Balladeer’s Blog resumes its examination of the macabre 1868 French language work The Songs of Maldoror.
THE GREAT TOAD-ANGEL
This stanza opens up with the supernatural being Maldoror contemplating the worms he pulls from the swollen belly of a dead dog. Slicing the worms into small bits he philosophizes on how human beings should learn a lesson about their own mortality from the state of such dead, worm-riddled bodies.
Night is falling. In the distance he spies a horse-sized toad with white wings flying down from the sky and landing on the road he is traveling. As the two draw nearer to each other Maldoror senses something familiar about the creature and reflects that its face is “as beautiful as suicide”. He resents the being over how beautiful it looks even in its massive ugliness and the halo over the toad’s head tells him it has come from Heaven and his archrival God.
Maldoror being Maldoror he tells the Toad-Angel how much he loathes it and berates it for the manifest unfairness and injustice of the world that God has created. He taunts the being that it is only what Maldoror perceives as the deity’s “might makes right” attitude that lets him inflict so much punishment on hapless humanity while feeling no regret.
At length the Toad-Angel reminds Maldoror that the two have met before. Once he was an ordinary bufo alvarius (a species of toad whose skin secretions are hallucinogenic and usually fatal) that Maldoror used to lick for psychotropic inspiration. Just as our vile protagonist received mind-altering visions from oral contact with the toad the eldritch chemicals in Maldoror’s mouth eventually elevated the common toad into the higher being it is now. Continue reading
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