknownst to me, was not human. His name was Siger de Brabant. You may read about him, if you like, in the specialized encyclopedias. These were troubled times in the University. The native Parisian student fraternities and the rival Picard fraternities (those attached mainly to provincial faculty--

  Siger came from what we now call Belgium) erupted into riots.

  In the end, the most progressive thinkers, we were later called the “Latin Averroists,” were run out of the city. The secret order of things among us began to crumble, which I later discovered was a productive alliance between mortal and immortal, together to grasp the nature of God. Our supreme leader was actually a mortal, whose name in Latin was Thomas Aquinas. His reputation has continued to grow in the time since. My Doctor, Siger, was his principal immortal collaborator. When everything fell to pieces, we were all on the run, branded as heretics. That was when Siger turned me. I had no understanding then.

  He bade me, very much against my will, to drain our Chief Doctor and not to turn him. I now believe this was an act of loyalty, perhaps even pre-arranged, saving Thomas from the flames of the heretic and sending him where he wanted to be, in heaven. Indeed, two years later, the teachings of Aquinas and Siger were condemned by the Bishop of Paris. But at the time, Siger told me I was to drain Thomas as revenge for an affront, because Thomas had written the vampires out of existence in his greatest work, saying that immortal beings could not possess carnal natures, and that among immortals, only pride and envy were within the purview of our “sinful” actions. You may consult this writing in English translation, Summa Theologica, Part I, Questions 63 and 64, the so-called “Treatise on Angels.” Yet, I find nothing offensive in the Treatise, then or now, and incline to believe the Angelic Doctor was actually covering up our existence, for mutual benefit. We were almost unknown to European mortals at that time, since we had only begun exploring Europe a century or so earlier. The first vampires in Europe came back with the Crusaders, as you might suspect, from our more ancient abodes in Persia and Egypt.

  But I did as I was told and drained the Doctor, which took a while--he was not a small man. I did not appreciate at the time how excellent and subtle is the taste of a chaste Italian. If anything, I suffer these days from an excessive refinement of taste. Americans remind me of the heavy Bordeaux wines we had in those days, complex mixtures, some almost accidentally nice, others very difficult to endure. I stand on my judgment that Italian pure varietals, taste best, especially those from Umbria (I mean the populace, not the wines--perhaps you may be fortunate to find an Umbrian immigrant to taste among your rolling cuisine).

  Anyway, this episode of my life ended when Siger was found out and sent to his permanent hell by a group of monks. It happened in Orvieto just a few years later. I was then “freed” from my master by this, but sooner than I would have preferred. I have continued with philosophy, and indeed with philosophers. I am particularly drawn to the problem of the nature of the self in relation to desire. Are you interested in philosophy? Perhaps you had a class or two? I was drawn to taste the Kantian there at your university, until I learned he was an Episcopalian.

  At all events, do tell me of your interests, your art, your reading especially, and what you want done with your maker.

  Ever Thine,

  Étienne Lavec

  222 S. Cooper

  Memphis, TN 38104

  February 3rd, 1984

  Dear Mr. Lavec,

  I finished the Anne Rice book. I told Dan to bug off for awhile, because “I had some serious thinking to do” (Yeah right. Like, what, am I going to sit around saying “Okay, Paulie, you have fangs now. Let’s monologue about it for twelve hours.” Boring.), and holed up at my favorite local twenty-four-hour joint, the Steak and Egg Kitchen. The place is a real Memphis classic, and the breakfast steak there is (well, it was) really great--totally undercooked. I used to think I could actually live on the stuff.

  Anyway, about this Anne Rice book, you and I have a few things to talk about.

  First of all, I didn’t get what everybody was so upset about all the time in the book. Every single frickin’ page is Fatal-Passion-this and Heartbreaking-Despair-that. And all of it because vampires are “immortal,” when, clearly, they’re not. I mean, sure, we don’t age, but we can be killed by tons of stuff. Like, uh, THE SUN. We can just get really, really old without showing it. Which makes us more like sea turtles than fallen angels, you know? Am I missing something here?

  Okay, second, I don’t understand Louis. I mean, I know that guilt and alienation are supposed to be the hallmark of his age (it reminds me of the quote in that Hemingway novel about the “lost generation”--was Gertrude Stein a guilty vampire?!), but I just kept expecting him to stop acting like a little girl and get on with things. Armand was right--we’re just another creature under the sun. Figuratively speaking. What I mean is that God created us, and when He did, He must have known that we were mean ol’ predators. So what’s the big deal?

  But, maybe I don’t understand. It’s the Eighties now, and they call my generation the Me-Nowers. As in this is Me, a Vampire, Now. I just can’t get behind all the poetic-y feelings about it. I mean, I’m angry that I’m gonna have to pay Social Security taxes forever and never reap the benefits, but it’s not making me cry bloody tears. I guess I’m just young. You’d probably say that I taste like a glass of Welch’s.

  I actually did take part of a Philosophy class. Have you ever heard of this guy, Malthus?

  As for “taking care of” Dan, that’s another point where you need to get up to speed. The way you said “taking care of” made me feel like I’m in a mafia movie! As you probably know, I have Christian and conservative values that make revenge look bad, but even if I didn’t, nobody settles their problems that way any more. Hello, counseling! Dan obviously needs some help, but I meant something more in the way of a reclining couch and someone to talk to about his mother. You say there are vampire careers--what about a vampire shrink?

  It was neat to read about the old days. Please keep writing me, and I’
ll keep writing you. I’ve actually been kind of neglecting my art lately. I used to like to paint the sunrise, but that’s obviously out. I’m going to have to go searching around town for some onyx-colored oils and a new subject matter. I’ll let you know how it goes.

  Au revoir!

  Paulie Dori Williams

  17 Magazine St.

  New Orleans, LA 70130

  February 29th, 1984

  Chère Paulie,

  You raise so many gnawing questions!

  Let me begin by apologizing for that biting tone in mine of last month, relative to your maker, but among our kind he is entitled to a traditional measure of authority over your movements and meals. He answers to me nevertheless. Even though times are changing, you will not want to test him too sorely, or those allied to him (and here I discreetly exclude myself). You should be aware that what stands behind this traditional “order” is not simply the threat of force or of punishment. This is not quite the mafia. We all live with limitations, even those who do not precisely “live” at all.

  You did not ask for an explanation, but I will offer it in any case, since it bears upon something I must come to later in this letter. The fundamental idea in our tradition, our common law, is that of “command,” indeed, nothing short of divine command. As you know, when God created the light, He commanded the light into being. Such Words, such commands, are all that lie between the two orders of light and dark. In the dark, our limitations just are the very border of the world of light. We cannot cross into the light because of God’s second act--when God set the darkness in its own realm to make a place for the light, the tension between our realm and theirs was established, and all beings, created or self-created (such as we are), have to conform to the order of the Word. Nearly all of our laws and traditions apply to our intercourse with mortals. We need no laws for dealing with one another, for here our natures provide the limits. You will not drink the blood of a brother or sister because it would bring on your second death, and you need not be taught that it is forbidden because your nature is repulsed at the very notion, and among us, desire and disgust are our most trustworthy guides.

  You may defy your maker, in the near term, dear Paulie, but you are no longer a creature of the fickle light. The darkness is before the light and it shall be after, and, if I may presume to be familiar, it was not God that made thee, not as thou art. Defy thou the Word now and the Word defies thee later. For our kind, there is no evasion of consequences because evasion assumes that time will run out before the consequences of a choice or an action can come back around. But for us, all time has already become space, the space of the dark. Remember that for us, “now” simply means “here,” and every “here” becomes, in time, every other. Defy your maker and you may safely ignore the question of when or whether you will be called to account. You will be. The only contingency is where you will be when it happens.

  Are we just aging and failing to show it? No, Paulie, we are not. You no longer live in the order of withering time and devouring light, but only the Word, the command, protects you from the devastations of time and light. Light consumes itself and all that it touches, and time is the ultimate weapon of the light. Obey your maker. He occupies the wider part of the dark. He is obedient to me for the same reason that you must obey him, as indeed I obey those whose realms exceed my own. My command reaches farther than you can currently imagine, but you will begin to understand. The order of desire is beautiful.

  As for your “Christian conservative values,” as they are called these days, you will find that you can keep those in their entirety. There is no light in them and nothing that limits desire. Indeed, they are expressions of the darkness at the heart of mortal existence, born of fear and violence. They will serve you well in your new afterlife.

  I am enclosing a little meditation on Christ, something I wrote centuries ago, in many ways a summation of all that was learned in the joint mortal and immortal inquiries of the Schoolmen. I have been revising and condensing it for centuries. I translated it into English not long after I arrived on these shores, to send to an odd little man from California I had discovered here. He taught at Harvard and certainly had Latin, but I felt this would be a good exercise for me in a new tongue. I will tell you about him some time, perhaps. His name was Royce and he looked like an insect of some kind. I pursued him for some years, but he had a preternatural sense of when I was closing in and took to hopping on ships leaving Boston harbor just as I arrived to drain him. Of course I did catch him eventually. In any case, you need not return the enclosure. I have other copies. It is the sort of writing that benefits from multiple readings over a long stretch of time, or, as I would say, in various places.

  Be aware, Paulie, that a certain degree of indulgence is sometimes exercised toward the young, but the young, among the children of darkness, are also the ones who endure the most exquisite and creative punishments (and we are nothing if not creative). It has been so for millennia, both among us and the mortals--indeed, we seem to carry over this (and certain other) weaknesses from the domain of the sun. To see a young, strong body suffer brutal physical violence has been a secret gratification of the mortal soul since the beginning, which, I think, may explain the popularity of the Passion story, and in the present century the continuing descent into explicit physical realism in their cinema.

  An intriguing mortal philosopher named Michel Foucault has recently written an entire series of books tracing the history of this sort of twisted desire, from human medicine, to madness, to punishment, and finally to an inverted eros (supposedly perverse love). He points out that the institution of medicine commands into existence a class of “the sick,” allowing others to be truly well, while the obsession with psychology creates “the mad” for the sake of defining the sane, and the prison created the prisoners so that others may see themselves as free. And finally the institutionalization of sexual desire creates the pervert. His (supposedly) normalized counterpart, since all erotic desire has been banished to darkness, is the self-emasculating confessor of his sins.

  As you can see, Paulie, this Foucault has understood much of what I explained above about light and darkness. Do not underestimate the power of the Word. It forms both the existence you have and the conditions for its continuation.

  And here, Paulie my friend, I must make a confession to you. It has been something of a calling for me, over the centuries, to interview (and sometimes to drain) the best philosophers I could catch. After the unhappy Aquinas incident, I tried to pursue philosophy much as I had before, without actually hunting philosophers, but I began slowly to suspect that I might learn more by seeking a deeper vein of wisdom, if you grasp my meaning.

  Following the genuine desire for philosophical knowledge called forth in me the examination of that desire. Self-knowledge is the ultimate destination of philosophy, and if for Socrates or the other wise mortals, self-knowledge begins in affirming their ignorance, for us it begins in embracing the tendency of our desire. Self-knowledge for a vampire is not good news, not the Gospel. But the bad news is more gratifying, as even mortals know. Notice the evening news, as they have come to admit, in a phrase worthy of our best poets--if it bleeds, it leads. The bad news that was so deeply satisfying for me was that merely talking to the great philosophical minds is never enough. What, after all, do they taste like?

  It is true that many of the philosophers whose lives are now combined in my own are unknown today, indeed undiscoverable, in spite of their illustrious reputations in their own times. But a few names have survived. For example, I made a fine meal of Pico della Mirandola (who was headed for the stake in any case--which is what happened to Bruno before I could get to him). Descartes also escaped me. He ran to Sweden when he caught wind of my intention (an English traitor warned him). But a member of our Gothenburg Fellowship dispensed with the coward there. I have always regretted that someone else tasted Descartes.

  Later I was able to corner the great Spinoza, and also Professor Hegel in
Berlin, when he was made vulnerable by an epidemic we planned (always the easiest time to strike), and then there was that gloomy Dane, Kierkegaard, who was frankly eager to be martyred by a “demon” (which is what he called me, somewhat inaccurately). He is the one philosopher I have drained and regretted the decision. There was something not right with his blood. I felt sick unto second death for nigh on a year afterwards. I interviewed Nietzsche in 1877, but decided to let him live, for all the good it was doing him. I must say, he is the one mortal soul who ever inspired something like pity in me. He stole some of my ideas about free death, but I can hardly begrudge him that. We all take what we need from others, do we not?