I CANNOT, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.
Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering.
There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory fails me not. It is the person of Ligeia.
I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall.
She came and departed as a shadow.
Of all the women whom I have ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the ever-placid Ligeia,
was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion.
And of such passion I could form no estimate, save by the miraculous expansion of those eyes which at once so delighted and appalled me.
Of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense --such as I have never known in woman.
Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted.
Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed.
Ligeia grew ill. I saw that she must die --and I struggled desperately in spirit with the grim Azrael.
And the struggles of the passionate wife were, to my astonishment, even more energetic than my own.
There had been much in her stern nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death would have come without its terrors; --but not so.
Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow.
That she loved me I should not have doubted.
I might have been easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have reigned no ordinary passion.
But in death only, was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection.
"O God!" half shrieked Ligeia, extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement.
"O God! O Divine Father! --shall these things be undeviatingly so?
--shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee?
Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."
She died; --and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow,
could no longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine.
After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering,
I purchased, and put in some repair, an abbey, which I shall not name,
in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England.
But these absurdities I must not pause to detail.
Let me speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed, whither in a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar as my bride --as the successor of the unforgotten Ligeia
--the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine.
I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man.
My memory flew back, (oh, with what intensity of regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed.
In the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug) I would call aloud upon her name,
as if I could restore her to the earthly pathway she had abandoned.
About the commencement of the second month of the marriage, the Lady Rowena was attacked with sudden illness.
One night, She partly arose, and spoke, in an earnest low whisper, of sounds which she then heard, but which I could not hear
--of motions which she then saw, but which I could not perceive.
She appeared to be fainting, and no attendants were within call.
I remembered where was deposited a decanter of light wine which had been ordered by her physicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure it.
But, as I stepped beneath the light of the censer, two circumstances of a startling nature attracted my attention.
I had felt that some palpable although invisible object had passed lightly by my person; and I saw a shadow
--a faint, indefinite shadow of angelic aspect.
But I was wild with the excitement of an immoderate dose of opium, and heeded these things but little, nor spoke of them to Rowena.
Having found the wine, I recrossed the chamber, and poured out a gobletful, which I held to the lips of the fainting lady.
She had now partially recovered, however, and took the vessel herself.
I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid.
If this I saw --not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine unhesitatingly.
Yet I cannot conceal it from my own perception that, after the fall of the ruby-drops, a rapid change for the worse took place in the disorder of my wife.
On the third subsequent night, the hands of her menials prepared her for the tomb,
and on the fourth, I sat alone, with her shrouded body, in that fantastic chamber which had received her as my bride.
Then rushed upon me a thousand memories of Ligeia.
The night waned; and still, with a bosom full of bitter thoughts of the one only and supremely beloved, I remained gazing upon the body of Rowena.
It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later, for I had taken no note of time, when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct, startled me from my revery.
I listened in an agony of superstitious terror --but there was no repetition of the sound.
I strained my vision to detect any motion in the corpse --but there was not the slightest perceptible.
Yet I could not have been deceived. I had heard the noise, however faint, and my soul was awakened within me.
I fell back with a shudder upon the couch from which I had been so startlingly aroused, and again gave myself up to passionate waking visions of Ligeia.
An hour thus elapsed when (could it be possible?) I was a second time aware of some vague sound issuing from the region of the bed.
I listened --in extremity of horror. The sound came again --it was a sigh.
Rushing to the corpse, I saw --distinctly saw --a tremor upon the lips.
The lady lived; and with redoubled ardor I betook myself to the task of restoration.
I used every exertion which experience, and no little medical reading, could suggest. But in vain.
Suddenly, the color fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed the expression of the dead.
In an instant afterward, the whole body took upon itself the icy chilliness.
And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia--
and again, (what marvel that I shudder while I write,) again there reached my ears a low sob from the region of the ebony bed.
But why shall I minutely detail the unspeakable horrors of that night? Let me hurry to a conclusion.
The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more vigorously than before.
I trembled not --I stirred not --for a crowd of unutterable fancies connected with the air, the stature, the demeanor of the figure, rushing hurriedly through my brain, had paralyzed --had chilled me into stone.
I stirred not --but gazed upon the apparition.
There was a mad disorder in my thoughts --a tumult unappeasable.
Could it, indeed, be the living Rowena who confronted me?
Could it indeed be Rowena at all --the fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine?
Why, why should I doubt it?
She let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly cerements which had confined it.
And there streamed forth, into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of long and dishevelled hair.
It was blacker than the raven wings of the midnight!
And now slowly I looked into the eyes of the figure which stood before me.
"Here then, at least," I gasped aloud,
"can I never --can I never be mistaken
these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes
of my lost love
of the lady
--of the LADY LIGEIA."
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Notes: Hello, dear and lovely readers! I hoped you liked this adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Ligeia". Last year, I made a a photostory of
"The Fall of The House of Usher" and since I enjoyed working on a Poe story so much (and received some extremely encouraging feedback), I decided to try making another one.
One small ambivalence that I have about "Usher" is that I re-wrote the ending to be less tragic. While I had my reasons for this, I think the photostory would have been better with Poe's original ending. In the spirit of learning from past experiments, I have here tried to follow Poe more closely (even though the ending of this photostory is still a little more positive that many possible interpretations of Poe's text).
Of the changes that I made from the original, most of them have been minor, and were done only to streamline some of Poe's more extravagantly long sentences.
The other change that I made to Poe's story occurs in my second last block of text. Poe's original reads: "and now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me." Because in the photostory, Ligeia already has her eyes open, I amended this to: "and now slowly I looked into the eyes of the figure which stood before me."-- Mostly because I thought it was too distracting to read that Ligeia was only just opening her eyes, when she had already been shown to have done so.
The first time I read "Ligeia", I was in a very disturbed state of mind. I also had no idea what would happen, and the whole atmosphere of the story spooked me in a way that seems a bit absurd now. Still, the things that are haunting about "Ligeia" are the mysteries that come from the protagonist's total unreliability. After Ligeia's death, I tried to show her surrounded by smoke or clouds, to suggest that while she might be a supernatural being with a horrifying will-to-possess, she might also be an opium-induced hallucination. I over-layed many textures and brushes to make certain experiences (such as the red drops that fall into the wine glass) seem visible but unreal.
The other choice that I made to try to show how "Ligeia" ruptures the link between perception and reality, was to photograph everything in front of a mirror. The mirror is not visible in every shot, but was there. It directed the light, spatially defined the end of the set that I made, and constantly thwarted my photography by reflecting all sorts of things I did not want in the frame. But of course, the mirror was perfect. It hints at the Doppelganger, the Shadow, the returned Double. It shows the philosophical and spiritual reflection of the characters, and the limits of what the protagonist (and the reader) can know based on their perception alone. It suggests the thinness of the veil between the living and the dead.
One of my reasons for choosing "Ligeia" for a photostory adaptation was the transformation of Rowena into Ligeia. Poe is very specific about how the eyes and hair of both women are very different and signify their personalities. Whether Ligeia's possession of Rowena is hallucinated or actual, whether it is fleeting, or permanent, ball-jointed dolls, as customizable "shells" for many people's favourite characters, seemed ideal to represent the uncanny transformation that Rowena undergoes in the eyes of Poe's protagonist.
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