Fluids & Eros

Gary Oldman as Vlad III in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a co-production of American Zoetrope, Columbia Pictures and Osiris Films. Photography courtesy of American Zoetrope, Columbia Pictures and Osiris Films.

The lit backgrounds escort a bloody battle of shadows. The impaler, impaler, prince of Wallachia, orthodox convert bastion, patriarch of the faith, horror of the infidel Turks, devastator of boyars, Vlad!, resists his old flesh for the survival of Christianity. Țepeș, Țepeș, Țepeș. To reach hemoproteic illumination, the reddish light of the digestive transverberation: to perfect the antiemetic art, to overcome the mechanisms of nature, to impose a military culture on every sensation of nausea. Become master of all nauseating beings. Laugh to tears in the midst of the most cruel spectacle, namely, the contemplation of human beings who feed themselves with iron and wood through narrow and edentulous mouths and a labyrinthine esophagus. Exhale huge lances bathed in bile and gastric juices. Die-to-be a tree of the most dense and beautiful forest that humanity has been able to experience. Amorphous trees, dynamic, gauguinian.

Dürer's self-portrait at age 28 has been resemantized and hangs, four centuries later, on the stony wall of a murky Transylvanian castle. Blood is life and to recognize this commits to stop depositing faith in ridiculous and infantile trifles. Every orgy is a battle for the living fluids circulating through the bodies of others, that is, to undertake the sinuous enterprise of a temperate homicide.

Gary Oldman as Vlad III and Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a co-production of American Zoetrope, Columbia Pictures and Osiris Films. Photography courtesy of American Zoetrope, Columbia Pictures and Osiris Films.

Dracula does not travel to the West on any ship, but in the Demeter, baptized with the name of the mother goddess, consignee of life and death on earth, germ of agriculture. Mina longs for romantic enjoyment, what is out there, distant, uncontainable: forests and mountains that crush unmercifully. Out there, as well, she's surprised by an Orthodox wedding, a patriarch who makes an ordinary Londoner a man shaped a la maniera greca. Dracul is not an earl, nor a dragon, nor the name of a Romanian royal house, but nothingness, the stormy breath of nonexistence. Drăculea, brother of Mehmed II. An imperceptible bat, a green cloud, the cosmic ether of all rebellion, a bunch of putrid rats shrieking everywhere.

The plague that runs through our veins and spills between our legs.