2010 · Alexander Keefe

THE ”Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body, and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men ; and the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half-an-hour…

Edgar Allan Poe gets points for this passage, the third episode in my ongoing American avatar series. Why? Because he capitalizes the word like a monument. Because instead of going into a bunch of obvious, heavy-handed exoticizing, Poe trusts the word itself to subtly charge his sentence with the dangerous energy of some alien world. Nothing more needs to be said of the Red Death: “Blood was its Avatar and its seal.” The disease’s mystical, liquid appearance on the skin, its arrival from the uncharted inner universes of its human carrier into visibility is also, simultaneously, the red-wax seal on that wretched creature’s fate. Cast off from humanity, transformed into the physical sign of a horrendous, numinous Other, he is a post-human and a pariah. Rarely, if ever, has the word “avatar” been used to such precise and devastating effect in American literature.

Histoires extraordinaires / par Edgar Poe ; traduction de Charles Baudelaire.

addendum: Baudelaire, 1855

La Mort Rouge avait pendant longtemps dépeuplé la contrée. Jamais peste ne fut si fatale, si horrible. Son avatar, c’était le sang, — la rougeur et la hideur du sang. C’étaient des douleurs aiguës, un vertige soudain, et puis un suintement abondant par les pores, et la dissolution de l’être. Des taches pourpres sur le corps, et spécialement sur le visage de la victime, la mettaient au ban de l’humanité, et lui fermaient tout secours et toute sympathie. L’invasion, le progrès, le résultat de la maladie, tout cela était l’affair? d’une demi-heure.

addendum: Price, 1964

Filed Under: Film, Literature
Tags: Avatars, Horror, Poe

The Other Song
01/04/2010 · Mansi Shah

In 1935, the Indian singer Rasoolan Bai sang, “My breasts are wounded, don’t throw flowers at me”. Never to be sung again, the song eventually got lost. Seventy-four years later, director Saba Dewan travels through Varanasi in southern India, in search of that forgotten song and the story of the women who inspired it. She encounters the modern-day descendants of the courtesans who, until a century ago, were amongst the most educated of Indian women. Today they’re considered deviants. Yet, their stories are irrevocably linked to the making of modern India, and the transitions around the censorship of female sexualities and cultural expression. – DIFF

Interview with Saba Dewan at Dubai International Film Festival 2009