Masque of the red death.

The aesthetic experience is the anaesthetic experience. When it comes to talking sickness and death, artists invariably moderate pain on behalf of the living, transmuting it into a broad metaphor calculated to leave admirers gaping at its brilliance.

 

Of course there are useful coded forms for dealing with death -laments, elegies, dirges- designed to help the living take leave of the departed. But rare and brave is the individual who accompanies the dying as they plumb the depths of solitude and reports back the emotions and sensations, the fears and the why - me anger afflicting them. For whoever is prepared to abscond from the cause of the living is likely to be dammed along with the dead, especially in the era of AIDS panic, which has witnessed the end of compassion and the return of the leper colony: suppurate and separate.

The close proximity of death on the domestic front has produced and ungly bunker mentality among the healthy. That early outbreaks were diagnosed in gays and drug users wasall the righteous needed to project AIDS as the  sword of the Lord swooping down and punishing the immoral. Later evidence of CIA and military cultivation of an AIDS virus as chemical weapon designed to take out undesirables only is conveniently passed over. In the meantime the reality of AIDS to sufferers condemmed to die in solitary confinement has been swallowed up in the hysteria of the Moral Majority´s metaphor of the disease as divine retribution.

Well, illness as a metaphor is thought, not felt, and hysteria by definition is unpredictible. But, properly harsnessed, hysteria is the mind in a latent state, ripe for conversion. Compelled to investigate the realm of slow death by some uncanny sesnse of its imminence, a feeling made fact by the AIDS loss of people close to her, DIAMANDA GALÁS naturally gravitated to hysteria as the rightful place for the expression of the complex emotions surrounding the disease. THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH is her response: a plague mass in three parts composed under AIDS spectre

Diamanda Galás port of entry into the blighted landscape AIDS sufferers. To work her way in and up to the hysterical state that is also her  alchemical method, she shriek-sings in the state´s proscriotive biblical tongue. If her usage is confusing. It becomes clear that she is convulsing its original meaning, inducing fragmentatin until finally its hate signals are reversed. Galás is not after illness as glib metaphor for social canker. Her MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH presents the full shock of the plague which, once felt, triggers a metamorphosis of bloodless bigotry and ignorance into a compassionate understandind of suffering.

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH Opens with THE DIVINE PUNISHMENT. This first section in steeped in the Old testament tone of prohibition alluded to earlier. Quotations from Leviticus , the Lamentations and excerpeted Psalms chart the progress of the sufferer from the point he feels himself outcast, through his fear and dismay and possibly, to the bitterness that leads him to accept the role of Antichrist conferred on him by those who´ve twisted Christ´s teaching into socially sanctioned condemnation of sexual difference. The barren electronics into which these charred fragments are ejaculated by Galás -as mercilless accuser, cackling crone, wailing moaner or painwracked victim- are coursed by a decelerated pulse.
 

Part two is SAINT OF THE PIT. The most ambitious and perilous leg of Galás´voyage with the dammed. Here, she plots the soul in transition, the selected texts registerering the mutilated emotions of a man ravaged by disease. The line keying her commitment comes in Gerard de Neval´s Artemis: "Love the one who loves you form the cradle of the grave". The force behind it compels Galás to raise the voices of the denied and dispossessed, thowing into relief the self-abasing Baudelaire text Self-Tormentor, and its light endures to the very end of Tristan Corbiere´s 19th century corpse poem Blind man´s cry. The texts are rasped just above the roar of the wind whistling through the distant, beckoning void. The whole is preceded by an organ overture that announces the part´s solemn liturgical tone, even as it mocks its Messiaen-ic sobriety with undertones of Poe and Corman.

YOU MUST BE CERTAIN OF THE DEVIL. Concludes the trilogy On an extraordinarily defiant note-a clarion call to the Dammed to arm themselves, no less. After scouring the plague territories of the Old testament and the charnel houses of 19th century French corpse poetry, Galás finally resurfaces in 20th century America-whose failure of compassion at the moment of death triggered her voyage of discovery. Informed by years of AIDS research, she´s ready to take on the on the economists of salvation on their own terms, diverting the babble of slot TV preachers and Ramboid survivalists into stiletto sharp parodies that slash their twin hotlines to God and bank. As always, Galás compositions follow the internal dictates of the material. This time tracking the American Bible Belt, the music absords dance and gospel, along with the territory´s Fundamentalist jarpon and speech patterns. The tighter narratives anchored to more rigid rhythms call on the singer to concentrate her often diffracted voices in singular withering harangues of the pitilessly powerful. The speed gospel of the title song, however, looses all her voices in a frenzied simulation of gospel induced ecstasy. And elsewhere spoken bible extracts cut into her own texts echo the first part, in so doing binding the whole.

AIDS

The first cases of what woukd later be called AIDS apperead in North America, Europe and Africa in the late 1970´s. AIDS  is related to a group of conditions called AIDS related complex (OR ARC). People with ARC are often quite ill, but do not match the "case definition" for AIDS. Some doctors have suggested eliminating the terms "AIDS" "ARC" and "HIV positive" and replacing them with the term "HIV specttum disease" to referer to the entire range of conditions purported to relate to HIV.

 

Two east microbiologist, Jakob and Lilli Segal, have published the most detailed argument for a chemical-biological warfare (CBW) origin of AIDS. This is the current theory quoted by the Soviet Union and reprinted in the international press. The Segals agree with establishment scientist that HIV is the cause of AIDS, but maintain it was genetically engineered by the U.S. Army and then released unknowingly through an experiment on human guinea pigs. They call AIDS "a military blunder". Asserting that AIDS first appeared in New York in 1979, then in Europe and Africa in 1982, they posit the following scenario.

First, the U.S. Army´s CBW laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in violation of the treaty signed by the U.S. in 1972, continued CBW research and development. Then, as the technology of genetic engineering emerged in the mid-1970´s, the military moved to harness it fot CBW use.

At Fort Detrick, the Segals continue, it was customary to use, in experiments with disease-causing agents, "volunteer" prisoners promised release if thet survived. In 1977 "the first test persons were probably infected" with genetically engineered HIV. But since no serious symptoms were noted, even after a year, apart from cases of apparently harmless swollen lymph glands, the newly created pathogen was regarded as ineffective and the "volunteers" were released. 

Under the current U.S. administration biological warfare research spending has increased 500 percent, primarily in the area of genetic engineering of new diseases organisms.

At a House Appropriations hearing in 1969, the defense department´s BW division requested funds to develop through gene-splicing a new disease that would resist and break down a victims immune system.

"Within the next 5 to 10 years it would probably be possible to make a new infective micro-organism which could differ in certain important respects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of t these is that might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease"

AIDS was first diagnosed in 1981, 12 years after the requested funds were approved.

It is significant that the "discovery" of the AIDS virus (HTLV3) was announced by Dr. Robert Gallo at national cancer institute, which is on the grounds of Fort Detrick Maryland, a primary U.S. Army biological warfare research facililty. 

The AIDS epidemic may have been triggered by the mass vaccination campaingn which eradicated smallpox.

The world health organization, which masterminded the 13-year campaing, is studying new scientific evidence suggesting that immunization with the smallpox vaccine Vaccinia awakened the unsusoected, dormant human immuno defense virus infection (HIV).

 

Some experts fear that in obliterating one disease, another disease was transformed from a minor endemic illness of the Third World into the current pandemic.

An adviser to WHO who disclosed the problem, told the times: "I thought it was just a coincidence until we studied the latest findings about the reactions which can be caused by Vaccinia. Now I belive the smallpox vaccine theory is the explanation to the explosion of Aids.

The smallpox vaccine theory would account for the position of each of the seven Central African states which top the league table of most-affected countries: why Brazil became the most afflicted Latin country: and Haiti became the route for the spread of AIDS to the U.S.

It also provides an explanation of how the infection was spread more evenly between males and females in Africa than in the west and why there is less sign of infection among five to 11-years-olds in central Africa.

Although no detailed figures are available, WHO information indicated that the AIDS league table of Central Africa matches the concentration of vaccinations.