03 August 2014

From the Desk of E.A. Poe (Section 38)




The previous Theatre of Hate post reminded me of avant-garde theater luminary & one-time surrealist Antonin Artaud’s Théâtre de la Cruauté or Theater of Cruelty & his treatise The Theatre and its Double so I was re-reading passages from it as I thought about how to finish off this weekend’s selections. I was in no mood to happily feature some chill-out Dub. In fact, I was feeling kinda the exact opposite. So I dragged out some Diamanda Galás. She's always salt in an open wound & definitely a proponent of the Theater of Cruelty.

In Artuad’s Theater of Cruelty: First Manifesto, he posits: 

     Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.



In the section “Theater & the Plague” Artuad explains the role of the Plague Doctor & the birth of the Theater of Cruelty:

     Over the poisonous, thick, bloody streams (color of agony and opium) which gush out of the corpses, strange personages pass, dressed in wax, with noses long as sausages and eyes of glass, mounted on a kind of Japanese sandal made of double wooden tablets, one horizontal, in the form of a sole, the other vertical, to keep them from the contaminated fluids, chanting absurd litanies that cannot prevent them from sinking into the furnace in their turn. These ignorant doctors betray only their fear and their childishness.

     The dregs of the population, apparently immunized by their frenzied greed, enter the open houses and pillage riches they know will serve no purpose or profit. And at that moment the theater is born. The theater, i.e., an immediate gratuitousness provoking acts without use or profit.




Here, as a requiem for those dead or dying of AIDS, is a Plague Mass in Three Parts.

Diamanda Galás – Masque of the Red Death 2xCD re-issue, Mute 61588-2, 1993.
decryption code in comments

Disc 1 –

The Divine Punishment –
Deliver Me From Mine Enemies :
a -This Is The Law Of The Plague
b -Deliver Me From Mine Enemies
c - We Shall Not Accept Your Quarantine
d - Εξεαόυμε (Deliver Me)
e - Υιατί́́, Ό́́ Θξό́́ς?
f - Psalm 22 (Excerpt)
Free Among The Dead:
a - Psalm 88
b –Lamentations
c - Sono L'Antichristo

Saint of the Pit –
La Treizième Revient
Εξεαόυμε (Deliver Me)
L'Heautontimoroumenos (1857)
Artémis
Cris D'Aveugle (1873)

Disc 2 –

You Must Be Certain of the Devil –
Swing Low Sweet Chariot
Double-Barrel Prayer
Let’s Not Chat about Despair
Birds of Death
You Must be Certain of the Devil
Let My People Go
Malediction
The Lord is My Shepherd



Darkness & Decay & the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.



3 comments:

  1. khJIx7eOX4L7T9mVgHZ2NrcNlfuXAGq4A3MzchGVfvY

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  2. Thanks for this. On Friday past I incautiously synced between two drives and "lost" every single individual file and folder which carried accented Latin in its filename. I since recovered a bunch of shit from a deep scan but all metadata has been stripped from those files, including name. It may take me years to match those orphaned files to their appropriate hierarchal folders. Well. What a fucking dunce. I quite forgot to run simulation mode.

    Hence, Diamanda Galás seems an especially appropriate addition to my "library"; not having heard any of this before, there is no master folder.

    Artaud. What a kindly looking older gentleman. He reminds me of an Irishman I once met living in the south of Holland. Jackie. He had one of the most interesting and arcane faces I've ever come across, all the more alarming as the result of his fondness for baseball caps and gothic jewelry.

    He ought to have scared the shit out of young children, but they seemed quite immune to his speed ravaged countenance.

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  3. (continued)

    Well. This data retrieval shit might best be described as the modern counterpart to pest control. While it was initially tempting to scream aloud, as a man pressing the sole of his foot on a snail, in the final analysis it seemed more prudent to don the miner's helmet and drop down into the abyss.

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