Van Helsing on America

This totally hurt my dang feelings until I realized it wasn't directed at me. It's from Bram Stoker (a filthy Mick, and therefore in self-loathing flight from the colonizing British whoremother even as he ran towards the fetid hum of her foul breath)'s 1897 novel Dracula. A novel about a sort of highly cultivated savage making his way from a world of primal aristocracy to a world of manners and money. And this, for Van Helsing (whose small below-sea-level country is colonially post-coital, now given over to the harnessing of wind power and the cultivation of tulips, and who can almost think straight about savages again as a consequence) is how to understand such an untamed human creature--not with scholarship or, strictly speaking, reason, but with big bangs of instinctive insight, with intuitive leaps that threaten violence to the mind of a sane and cultivated queenservant. Even to think about such a creature requires the civilized mind to transgress itself--to enter a new sort of death, an old kind of chaos.

What does this tell us? Not much? no! The Count's child-thought see nothing; therefore he speak so free. Your man-thought see nothing; my manthought see nothing, till just now. No! But there comes another word from some one who speak without thought because she, too, know not what it mean—what it might mean. Just as there are elements which rest, yet when in nature's course they move on their way and they touch, then pouf! and there comes a flash of light, heaven wide, that blind and kill and destroy some; but that show up all earth below for leagues and leagues. Is it not so?

Shoot boy, don't nothing but steers and pouf!'s come out of Dublin, and I don't see no horns on you. This is Stoker looking at England looking at Ireland, even as Ireland is beginning to lose interest in this game, seeking new forms of poverty and servitude in the next parish West. And not just that, of course--also seeking freedom and possibility. That, too. We reinvent ourselves as a form of address. Some of us seeking terms of rapprochement with the departed, some of us speaking the outline of something that still forms on the Western horizon.

Build your own America, boy. I backed over the old one in my hearse.