Education as a Weapon in the 21st Century Gothic and Vampiric communities the world over seem to suffer many of the same ills: chronic unemployment, societal disdain, and a generally singular existence that tends to isolate those communities from the rest of the world. Higher education is often seen as the panacea for these troubles, largely by those who already have it. Try as we might, as a group, we tend to separate ourselves from society as whole through manner of dress, social priorities, music, and a host of lesser tendencies (speech, body-piercings, tattoos, etc.). We deliberately set ourselves apart from the rest. In and of itself, this other-ness is not an issue. By and large, we PREFER our isolation. In some Byronesque fantasy, it is romantic to be the loner, the odd man out, the James-Dean-Walking-Through-Times –Square-In-The-Rain-In Stunning-Black-and-White—We cultivate isolation the way some social tribes cultivate interaction. Most often we don’t seek acceptance from society at large. We often PREFER being disdained by the old woman (pushing 50?) at the supermarket who reacts not to who we are but what we wear. Yet we constantly seem to be on a search for that illusive ideal we shall, for want of a better word, call ‘community.’ I say ‘illusive’ because I’ve yet to see this community work as planned—someone always decides that they want to be the king, sides are taken, battle-lines drawn. It seems that we yearn to be separate and alone, but we yearn to be separate and alone together (at least for a little while…). … We work ever so hard at bringing like-minded individuals together only to factionalize, subvert, and otherwise divide ourselves into categories and sub-groups. A really good Machiavellian scheme in action has become the new Rubic’s Cube of the psi-vamp, an exercise to stretch one’s abilities and little more. How can we ever hope to unify if we are constantly on the lookout for the next buzz, the next feed, the next incestuous little war to come along? We often wait on the lookout for these things the way opportunistic predators hang around schoolyards. Not all of us do this, of course. Some of us are exceptionally aware of and sensitive to the rest of the world. It reminds me of the Irish toast, “Here’s to us! Who’se Like us? Damn few, and they’re all dead”. How can we survive—put food in our bellies and clothes on our backs—if we can’t even get a job at the convenience store and keep it longer than a week? We seem to constantly recite the mantra of Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?”—while we plot and plan to advance our own places in the community at the expense of our peers. The answer, then, is, “ Apparently not.” This community DOES have a secret weapon, and like most secret weapons, we are reluctant to use it for a variety of reasons. Some are practical and valid, others silly and pretentious. Education is the atomic bomb in the arsenal of the gothic and vampiric community. Mutually-Assured Respect is the bludgeon of the 21st Century. Education is our means of acceptance. It will become our tool of survival. It is the primary weapon in our toolbox against ostracism and devisiveness. I’m not speaking specifically about school, mind you. A college degree does NOT guarantee you a living wage or the respect and admiration of your peers. Ask any of us geriatrics with graduate degrees how much money we made last year. I’ve been a professor at the same University for 11 years now, give or take, and I have yet to break the $30K barrier. But that is my choice. I have made it my business to educate myself as to who I am and what I want from the world. Having the answers to these two questions has allowed me to reach a delicate balance between the norm and the fringe. Within my department, I am the odd-man out- separated from the group, housed in a different building on the other side of campus from ALL of my colleagues. I have the ONLY office on campus with 30 stairs to climb, the only office with glass walls and the constant sound of industrial machinery reverberating from the cheap and broken ceiling tiles….AND I LIKE IT. I have a shrunken human head on my desk. I have a stuffed raven and a vulture on my massive bookshelves. I have a Pagan altar in one corner of the room. Swords cover my walls. We are a smoke-free campus by government decree, but there are makeshift ashtrays on every flat surface. Anybody that has business in this office isn’t likely to care whether I smoke or don’t. Being isolated has given me near shamanic status- autonomy, of sort. Student pilgrims search in vain for days (sometimes whole years) for my office. When they finally find their avatar and pose their question, the answer is always the same. Never let your classes interfere with your college education. Goth students ask me if the struggles of trying to remain an individual within the academic structure is ‘worth it’. I answer with a question of my own. “Is it?” The answer depends entirely upon what you as an individual want out of this world. If you want to spend your life living with your mother until she finally boots you out at the age of 35 so that you may continue your inner-journey into self-centered angst, then no, probably not. If the idea of begging cigarettes from your friends while they beg acceptance from you doesn’t appeal to you, then the answer is, “perhaps.” The reality is that even the kid who is ringing up your taurine-laden energy drink slurpee has at least a bachelor’s degree or is working on one. Obviously, a college degree doesn’t guarantee you a rewarding career. Without one, however, you hardly get to participate in the great game —Never leave ‘Go’, never collect $200. Even fast-food restaurants won’t allow you to wear your sanguine ankh to work. Can you actually work eight hours in a row in a place who’s own corporate image is so vastly different from your own self-image without losing your identity? Of course, but first you have to know exactly who you are. One of the most successful vampires I know is a bank manager in a rural town in Kentucky. Five days a week she puts on a modest skirt and blouse, picks up her black-leather briefcase, and trudges off to approve home-loans for Kentucky dentists. The other two, however, can usually find her at a Coven gathering or SCA event in full regalia. After five PM, I strongly suspect, you would probably find her wearing nothing at all. How does she manage this tightrope between worlds? That is simple. She knows who she is and she knows what she wants. Having identified the means to achieve those goals she is simply applying the psi-vamp’s ability to ‘disappear’ in a crowd—in this case, a corporation. It is very rare indeed that a vampire reaches the age of 50. It is rarer still to have a vampire retire from anything. Apparently, 20 years in the same job is a bit much to ask from a person who can be a community elder in about 6 months. It is a fundamental irony of the universe that those who can afford to shop at Hot Topic and the like are the least likely to do so, and that those who cannot afford to are most likely to be found selling plasma for the latest Red Ball jacket. Priorities are remarkably subjective. Clearly, formal education is only a building block—a necessary one, to be sure, but a mere foundation of the education one requires to succeed in society as a member of the outsider’s club. To succeed both within society and within vampiric communities requires an entirely different kind of learning. Success requires skills that often appear to be entirely outside of our reach. It requires communication, self-discipline, and understanding on a level usually associated with Tibetan monasteries. It requires acting abilities usually associated with art-films. It requires the one talent that most of us sorely lack and would prefer to go the rest of our lives without if at all possible. To successfully operate within both the corporate world and the vampiric community requires absolutely brutal honesty with one’s self about who and what one is. Socrates said “Know thyself.” Apparently Socrates had nothing to hide, and they killed him for it. To be able to sit down calmly and say to yourself, “OK, I’m a 42- year- old vampire with absolutely no inner monologue and a genuine talent for pissing away a fortune on useless accoutrements and fashion accessories…Now what can I do with that,” requires a self-discipline that can only be acquired through years of practice in the fine art of overcompensating for perceived inadequacies. Yet oddly enough, this is the path to liberation, the first step on the road to true education. You cannot know another in anything but the most superficial of terms until you know yourself. You cannot trust another, be it a community or an individual, until you can trust yourself, and you cannot trust yourself without first undergoing the painful education of learning what you really are--only then can you go about the business of inventing a useful façade and make it believable. In the classic ‘outsider’ movie “The Wild One,” someone asks Marlon Brando’s character the question, “What are you rebelling against?” His reply? “Whaddaya got?”
When you can answer that question, you are ready
for gothic kindergarten. Until then, get used to
having people tell you to roll for hit-points while
look up things up in your clan book.
© Vampire Church |