Day 11 on IWTV: Slavery

So I did watch 12 Years A Slave, which apparently was based on a true to life account of Solomon Northup. I found his life story riveting and disturbing, and I couldn't keep out thoughts of Ferguson, MO out of my head as I watched this searing film. I saw through the film a sugar plantation and cotton fields. Watching the movie I understood what Louis meant when he told Lestat to "use all his power as a white master over them." Back then, the slaves were not treated as human beings, but worse than animals.

Slavery was a fact of life in the South during the late 18th Century in the United States, and I am not sure if they are proud of that. Louis kept slaves and called them exotic. It seemed that the slaves in the Pointe du Lac plantation were indeed of a different sort, not at all subservient and obsequious, but fully African and foreign. (Easter egg! "Daniel" was the name of Louis's trusted slave. Daniel was also the name of the young boy who interviewed him.)

Our nation is not a stranger to slavery. We have been enslaved for over three hundred years by the Spaniards who stole our lands, our gods and imposed Catholicism and feudal rule. The Spaniards sold us to the Americans, who established colonial rule. And then the Japanese came. And after the World Wars, when we were granted Independence as a nation, we were enslaved by greed (by corrupt governments), poverty, superstition, religion, and lack of education.

Today I signed a job offer contract. I will be a full-time employee to a large corporation. I am looking forward to getting paid and buying more books, but not to the time I will have to invest in the new job. Half of the twenty-four hours each day I receive will be devoted to work, five days each week. Eight hours for work, one hour for lunch (at the office), three hours travel time to and from work. I'll be a paid slave in the twenty-first century, although my local church admonishes us that work is good. Naturally, they say work is good. We get paid, and then we pay our tithes to the church. I start on the fifteenth of this month.

I still long to be a published novelist, and to continue acting on the stage. On these dreams I will not give up.

 At this point in the story the slaves were rising up against Louis and Lestat, and Lestat's father was dying. Lestat couldn't bear to end the old man's life because he was, after all, his father. This is our first pure glimpse of Lestat's heart. Yes, he is reckless, yes, he is a true predator. But he's not a heartless monster after all. In mercy Louis killed Lestat's father, but this is Merciful Death, Sweet Death, and there is no horror to it. I do not understand why our minds accept this kind of death for the old and suffering. Do we really subconsciously believe we go to a better place of eternal youth and bliss and health after we die?

Day Three, IWTV: Louis's conversion

I forgot myself. I forgot myself totally.

Those were the mortal Louis's overwhelming thoughts when he encountered the supernatural creature that is the vampire. He said his past "shrank to embers."

This experience is almost akin, in fact, almost perfectly describes, my conversion to Christianity when I was twelve. I grew up as a Sunday School kid. My parents separated when I was six, and since then, my uncle Albert and aunt Wilma had taken me to church every Sunday. I enjoyed the stories, but that was all they were to me: stories. Fantastical, adventurous, but having no more real value than say Jack and the Beanstalk or Puss in Boots. All these stories anyway amounted to one moral for the young boy: be good and obedient.

Then one summer, in Laguna, someone shared the Gospel to me, and the clouds parted in my mind and my heart cracked open. I realized God loved me, and expressed it undeniably through the Man Jesus Christ. All those stories in the Bible taught me in Sunday School: Moses crossing the Red Sea, David defeating the giant Goliath, all of them pointed to Jesus' love, birth, sacrifice, death, and resurrection. I was reduced to nothing. I made a decision to embrace Christ.

I guess it was opposite for Anne Rice at the time. In the biographies of her, we learn that she turned to secular humanist atheism in college, having grown up Catholic. And I think she expressed the same feeling in this scene of Louis's transformation into the vampire. Isn't it curious that the feelings surrounding the separate experiences are the same? Two different conversions, both resulting into the death of ego.

I always return to that moment when my faith runs dry. And also at the story of my baptism, which is a story for another blog entry. And my near-death at the floods of Ondoy. God always saving, God always loving.

Louis cherished his last sunrise before he became a vampire. He was going to lose the light. I, on the other hand, grew up to be a teenager and realized I lost the dark. The music of the Smashing Pumpkins, whose poetry I loved were denied to me. So were Anne Rice's books that had the words vampire, damned, devil, thief and witching on them. I never smoked or drank. I tried to be obedient. But internally I rebelled.

In college I broke free from all shackles and read the novels I wanted and smoked. I was expelled from the catholic university because they found bottles of liquor in my bag, put there by my classmates. I went all crazy. I thought why did I convert to Christianity so young? Why don't I have the stories of ex-drug addicts, or ex-prostitutes who tasted the dark before coming to Christ? Why was I to be denied all these worldly pleasures?

Louis's transformation into the vampire was physical. He was to have a body that would have powers no human being could have. But his soul... did it change? That was his burning question for the rest of the book, and highly worth examining.

When I converted to Christianity, there was no heavenly lights falling down on me. The world felt utterly the same. But inside I felt cleaned, loved, treasured, assured. Writing about this now as a thirty-three year-old man, I think, what happened? How come I lost all of that? I might not have changed physically dramatically like Louis turning into a vampire, but my inside was changed. I became, in the words of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, a new creation. Am I less loved and treasured today than that first day? Surely not! For God is faithful and continued to love me in spite of my many rebellions through adolescence and young adulthood, and even in my 30s.

For us Protestants, the proof of commitment to our new faith was through certain rituals: prayer of acceptance and repentance, baptism. Both symbolized the death of the old self and the rebirth of the spirit. We were to study Scripture and continually meet with fellow Christians. For Louis, the proof of commitment Lestat required of him was for him to witness the death of his plantation overseer. Louis had a reverence for life which, he said, never went away even though he became a vampire. Why is death always a part of any ritual of conversion, whether symbolic (as in baptism) or actual (as in Lestat's killing)? These are mysteries of life I would not know. Life and death seem to be deeply ingrained into the very fabric of our universe.

Day One on IWTV

I realize how serendipitous it is that I begin with Interview. I so wanted to forget about my plan and review Called Out of Darkness because, although Anne is most known for her fiction, her memoir is my favorite of her books. I also want to go into Prince Lestat so badly!

Interview begins where the reader's position is. It is as if we were the boy, too, wanting to find out about the vampire even as we shudder at his presence. And then we are seduced, by the vampire, by his story, by his beauty and voice. And we fumble, just like the boy, not knowing the right questions to ask. We are faced with the supernatural here.

I have to go back to when I first read Interview. I was in high school. I did not know that a lot of people in my generation were the same. My classmates have seen the movie. I haven't. A girl from the first section (the brainy class) lent me her paperback copy.

Back in high school I would've done anything to fit in. I'd be the class clown, the one who strived hard for good grades, not only for my teachers' approval, but also my classmates', for I often showed them the answers to my homework in exchange for camaraderie. Belongingness was very important to me.

This was a trait I carried to much of my adult life. (Isn't it obvious? I want to jump into the Prince Lestat bandwagon? I want Anne Rice to post a link of my glowing review on her Page.) But it also showed in a lot of other ways. My most honest boss once told me that I sway too easily to popular opinion, and that I should learn to stand by my thoughts because they were, too, valid and sensible.

One may think that wanting to belong is normal for human beings, and it is. I think maybe the reason I push it over the edge is because I didn't quite receive it when I was young, at least not from my parents. I grew up knowing I have to be at my best for people to like me, and that my friends are my friends not because of who I am, but because of what I do and how well I do what I do.

Auditions terrify me. When I don't pass the rejection bruises me. In confrontations, I tend to back down, listen, try to see what the other person's point of view is, try to win the other person, at the argument.

As an actor and as a writer, I am haunted by this fear always. That I am not really part of the crowd of real actors, real writers--that something is missing in me. A certain knowledge, a certain look, a manner.

I feel an outcast. Even in my own church. Is this universal? Do all human beings feel this way? Did Jesus feel like an outcast, too?

So reading Interview now, I am astounded that I could feel more empathy towards Louis than I ever did. This feeling of being cutoff from light and the living and all innocent happiness.

Interview also begins with death. One very excruciating one that will echo throughout the many deaths in the book. The death of Louis's brother, Paul. Knowing what I know now about Anne from her memoir, I suspect Paul symbolized the death of her Catholic faith and devotion growing up. I never really trust a novel now that does not mention death in any way. Death is a fact of life, something we all have to face sooner or later. Paul's death was devastating for Louis, and he blamed himself for it. Does Louis pay for that guilt every dawn as he retreats into his coffin?

Louis's world was full of concerns about plantations and managing it. Paul's world was the spirituality, religious fervor. And when Paul wanted to be a missionary, to live like a saint sworn to poverty, Louis refused. It was because his world as he knew it would be greatly affected if he agreed that Paul's visions were real. I believe a lot of us would have behaved as Louis did, to dismiss another person's spirituality not without egotism.

It is hard not to dismiss other people's beliefs when the affect our own, or go against our own. I think the day we all could just breathe together and cherish each other's presence and humanity is the day religion dies.

But now let me talk about egotism and the need to belong. When I was fifteen I belonged to a group of artists I would have gladly stormed the gates of hell for, and with. I felt invincible with them. I felt loved by them. And yes, I was often admonished for my youthful lack of taciturnity and tact, but I saw these admonitions as to be done in love and in my own best interest.

The leader of this group I looked up to as a brother closer than any friend I ever had. I believe a lot of us in that group of teenagers and young professionals in their 20s felt that way, too. He was a great spiritual leader and model. But then that leader began to make sexual advances towards me. In the fear that I might disillusion the other members of the group if I spoke out. I was fearful, too, that it was my fault. That I inadvertently attracted the man's attention and warranted his abuses. And I was afraid to lose the friendship and belongingness I enjoyed with the leader, and the group.

So I shut up. I valued being part of a group, and will not say anything that might threaten the integrity of the group nor its leader, even though I was being hurt.I wonder now, too, if that martyrdom was nothing but egotism.

I bookmarked my reading just before Lestat enters Louis's life: which was at a point he was so devastated and wanting to die but lacked the courage to kill himself. I'll read some more tomorrow.