Lestat's instructions for hunting and feeding felt to Louis crude, clumsy and rushed. But as Louis finally succumbed into the kill, his description of the experience was a lot like what humans feel when in love! This one of the beautiful deviations Anne Rice's vampires made in all of Goth literature. A lot of today's writers tried to follow suit and romanticized the vampire after this landmark novel.
Rice's vampires are dark, tragic, and romantic. They are not mindless predators. Louis's first kill was chilling, brutal, and intriguing (they attacked a bunch of men and that was erotic), but it also is sacred, akin to deep intimacy of sex, though resulting in the death of the victim and animation of the vampire. For Louis, the result also was his damnation.
I feel really lonely today. That's the truth. I wonder if all creatures under heaven are damned to feel lonely and only have snatching glimpses of scintillating happiness in their lives. All that ache. Louis found out that after his first kill he had a deep respect for life and beauty, and this tears him up inside, because he has become that which takes away life. Can there be beauty in darkness? Maybe. But very few minds are ready to explore it. Doesn't it seem that stars are brighter when no city lamps compete with their light? And yet they too seem lonely in that Great Expanse.
Last Sunday we were taught to fix our eyes on Jesus. How to do that, they didn't say. They said don't look to people or circumstances because they are bound to fail you. Look to Jesus. Where is He? I cannot see Jesus with physical eyes. I can read about Him in the Gospels, hear about Him in the lives of people. How do I fix my eyes on Him? Isn't He inside me? Do I look inward, as in meditation?
At church last Sunday the minister also said that all I do offered to God from my heart becomes sacred. Even after years of church and the blessing of a beautiful family I still have a hole in my heart. I wake up and it is there. I cannot deny it any further. I have asked Jesus before to come in, and it--the gaping hole--is still there. Though now it seems I have a Companion to share it with.
I wonder if the Messiah came not so much as to medicate pain but to be with us intimately in the face or midst of pain and loss. He has suffered on this earth, too, like any human being. I identify most with the Human Christ, the Suffering Christ, than with all the songs of victory belted at church last Sunday: "Everything will be all right `cause we're on the winning side." Honestly, there's very little poetry in most worship songs these days. It's sickening.
We did sing a song that talks about choosing still to just worship, and that song was full of truth and meaning. And so is my favorite Blessed Be Your Name.
There is so much to learn through all the joys and sorrows of life. Louis said, "If I were to maximize every experience available to me, I must exert my own powers over my learning." Then he said in a setting of a beautiful gallery of jasmines and wisteria and fresh rain and a large moon, "I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another." I think this is beautiful.
I want to learn God. I want to know God's Presence and Love. I want to delicately and reverently come to understand that three things will last forever--faith, hope, and love--and the greatest of these is love.
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