Saturday, December 11, 2010

Life Blood - using eroticism to redefine the vampire mystique

"Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection. Advance and do not fear the thorns in the path, for they draw only corrupt blood" - Kahlil Gibran

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." -Plato

"It's not too much to hope for things to feel all right. Nursing a drink till I get sleepy and go to bed and dream about sex and heaven, that's not empty shit." -Jonquil Florio

The above are not exactly the kind of musings one might expect in an erotic vampire novel. But each one appears in my new novel "The Blood Jaguar", released today from Passion in Print Press. In the book, I steer the Siobhan Bishop Erotic Underworld series into territory both new and very, very old. Vampires are the stuff of frenzy in creative media of all kinds these days; seems like everywhere you look on television, movies, books, someone is smiling back at you with bared fangs. A lot of those works repeat or revise themes popularized by Bram Stoker's classic "Dracula", or Anne Rice's wildly popular modern spin on the subject. But the human fascination with blood and sex (the essential elements in the tales of Stoker and Rice) goes back as far as human history, and has taken shapes from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other -- from fear to desire, from dark passion to bright exaltation.

For my own own exploration of the fierce sexual phenomenon of the vampire, I wanted to take things to a new and different place. So I rooted the story in a culture steeped in things that are quite the opposite of the dark and unholy night creatures of modern entertainment. Life, reverence for the faith and power in sacred things, love of the sun and delight in the day, along with intense eroticism, were the elements I wanted to weave into the vampire mystique. Not much like Dracula, I'm afraid.

I also wanted to bring things down to earth a bit. Most vampire tales are filled with fantastic elements like becoming "undead", having a strange form of immortality, possessing a form of sexual hypnotism to lure victims...right on down to sleeping in coffins or turning into night mist. Fun as all that is, I wanted to write about things on a level a little closer to our own. The fact is, there are real people who adopt a "vampire" identity as part of a lifestyle choice. In my current hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida, one need only go down to the city park in the center of town to see young men and women who call themselves vampires, and they have little use for stereotypes, embracing an alternative lifestyle in which they mix blood ritual with their sex lives.

So I took those two basic approaches -- the "vampire mystique" as a source of life, energy, sex and health, and a subculture of realistic young people looking for an alternative way to have passion in their lives -- and wove "The Blood Jaguar". Among its characters, along with the regular protagonist occult book expert Siobhan Bishop and her lover Professor Richard Blake, are a young intellectual nihilistic woman working in the Central Florida sex trade; a highly successful Mexican couple of Aztec descent who run a high-end resort that offers the raptures of sexual enlightenment through "vampire" techniques; a devout Baptist pimp who is a sucker for hearts and flowers love; an equally devout Catholic woman who wears a silver cross given to her with affection by her vampire lover...let's face it, we're not in Transylvania anymore.

The eroticism of the story is intense, but under it is a theme I always strive to bring to works that explore sexuality: how does passion excite the soul along with the body? Without one the other can only be shallow and empty. Can the soul be excited by a wild closeness to our life-blood, and sex that is both savage and sophisticated? Ask the sangre angeles, the "blood angels" of "The Blood Jaguar", along with their kiss that changes both body and soul.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

To Be Naked

As a writer of erotic fiction and sensual poetry, the act of becoming naked is certainly one that I depict over and over again. But in every one of those scenes, whether it be an interlude in a novel or a stanza in a poem, I remind myself that the exposure of the body is basically empty without an opening of the soul to accompany it. And yet, how often during physical intimacy does this really happen? In my poetry collection, "Touch in the Bed of Light", I try to explore this in many ways. From couples who close themselves off to one another intentionally -- because of lack of fundamental trust, or fear, or the presence of cruelty in the relationship -- to those who have achieved the kind of love where the soul does indeed become naked. For men in particular, this seems to be something at times almost inconceivable. Why? One poem in the book takes the concept and looks at it head-on, and raises a question that perhaps we all should ask: have we ever, truly, shown ourselves to the one we offer our body to in the sharing of passion?

Naked

He wonders
how many grasping, clutching, hungry bodies, seeking solace,
seeking connection to life in the immensity of the warm night
have ever truly been together naked.
How many have spoken these words, which she says now to him?
More than just a fuck tonight, sweet love.
Open yourself, and I will lie open for you.

How easy it would be
to send the most vulnerable part of his soul,
that which feels the most,
into hiding; to send out his avatar,
well trained by him in the motions of tenderness and passion,
but with the core of aching light held back.
Men do it all the time.
He supposes that many women
believe that core does not even exist in men.

Her fingers deftly undo buttons, and her mouth opens,
gesture of anticipation,
tongue appearing for the briefest moment between her lips.
How many men have spoken these words, as he speaks them now?
When I touch you tonight,
that touch will be everything that I am.

The motions of pleasure, crafted by men and women
since water first sought the earth,
change only a little;
he wonders how often they become a pantomime,
feasting, without fullness achieved?
His tongue will enter her sex, soft circles inscribed
upon a flower seeking to unfold at the touch of true light offered.
He will harden it to let its tip pass into her, and he will listen
for her small cries that speak of an equal door
cracking open in her soul.

In the moment when she looks into his eyes
a tremor of fear appears within him, and passes.
He does not wonder any more
what it is like to stand in a sacred place.
He is naked.

 


Saturday, November 27, 2010

"History's Greatest Love Story" and the demonizing of the sexual woman

When the concept of history's greatest love story is bandied about, there are certainly many that leap to mind. Arthur and Guinevere perhaps (though their claim to being historical rather than fictional is dubious)...Henry the VIII and Anne Boleyn (for which a whole system of belief and politics was uprooted and re-shaped, in the English Reformation)...but in my mind, the love story of the Roman poet Catullus and the noblewoman Clodia tops them all. Catullus wrote stunningly intense and immediate poetry about their love affair, made even more poignant because he wrote equally agonized poems about its collapse. Catullus died young, and there was no happily ever after for them. There is debate even as to whether the "Lesbia" (as Catullus calls his beloved in the poems) is Clodia at all. But having studied that debate myself, I believe she was. And that leads to the second part of this blog's title, the demonizing of the sexual woman. Clodia was considered notorious,and has often been portrayed in literature as downright villainous. A state which both Guinevere and Anne Boleyn have endured as well, when you give it some thought. And why? By and large, despite being part of love stories that have inspired lovers for centuries, because of their powerful sexuality. It's a double standard that has always troubled me, and one that I believe is alive and well today. The stereotype of the "evil temptress", the "fallen woman", as well as invectives far more crude.

I love to write about love, and about the sensuality of the body, mind and soul that accompany it. But the concept that sexual power equates automatically to a fallen women is a stereotype I can never embrace. Rather, sensuality, when embraced by a secure and unthreatened partner, elevates both lovers.

In my novel about Clodia and Catullus, "The Festival of Seven Nights' Passion", I take the demonizing of Clodia apart, placing it instead in the context of a time in history when women, even aristrocrats, were considered little more than possessions...where romantic dalliances by men were considered a sign of virility, and by women, a sign of wild immorality. Sound familiar? Some things haven't changed much since the First Century BC.

Here's a brief excerpt from the book, in which Clodia looks back in her mind at the men she has known:

Possessed. The men who had possessed her in one way or another, had laid claim to her body and all of its shocks, pains and pleasures...possession had looked different for each.
     I can’t hear the tone of Sulla’s voice any more. For a long time when I had nightmares, his voice would seem as real and present as if he stood right beside me, or held me next to him. “Claudians. Why is it that Claudians are always such beautiful things? Come here little Claudia, take it in your hand. You have perfect hands, my child. I’ve never been touched by anything half so soft.”
     Then later, crying at all the wrong times, embarrassing father at the dinner table when I tried to put food in my mouth, or to cease playing out in the garden and suddenly kneel in the dirt and wail. Father would cuff me with his palm and send me to my room. You came then, Publius, sneaking in to see me when the house was asleep. Always with the same promises, to get revenge on all the old men, the bastards, to let me watch while you tortured and ruined them. Holding me, rocking me, kissing me. When you held me in your arms it was like being cradled, even though I’m the older; or caressed and loved by my own mirror image, my own soul given the shape of a man, who could do things, change things. “I won’t let any of them have you, Claudia. Not ever again.”
     Then Metellus, and that was the final end of such illusions. He was rough with the Knot of Hercules on my wedding dress. He pulled off my red veil and dropped it on the floor. He didn’t bother with kissing me. Pluto stealing Prosperpine, taking her to the Underworld on his black horse with red eyes, whose hooves could cleave rock.
      Finally, Catullus, there was you.
     “You have no meter, Clodia.”
     Meter’s not important. It shouldn’t be about meter. There are other ways find mastery of the secret language, the one that enables souls to look into one another as one would look at the sun, and without being blinded.
     Clodia let her hands stray to the curves of her body, still beautiful, still desired, even after all the ravaging forces.
     But now I belong only to myself. Perhaps that was always true, and it has just taken the longest time for me to realize it.