MALDOROR 10: A RAIN OF BLOOD FROM MY MIGHTY FORM

Balladeer’s Blog resumes its examination of the macabre 1868 French language work The Songs of Maldoror.

A RAIN OF BLOOD FROM MY MIGHTY FORM

An uncharacteristically vulnerable Maldoror wonders if he is in his final hours. He defiantly and gleefully boasts that none of the world’s lying, parasitic clergy will be attending him when his end comes. If his supernaturally long life is at last over he plans to meet it cradled on the waves of the sea or atop a forbidding mountain peak. 

Our narrator further points out that no sign of either sorrow or fear will mark his hideous visage at the approach of his merciless annihilation. Against all the odds he marshals what is left of his strength and begins to float across the sky, so that he can watch man’s inhumanity to man to the very last. His eldritch form spreads like a coal-black cloud, blotting out the sun and inflicting violent eruptions of lightning on the ground below.

Birds and land animals are frightened while human beings drop to their knees and press their foreheads to the ground in terror. He sneers a reminder to the trembling life-forms below that he surpasses them all with his inherent cruelty. A rain of blood begins to fall from Maldoror’s mighty cloud-form, a rain that burns and rots the flesh of those below.

In a conciliatory turn our protagonist assures his “children” looking up at him that he will not curse them. He tells them that the evil they have done him is too great and too great is the harm he has done to them. Rather than feel soothed by this attempt at atonement from the supreme misanthrope Maldoror, humans and the wild animals instead rally together in their hatred of him.

Seeing the men and beasts of the world setting aside their ages-old enmity to turn all their hostility skyward toward his still-lengthening body Maldoror rises higher on the winds to escape the restless mob below. Next he feels the rustle of a bat’s wings against his neck and awakens in his cave with a rhinolophus bat sucking blood from his throat.

It was all just a dream. The bat’s drinking of some of his blood accounted for the weakness and the feel of his vital fluid falling from his body like rain from a cloud. Maldoror lovingly describes the bat in great detail (hence my inclusion of the actual species of bat, in which some critics see Deep Meaning) but is filled with sadness that the bat did not drain every last drop of blood from his body.

Next time around it’s back to what the vile creature called Maldoror does best – mutilating and killing people, the more innocent the better.     

I WILL RESUME THIS LOOK AT THE SONGS OF MALDOROR SOON. CHECK BACK ONCE OR TWICE A WEEK FOR NEW INSTALLMENTS.

FOR PART ONE CLICK HERE: https://glitternight.com/2015/02/28/maldoror-a-neglected-masterpiece-of-surreal-horror/

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