Overture

If I intended to write a love story which was at once mystical yet archetypal, agonised yet recognisable, it would be a passionate romance between two women, a vampire and a saint, a desperate, condemned love, driven by dreams, desire, pain, and imagination. The first protagonist would be a virgin Christian mystic saint, who is madly in love with Jesus Christ. She is the typical model – at least in the Western mindset – of the sublime devotional lover who, within modern secular societies, has come to be retroactively regarded as mentally ill. Meanwhile the vampire is the folkloric, literary, and cinematic incarnation of the sick and abusive love. Paradoxically, in the past considered real by oral history and pre-modern science, she has been transformed into a fictional character in the light of the twentieth century (an extinct species, one might say). They both transfigured – yet did not disappear – abandoning their place in social reality, they secured a no less relevant place in the discourse, both of popular and niche culture.

This text is an exercise. It emerges as my attempt to study and to intimately relate to historical, cultural and discursive others. How can I accompany them in their metaleptic movement – in their own mesmerising exercise of shapeshifting from one reality to another?[1] What can I learn from them about love and suffering? The title “If I Stay with You, I Am Rooted, but I Flow: On Discursive Love Between a Vampire and a Saint” includes a quote from Virginia’s Woolf experimental novel The Waves, in which young Jinny observes her own desire: “I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”[2] Further, throughout the text, I interchangeably use small and capital letters for the saint/the vampire and Saint/Vampire. This is to distinguish when I refer to an abstract cultural figure and when I refer to my character. Finally, the fragments written with this highlight, and displayed on the left are written intertwining with the voices of multiple characters and my own – a unified utterance which allows me to speak as one of the lineage. Speaking along with and through the absent others, can, I believe, contribute to developing a different, intimate, immediate, mutual, and affective relationship to (historical) discourses.

My discursive lineage is not only a weaving of mystics’ and vampires’ narratives, but also of writers who, like Virginia Woolf, already a while ago, developed models of thinking about love and desire. In her novel Thérèse mon amour (Teresa, My Love), Julia Kristeva follows the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic saint Teresa of Avila and travels to places she lived, while going through a personal self-reflective process coloured by her own experiences as a psychoanalyst. What evolves throughout the novel is a transchronological love between the historical character and the writer. Both Teresa and Kristeva are my teachers in revealing their confessions of intimate and passionate relations with somebody they have never had a chance to meet.

Confession, indeed, is the overtone of the following left-side fragments. According to Michel Foucault, in the Western mindset since the Middle Ages, confession has been one of the central rituals in the production of truth. Even in a secular contemporary society, the impact of confession is singular: “It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations…one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles.” [3]

This text is a performance of joint confession – the characters speak through my voice as I speak through theirs – for the community of readers. Throughout the history of Christianity, the semi-private performance of confession between a penitent (the one who confesses) and a confessor, followed by a public performance of remorse through penance, was a codified social practice central to the life of an individual and a community. Books of instructions or penitentials were assembled for the sake of precision about how to regard sins, including sinful sexual thoughts and acts, as well as about procedures of confession and what punishment was required. In her discussion of medieval confession in women’s monasteries, Rabia Gregory simultaneously follows and critiques Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. She develops an argument that the practice of confession, although gendered and sexualised (a male confessor listening to a submissive female penitent expressing her sexual sins), was also an act of empowerment for the women’s community to which the penitent belonged. Gregory analyses the so-called Sisterbooks – collections of usually anonymous women’s writings, associated with the Dominican mystical traditions of Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries, and compiled to record and document communal life in the monastery. Accounts there include criticism of confessors and the institution of confession while empowering the confessing woman by emphasising the performance of penance itself.[4] Here too, I draw attention to the collectivity, performativity, and passion of the confessional itself, instead of focusing on the confession as a mechanism of control.

Offering an associative dictionary of love and yearning, Roland Barthes described his book Fragments d’un discours amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments) as a collection of figures or a portrait, “but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.”[5] In the case of my research, the loved one who does not speak is a historical character, the inaccessible discursive “other” whose silence both challenges and excites me. Just like Barthes’s lover’s discourse, saturated with the sad nuances of longing (anxiety, annulment, waiting, dependency, fade-out, etc.), this text envisions a historical love strategy beyond the happy romantic scenario of “love ever after.” What if our image of intimacy was built upon an impossible love tale between Vampire and Saint?

Yet why talk about these characters now? In the introduction to his book Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film written in 1992, the artist and writer Jalal Toufic raises the same question: “why on vampires now, by what coincidence? How come what functions in the too-late and too-early mode is being written about now, when it has become fashionable? But isn’t it characteristic of telepathy that it reaches the present of fashion by a too late of the too early or a too early of the too late?”[6] I can only add that by 2022 vampires did not fall out of telepathic fashion; on the contrary, they have fully established themselves in popular culture. There have been countless films varying in cinematic quality and taste, while in literature it has remained a popular genre, and even the whole Gothic subculture has been inspired by horror fiction with vampires as the most prominent figures.[7]

Meanwhile, Christian mystic saints, who enjoyed the status of celebrities during their lifetimes, took a longer path to gain public interest in our times. Only in the last decade have there been popular high-budget films about female mystics, such as the German Vision – From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen (2009), the British Saint Maud (2019), and the French-Dutch Benedetta(2021). All of them simultaneously serve (and, likely, that is the reason they are produced) as LGBTQIA+ movies exploring the theme of lesbian relationships within the history of Christianity.[8]

However, intellectuals have already found interest and relief in mysticism in the depressed post-war context. Amy Hollywood dedicates her book Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History to discussing mysticism’s role in modern French philosophy and its relevance for the works of Bataille, Irigaray, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Lacan. She notes, “The twentieth-century fascination with Christian mysticism is, I think, a response to this need and to this desire to come to terms with suffering and death. The mystic who cries out in anguish when Christ leaves her recognizes, in a way many of us today do not, that loss is experienced in the body.”[9] Mysticism is, therefore, rooted in the body, where sexuality, the imaginary, and the absent meet.

It does not take much to notice that not only the mystical performance but also the vampiric performance is located in the body. In the introduction to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (originally published in 1897), Maurice Hindle suggests that the whole novel can be interpreted as the male’s frustration with his impotence and the fear of the female: “The terror that haunts Stoker’s work most persistently is a male fear of, yet desire for, sex.” [10] Unsurprisingly, its soft-pornographic content was directed primarily at a male readership. Thus, both of these discourses, the mystic and the vampiric, define themselves and exercise intimacy through the bodily practices of trespassing. Dramatically trespassing the boundaries of the bodies, and simultaneously the boundaries between the social and fictitious realities, agony and jouissance play central roles in the never-to-be-finished project of the history of passion.[11] Isn’t it fascinating that passion means both, suffering as in the Passion of Christ and sexual passion?

Saint’s background check

The legacy of Christian female mystics offers us no fewer wonders and questions than the legends about vampires. Practitioners of miracles, revolutionaries, schizophrenics, anorexics, prophets, sexual icons and celebrities, leaders and feminists – each portrait that reaches us from a range of centuries and places across Europe usually contains most of these labels. Here, my interest lies in the practices of intimacy that Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, Caterina of Siena, Angela of Foligno, and other women described. I focus on their passion – the agonised yet stunningly erotic nature of their encounters with Jesus.

Many of the mystics were illiterate or at least did not write down their visions themselves; in Barthesian terms one would say their visions were written aloud. In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes talks about writing aloud as an erotic mixture of timbre and language: “what it searches for…are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.”[13] Therefore, I believe we can speak of a mystical performance – a discourse that is utterly performative, born to be embodied. According to Judith Butler, spoken language is an extension of our bodies or is embodied and thus both vulnerable and dangerous. She talks about the speech act as being a bodily act, which, because of its performativity, can be an act of threat.[14] The confessional speech act, in this case, simultaneously threatens social normativity and is vulnerable as a statement because of its ephemerality. It both disrupts and disappears as a dream does after revealing our utmost desires. Yet, once recorded, as mystic accounts have been, this dream insinuates itself into an entire unforbidden territory for practicing female desire within a highly restrictive and codified paradigm. Paradoxically, the erotic mystical performance, found a respectful place in patriarchal Christianity, while other forms of female eroticism had no place but denial.

Thus, in the accounts of the mystics, one finds love and sweetness, desire and penitence, disassembling bodies and an unbridgeable longing for Him — for the absent other, the alien, the divine. What one also notices within the whole tradition of female mysticism is the horror: pain and torture, usually through violent acts of self-mutilation and radical abstinence, depriving oneself of food, sleep, and basic comfort. Often the mystical exercises went to even more extreme lengths: Caterina of Siena licked the cancerous wounds of the ill she visited, while Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk girl who converted to Catholicism, was known to sleep naked on thorns.[15] The proximity of mystical experience and horror is well portrayed in the film Saint Maud, directed by Rose Glass (2019), in which a young caretaker living in contemporary England confronts increasingly shattering experiences of the divine presence. Finally, God guides Maud to murder her non-believer patient for being an embodiment of the devil, and to burn herself to death. Unsurprisingly, entertainment industries feed on the representations of various kinds of violence, including spiritual violence. However, I should mention that, as far as we know, the Christian mystic saints presented here did not murder or hurt anybody except themselves.

Horror and violence again draw our attention to the body. Kristeva, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, proposes that horror always feeds on ontological insecurities which are depicted and symbolised through a focus on the body. Thus, horror portrays the transgressiveness of the body, exploring the borderline between humanity and the other (the spirit, the alien, the animal), challenging the integrity of civilised behaviour, inducing us to fear decay and madness.

Sexuality, as another form of the transgressiveness of the body, has always had a particularly important place in Christian discourse, with mystic saints at the centre. In In Praise of Love, Alain Badiou suggests that Christianity, among all religious systems, is the religion that most masterfully captures the intensity of love and desire, and transcends it so as to move towards the universal, for its own purposes.[16] Furthermore, the ideal form of sexuality and desire has a very specific shape in the Christian context – namely, virginity.

The myth of virginity, beginning with the son of God being born to a virgin mother, simultaneously stimulated and controlled female sexual desire. The earliest tale glorifying virginity can probably be found in The Acts of Paul and Thecla, a second-century scripture attributed to the early Christian Tertullian, originally part of the New Testament, which was later (in the fifth century) excluded from it, after the consensus limiting the New Testament to the canon of twenty-seven books. In the Acts, the first century Roman girl Thecla who, upon merely hearing the voice of Saint Paul preaching about virginity, decides to leave her fiancé, her family, and the prospect of a comfortable married life in order to devote her virgin body to Paul. She then has to endure a series of challenges, such as being burned alive, multiple rape attempts, and being thrown into an arena with wild beasts. Yet miraculously Thecla survives all the forms of Roman punishment. The narrative is saturated with stimuli that arouse the erotic imagination, such as descriptions of naked Thecla being tortured. Yet, besides the supreme importance of virginity in this story, Thecla’s rejection of the status quo, demonstrated by her refusal to marry, can also be seen as an act of gaining agency and emancipation.[17] For a true Christian, virginity not only assures heavenly rewards, it also exemplifies the ultimate values of self-restraint and self-control. Saint Thecla‘s story, in its own way, reverses common Roman virtues and values by redefining what is honourable and what is shameful, and establishes Christian ones. Moreover, since honour and shame were coded to gender (strength, brevity, and passion to men, and weakness and passivity to women), we can see a gender inversion.[18] And thus a cult of virginity prevails throughout the whole Christian era: In the fourteenth century Caterina of Siena took the ”vow of virginity” at the age of eight. She saw it as her affirmation of passion and commitment to eternal unity with the son of God as her spouse. There are even sources demonstrating that Caterina claimed to have in her possession a wedding ring made of Jesus’ foreskin.[19]

Queerness – and in particular homosexuality – is another, rather contemporary, interpretation frequently adopted when addressing the sexuality of Christian mystic saints. Donald L. Boisvert and Carly Daniel-Hughes suggest that “holiness or sacredness may itself be ‘queer,’” as the holy figures have the ability to move between heaven and earth, the infinite and finite, and often exist at the margins of femininity and masculinity.[20] To take a cinematic example, Vision – From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen (2009), directed by the feminist filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta, invites us to dive into the philosophy and music of the twelfth-century mystic thinker, composer, painter, ecologist, and activist Hildegard von Bingen. With Hildegard’s magical choral music in the background, an important element of the plot evolves (apparently based on historical sources) – Hildegard’s subtle, intimate relationship with the young sister Richardis.[21]

The tortured, eroticised body also prevails in the horror genre, just as it does in the accounts of Christian mysticism: the erotic desire of the unknown, infused with pain and suffering, and often fetishised and saturated with Christian attributes. For instance, the seminal horror films of Dario Argento (such as Inferno (1980) and Opera (1987), in which the main protagonist is repeatedly tied up with ropes and has pins glued to her eyes, suggesting the crown of thorns) remind us both of Jesus’s iconography and of BDSM practice. Finally, vampire films, old and new, are always a balance between horror fantasy, and erotica. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), which is considered to be one of the most accurate film adaptations of the novel, is as saturated with orgasmic convulsions, as is Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night (1979). Interview with the Vampire (1994) subtly represents a homosexual set of relationships (with Brad Pitt in the centre, being desired by Antonio Banderas, and raising a child together with Tom Cruise). One should end with the Vampire Hookers (1978) by Cirio H. Santiago, a typical B movie, charming in its obscenity, with its impressive six-minute-long scene (which is really long for an action film) showing three female vampires making love to a male sailor as a prelude to sucking his blood. The erotic yet tortured body hosts both the vampire and the saint in the same cinematic discourse of transgressive intimacy.

Vampire’s background check

Narratives concerning demonic blood-drinking undead creatures, which were already found in ancient Mesopotamian, Hebrew, and Greek mythologies, became truly widespread in European folklore, especially in the Balkans and Eastern Europe.[25] Vampire folklore reached the peak of its development in eighteenth-century southeastern Europe’s oral storytelling tradition, particularly in Transylvania (today‘s Romania), which, as a consequence, gained the attention of the Irish writer Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula – the most successful vampire novel of all time. However, Dracula itself is situated in a lineage of literary vampire fiction, with probably the first famous short story being John William Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale (1819), apparently inspired by Lord Byron’s quest for horror stories for his young friends at the same gathering in Switzerland where Mary Shelly, only eighteen years old at that time, developed the plot of Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus. But an even more exciting predecessor of Dracula is the short novel Carmilla, written by another Irishman, Sheridan Le Fanu. It is an explicitly erotic lesbian love story between two beautiful young ladies, one of whom appears to be a vampire. The author creates an atmosphere built not so much on spookiness and fear but rather on the joys of intimacy between the two friends. Unfortunately, the story ends with the two male protagonists defeating and beheading the vampire girl and, in so doing, restoring the modesty and the conventional life of the other woman.

In most regions where vampires were found, they have been interpreted as incarnations of evil beings, suicide victims, and witches, but vampires could also be awakened by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or a living person after being bitten by a vampire. A vampire has always been a loving character: Awakened vampires were known to first visit their loved ones – spouses, lovers, and children. It is said that one has to first invite the vampire into their home, only then can it come and go as it pleases. On the one hand, this explains why the loved ones usually become the first victims; on the other hand, the invitation into one’s intimate space functions as a key to a more profound intimacy: one’s blood vessels.

It is important to acknowledge that vampires have not always been mythological creations – for centuries they were considered to be tactual and tangible participants of the social fabric. Superstitions around vampires were elaborate, and public executions of people believed to be vampires were not a rare thing. There are multiple reports of mass hysteria caused by vampires.[26] Gianfranco Manfredi, who studied Voltaire’s critique of religion and superstitious beliefs, states that Voltaire was one of the first thinkers to express suspicion towards vampires: “it was therefore not a pure intellectual exercise, such as questioning the possibility of intelligent life on other planets or the existence of fairies and fantastic creatures. In the case of vampires, as in that of witches (and to a lesser extent werewolves), we were dealing with genuine social emergencies, proven by countless careful and well-documented reports and chronicles.”[27]

Paradoxically, since the modern era and the rise of scientific reasoning, there has been no lack of scientific study of the subject. So-called demonology, with vampirology as a subdiscipline, has been a respectable interdisciplinary field situated among theology, social sciences, and the humanities. For example, in 1597, King James VI of Scotland published his Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into three Books: By the High and Mighty Prince, James &c., which included a study on the methods werewolves and vampires use to bother men. It was intended to educate misinformed readers about the history, practices, and implications of these beings. In some contexts, demonology as a field of study exists even now, as do vampire-hunters.[28]

As incarnations of evil spirits or even the devil himself, vampires are known to fear the cross, the rosary, and holy water, and have trouble walking on sanctified land such as the grounds of a church or monastery. Even though vampires are older than Christianity, Christianity did its best to adapt the vampire figure into the perfect inversion of Christ (or did it adapt the Christ figure to the vampire?): Jesus rose from the dead to eternal life at dawn, while Vampire rises at sunset to eternal death; Jesus gives his blood to believers to consume in daily communion, while Vampire drinks the blood of others; Jesus is symbolically represented by the lamb, Vampire by the wolf.

On one hand, it is dramatically unlikely that a Christian mystic nun would love a vampire woman back. On the other hand, desire is known to draw us to the direct opposite of what we believe is good for us.

The consequence of love

How does this story end? Perhaps it never ends, like in a soap opera concerned with love ever after? Indeed, this one is desperate and bloody – it ends like many relationships do – tragically, apocalyptically. Once bitten, Saint died within minutes from blood loss as her anorexic body was already impossibly weak from life-long self-mortification. In the instant when her soul departed from her body, she was elevated above the floor, floating. The beams of light coming from above piercing though the walls of brick and stone could be seen throughout the entire neighbourhood. While her soul was safely transported to heaven where His embracing arms would eternally comfort her, her body was quickly buried. But soon after, it was dug up and chopped into pieces, for her admirers could not agree where the corpse of the saint should rest. Her head, arms, legs, fingers, and toes ended up as holy relics in churches all around the world. Yet one can safely say that Saint was the happy divorcing part for whom this condemned relationship had brought what she desired the most. Is every desperate love selfish?

Saint’s sudden death left an abyss in Vampire’s heart, deeper than the stake of a cross would leave: “Amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you.”[32] Moreover, she had contracted the bacteria of delirium, which had been contained in Saint’s blood. Trapped in her own role, unable to bear any aesthetic distancing, she got stuck in the inhuman character of horror, every time a new infecting of and infection from her audience. Yet even worse was that Vampire was not able to die from the torturing amorous absence and the maddening disease. Blood has been seen seeping from her mouth and her nose, and her left eye always stays half open. It caused Vampire to develop an allergy to garlic, mustard seeds, and wild rose. In a mirror she was no longer able to see her reflection nor cast a shadow in the sunlight. In fact, she was no longer able to bear sunlight. She could not sleep but for one hour every two days, at dawn. Like every insomniac, she kept wondering – is solitude the way?

Curtain call

Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.[33]

Fragments from a tragic story of passion – this text is an exercise in imagining how love and suffering can be discursively experienced in line with historical inheritance. In other words, how historical and discursive beings – those we encounter only through language – can guide us through our intimacies. The poetic portions of the text are entangled compositions of the multiple historical others and of my own passion. Their voices allow me to speak of my own experiences of sadistic love and toxic desire. They remind me that my own story is part of a lineage. I inherited my fears and desires, my fantasies and fetishes, and even my lovers and love stories from the mystics and the vampires.

In her book In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, Kristeva shows how the trust relationship and the transferential discourse between analyst and analysed is based on mutual love.[34] Psychoanalysis, therefore, “seems to be the specific contribution of our modern civilization to the history of amorous discourse.”[35] By confessing to each other and confessing together, the saints, the vampires, and myself experience a manifestation of mutual transference: I project my experiences onto the characters while they project theirs onto me, and this allows us to manifest a joint confession. Our mutual trust enables a safe space for us all to declare our sick love, since nobody else can know who is speaking.

From the standpoint of critical thinking, I need to mention that by creating a romanticised picture of these both popular and yet problematic characters, I also attempt a kind of awareness or a confrontation. Long before Marx and Bakunin there existed a valid social critique of both saints and vampires. As G. Manfredi analyses Voltaire’s eighteenth-century critique, both the Church and superstition are profitable for the ruling class. At the peak of public executions and exhumations of vampires throughout Europe, Voltaire uses the vampire metaphor to talk about blood-sucking traders and businessmen who do not live in cemeteries but in very pleasant palaces: “Superstition therefore finds its usefulness for the ruling classes, by substituting the question of the supernatural for the social problem, thus using terror and popular resentment towards the dead, when the real vampires are in fact the living who dominate them by feeding on their blood.”[36] Meanwhile, the emancipatory interpretation of female mystic saints can be viewed from a less optimistic angle, namely, not as emancipation but as compliance. Sarah Macmillan argues that through the centrality of the body the Christian medieval narratives interiorised socialised violence: The embodiment of pain was revalidated through its necessity in the scheme of salvation.[37]

However, by proposing to draw a line between these two poles of Christian mythology, I also attempt to envision a different relation to the female body and eroticism in Christianity, and thus, in our post-Christian contemporaneity. What if our cultural imaginary of love and desire was formed by such mutually cruel yet passionate, explicitly performative, and scenographic narratives? Instead of frustrated, concealed, ashamed, and controlled historical representations of female sexuality, which therefore, in the modern era, needed to be liberated. What if they had already been liberated to excess?

In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes describes the text as a body, an erotic body, and relates the pleasure of reading phrase after phrase to the pleasures of the body. Figuration, in opposition to representation (which he defines as embarrassed figuration) is what turns a text into an erotic body: “one can feel desire for a character in a novel…[or] the text itself, a diagrammatic and not an imitative structure can reveal itself in the form of a body, split into fetish objects, into erotic sites.”[38] Therefore a text, according to Barthes, just like a body, needs a shadow, which may consist of a bit of ideology, a bit of subjectivity, a bit of stupidity – ghosts are inevitable in a text worth reading.[39] Here too, I believe that a clean, entirely new, and unique story is frigid. It can be in the old and problematic, the archetypical and haunted, that we find passion.

Amorous discourse is always paradoxical. It combines and feeds upon the tension between the language and the other – the emotional and passionate realm, which itself is located in the body. Trespassing the boundaries of the bodies, and simultaneously the boundaries between historical and fictitious realities, we may be able to invent and practice discursive lineages of passion, and thus become rooted, yet maintain the flow.