Vampire Flower Ink

Nosferatu, Poinsettias and the week between the worlds

“His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, The Dead

The week between the worlds

Sorry its taken me so long to write to you its just that I find myself afloat in the limbo between the holidays. If All Hallow’s Eve is the time of the thinning of the veil between the spirit and earthly realms, this last week seems more like a thickening of the veil into something more like fog. A whole valley of soft grey without time or direction. C.S. Lewis calls his version of limbo, in a memorable chapter of the Magician’s Nephew, “The Woods Between The Worlds.”

Nosferatu

The latest version of which maybe not coincidentally opened on Christmas Day stars Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and a bunch of other good looking actors and is worth seeing for the costumes alone and does a pretty good job at conjuring up a place between worlds— a seasick fascination with the meeting of the otherworldly and the domestic, the pagan and the Christian, the ordered and the disordered. Christmas, if you ask me, is the real Goth holiday. Halloween is too much on the surface, too obvious and playful when compared to children singing in echoey old churches with blizzards and tiny fires outside. Dickens understood this, as did Warhol and the German Expressionists.

While the updated Nosferatu count has the moustache and chest of a lumberjack rather than the rat physique of the original, in most ways this new version seems to cleave surprisingly close to the 1922 German Expressionist version. What you first notice is the sound and colour. Interestingly the original used two coloured gels, orangey for daytime and blueish for nighttime. And interesting, too, the the new version in its most critical moments loses almost all of its colour, conjuring up a half-waking nightmare with a blueish tint. What the full-colour version does well though, is the mid-tones. For a film about blood, there are very few moments of pure, shocking red. What we get instead is a study in cool greys.

All the stills are great but there is a colour of grey that is born of purple.

Not dulled down but desaturated, soaked-in you could say. And it’s this moody, moldy grey of lichens and nordic lakes and silvery skies that I noticed in particular on the cravat of Thomas Hutter in Robert Eggers’ new version of Nosferatu.

Thomas Hutter played by Gustav von Wangenheim in the 1922 version. Also wearing a cravat and looking handsomely into the middle distance

The Cravat

The scarf is wrapped elegantly few times around the hero’s high white collar and then tied into the sort of satisfying silken bow that only regency Victorians seem capable of figuring out. The cravat becomes, with the leading man, increasingly unravelled as the film progresses. F.W. Mernau’s groundbreaking though copyright infringing1922 silent version also opens with a scene of cravat-tying that I kind of wished had gone on a little longer so that I could understand how exactly he was doing it. But that silky bow seemed to be the more typical white colour and then later a jet black one setting the tone for a film that delights in strong contrasts. The chiaroscuro effect was made most famous by the image of a ratty postured long fingernailed figure of Nosferatu’s shadow going up the stairs and into the diaphanously curtained bedroom of Mrs. Hutter. The new version plays with shadows a bit too, but is at its best, in the slightly tinted greys signalled by the cravat. And anyway the subtle muted greys suited my mood better.

Warhol was born into a Byzantine Catholic family in Pittsburgh. His older brother, John Warhola, said that Andy was sickly and spent much of his childhood at home with their mother, eating Campbell’s soup at the kitchen table, while gazing at a print of Leonardo DaVinci’s Last Supper.

That grey again

And what better time to get into the purply pewter-grey of Victorian vampires than now. Forget Christmas’ red and green, or the flashy sparkles of New Year’s Eve, we are still in the dim out-of-time dreamscape of late December and what can you do but stumble into it. You know the crepuscular tones of a sky going soft and grainy into evening. Silken grey, between times grey, Liminal floating grey.

What makes the membrane between the material world and the spirit sometimes thin to almost transparency? It sounds romantic but it is scary. The feeling of not being quite sure where feelings and things overlap.

Back when I was living in a single apartment on the high spot above the city. I was living alone except for my black scruffy farmdog in the little apartment at the top of the hill past the park where I once got mugged for my wallet and then called the cops on the kid who was just a kid thrown on the hood of the car probably for the colour of his skin and because I was white. And later in the police station, I refused to press charges, refused the police lineup, but I brought back the little white cards of the bad men. Suspects wanted for every imaginable crime, all of them looking a bit like a version of Santa Claus that had done time.

I remember Judah and I were smoking then and drank giant 7-11 coffees for Christmas day, and he made me, on his patched together PC, a website full of all my bad men drawings which kind of wobbled on the computer screen while the song All by Myself played at full volume. It was beautifully unhinged. Probably this was before he moved in with me because I was living alone and writing about vampires.

All during that time I was thinking of vampires. That I might be one. I’d been suffering from the after effects of a big breakup and things were a bit fuzzy around the edges. I wrote a suite of poems I called The Vampire Poems. Where are they now? I found one that Shary illustrated for me a year later for my birthday after the vampire period. But then. O life was so lonely then, and I feeling like I was verging on being undead. Finding the sunlight painful. Worrying that my bed was a kind of coffin. Noticing the flutterings of black wings. Loving the word hover. Wearing a lot of black.

But how to make that grey?

Anyway those are all just memories and while in the limbo not writing to you, I have been busy. I would like to say that I was like a Victorian putting my personal affairs in order in this deadzone between Christmas and New Year’s, but instead I find myself pulverizing a plant into ink.

A Christmas plant

Its petals are not petals but a kind of leaf called bract gone bright, bloodred with the dying of the light. Pointed like pikes or batwings the leaves wilt into a kind of pleated cocoon darkening to the purple of dried blood. It is the goth of flowers.

Pluck the red bracts off and a white latex drips out. This milky substance may be a bit of an irritant and is a bit disturbing, but despite the rumours, no part of this plant is out to poison your cats, dogs, or children.

Forget the name

Poinsettia’s were cultivated in Mexico by the Aztecs for a long time. They were used as a dye, as a medicine, maybe as a symbol of blood sacrifice and were later coopted into Christian missionary mythology, heavily marketed by a single Californian ranching family, embraced by Andy Warhol’s vampiric love of kitch, and all this before finally ending up at your local bodega wrapped in pleated red foil and left by some random relative on your sink to eventually wither to nothing.

They are, and of course, like all plants, kind of amazing. When inked (a recipe is available to colour lab members only) they pulse with the bright red of a finger cut while slicing bread and quickly go royal purple then blueish purple, and finally, and this is sometimes after a few days on slightly alkaline watercolour paper, turning the perfect vampire grey I have been after. A colour like dead lilacs, like wintery skies glimpsed through branches, like a bruise that is the memory of blood below the surface changing slowly but inexorably towards something like healing. Like a medicine for the new year.

Yours,

Jason

A recipe for changeable Vampire ink