Anti Vampire Center

Contrasting human feelings with the Vampire's sentimentalism

Feelings, in the non-Vampire world, are simple and unequivocal. This is not the case in the world of Vampires, since the latter always tend to treat any feeling as something strange, complicated and indecipherable, besides being useless.

Being in touch with our own feelings doesn't only mean experiencing grand passions or being easily moved, as the Vampires would have us believe, to be better able to look down on us. It can also mean many other things: replying with kindness to someone who is kind to us and with gratitude to someone who has unselfishly given us something; trying to offer opportunities to those who lack them, being tolerant toward those who err in good faith, knowing how to perceive worth and reward it with recognition that may be symbolic, but as real as the worth; looking inside the human soul, knowing how to perceive signs of honesty within it, and knowing how to behave accordingly; never hesitating for a moment to do something to save a life and never tolerating acts of violence against innocent victims; and many, many other things of this type.

The day we wake up without feelings, we will in fact be Vampires. Unfortunately, our ideas on this subject are confused from childhood, to the point that it becomes practically impossible to distinguish between feelings and sentimentalism. Sentimentalism is an adulteration of feeling, which tends to create concepts that drip with rhetoric precisely because they lack content. Sentimentalism, for example, is the idealization of the "good old days gone by", or a naive and romantic devotion to a so-called "faith" (with a vast range of variables that may go from attachment to a racist or ultra-nationalist concept to blind fanaticism for a sports team's "flag"), or the mystique of "poor me", which often conceals selfish and vampiric objectives behind the false grimace of the pain of being a victim.

Feeling, instead, when wisely associated with the use of intelligence, shows parents the way to make their children become free beings, or makes a populace rebel against a tyrant and win, or produces great human insights, be they philosophical, literary, religious or scientific. These are all things which do not allow for surrogates. One might say that feeling is the flying carpet of fables: thin, soft, flexible, with nothing rigid about it, without sails or motors or mechanisms or hidden tricks, but marvelously agile, supple and capable of transporting us - who knows how! - up to the stars.

As we well know, the reality in which we live portends bad luck for those "foolish" enough to stay in touch with their own feelings. Our worst enemy is definitely the person who - Vampire or not - urges us to become hardened, to become cunning, to put aside our scruples, to elbow our way to success, to flatter those in power and scorn those who cannot assure us tangible advantages. This mentality creates the worst inequities, and sets up the conditions that turn us into Vampires or predestined victims of Vampires. This second outcome is not at all rare. Indeed, it is not at all certain that all those who are brought up with the precept "be cunning" will in fact become Vampires; human beings possess resources of resistance against the vampiric vortex which are capable of evading all domination and evil instigation. Those who are fortunate to possess these prodigious internal resources might not only save themselves from a condition of vampirism, but might easily triumph over any Vampire who might approach them. Provided, however, that they ignore the recorded message that repeatedly tells them "deceive or you will be deceived" and other stupidities of the kind. Even the wisest of men, in fact, if torn between two versions of life that pull him in two opposite directions, will yield to a state of perennial conflict and confusion, and in the best of cases will spend his life wondering what the right thing to do is, without ever reaching a definitive conclusion.

A sense of justice as an invincible weapon against the Vampire

A sense of justice (that is, the key to the secret of knowing "how to do the right thing") is the invaluable patrimony of the individual who has not sacrificed his own feelings on the altar of a culture of ignorance which claims to have understood everything about life. It is an unstoppable weapon of formidable power. Learning to use this weapon means not succumbing ever again to the Vampire, in whatever guise he may present himself. Whoever possesses it is a little like a Jonathan Harker or an Arthur Holmwood or an Abraham Van Helsing of the year 2000: in short, a hero of Bram Stoker's Dracula designated by destiny to liberate the world from the monster.

In the story Samuel Serrandi which we have cited several times, Massimo carries out an investigation in the home of his friend Luigi Limandi to try to discover the reasons for his mysterious suicide. When he is finally able to reconstruct the facts and to conclude that the person morally responsible for the death of his friend is the swindler Serrandi, he finds himself gripped by a mysterious feeling which, welling up from deep within, gives him no peace; a feeling which involves both affection and respect for his deceased friend, and a just evaluation of Serrandi's inhumanity. Convinced at first that it is hatred, he will come to realize later on that it's his sense of justice, which he will define as "the instinct for the preservation of the species of innocents".

Massimo began to experience a fundamental feeling that rose from the depths. It was neither exasperation nor disdain or solidarity. Those were news terms. Empty. They expressed nothing but the worn-out rhetoric of a society that cannot experience feelings and so mumbles again their manneristic counterfeits. No: what Massimo experienced in that moment was something quite different. It was so innocent a feeling to seem devilish, so natural to seem perverted, so human to seem bestial. It was hate. And while the interiorized structures of the ethics, common sense, religion, law, civil living launched their slogans of condemnation, he was nailed to the terrible discovery that hate is not the opposite of love, but a dramatic defensive phase to come to forgiveness, and from there to the elusive love for the neighborhood. A neighborhood that in this case was called Samuel Serrandi. Dr. Samuel Serrandi. With a frozen light in his eyes, he disposed to wait. Among the potential customers of the indispensable ‘special programs of computer publishing’ there was him too.

[...] He had endured, supported by the mysterious feeling that at a first moment he had called hate, but that during the last hours he had begun to define more properly ‘instinct of self-preservation’. Self-preservation of the species of the innocents, which perhaps was worthwhile considering endangered like some animal species, because it too at risk of extinction. Not only are the Serrandis in relation to the Limandis as are the hunters with roe deer, but in the war between the Serrandis and the Limandis, the first can enjoy a formally opposite but substantially sympathetic audience, if not even friendly. Also for this reason Massimo had told nobody of his discovery. Not to expose Luigi to definitive shame that the same death of his would have sanctioned, instead of dissolving it (he already imagined the comments of friends and colleagues: "Well, quite stupid to get gypped in that way… He asked for it… It’s quite like the Guinness of World Records: the most stupid death of the century…"); but also not to transform Serrandi’s smartness in a kind of myth, maybe negative, but myth as well in comparison of Luigi’s idiocy; and not to even leave him the honor of being the smart executioner of a foolish condemned man.

Thanks to his sense of justice and the fact that his feelings have never died, Massimo, after a distressing battle of nerves, will be able to defeat the Vampire and to denounce publicly in the columns of his newspaper the scandalous traffic that revolves around his activities, although he will have to encounter the ignorance and embarrassed reaction of a society that has a lot in common with that Vampire.

Never forget that there exists a force that is superior to the Vampire

Some of Corte's stories have in common the presence of an element which is mysterious, unexplainable and miraculous, which unexpectedly illuminates the scene with a supernatural light, evoking from the depths of the soul feelings with which men have always been familiar, but which they forget, or annul altogether, convinced of their lack of usefulness or, worse yet, their perniciousness. These stories therefore find their resolution in a portentous event which, although prefigured and in some way "written" into the fabric of the incident or in the personality of the protagonists, is carried out in a way which is nonetheless unexpected, resulting in the salvation of the individual who deserves being saved.

The subject, as one might guess, is a delicate one, because it assails the personal convictions of each of us with respect to the Mystery. We will simply point out that the stories include The Meeting, The 1100 Belvedere, Expositio ad bestias, passages from which have already been presented, and Dancing with Her.

We merely invite you to read them, adding that in our opinion no one on this earth can claim to have an absolute monopoly on the Mystery, and that, whatever one chooses to believe in, to admit that the Mystery exists in men's lives is always a unique opportunity for human and spiritual growth, and a way of going back to feeling humble in the face of something which is indeed greater than us, if only for the fact that it eludes our comprehension.

In particular Dancing with Her suggests that whatever horror may appear before us, including the most implacable of all, Death, there is in the universe a force that is superior to every monster, visible and invisible, which moves among us. In the presence of that force there is no Vampire who will not be blinded. The individual who, like the protagonist of the story, has chosen not to become part of the band of Vampires, will receive the greatest gift of all, that which men have been asking of their gods for thousands of years: definitive proof that that force exists.

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Anti Vampire Center
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Do you want to read Mario Corte's latest story, The meeting, in its entirety? Follow the link and you will experience a very special encounter with an individual who knows about devilish beings, and who not only fought them, but one far-off day faced and defeated the most terrible Enemy of all: the one to whom every Vampire has chosen to devote himself, under the illusion of acquiring absolute power over others.