“Anything Without Anything is a Corpse in the Mouth”
The body itself is operated by remote control
no more than its own terminal connection
has no other concern than the optimal
self-management of its memory banks—
A corpse is seduced and eroticized
by the instantaneous report it has of itself
not simply to speak of it as a mere screen or form
but as a myth, something that still resembles
a double, a mirror, a fantasy, a dream—
For it is in the extortion of speech
that a cold seduction governs the spheres—
The lion’s face is a peculiar form of “You”
“you beasts hissing over the face of a dead woman”
you lisping the forms of a marvelous rite
over the sediment sucking at non-functioning mouths
jammed with coteries whose residue
resides in an edible Heaven—
That is to say the lion’s face is the advent of good news—
The news invaded by a phantom content, a transplant, a walking dream—
A circular construction where one presents
a corpse with what it wants: the integration of labile meanings
though the corpse remains unaware of the immense energies spent
maintaining it, to avoid the brutal dissimulation that occurs
when the reality of a radical loss becomes evident—
“Anything without anything is a corpse in the mouth”—
Anything arrests. Anything arrests anything.
The lion’s face is a fake, a fraud
that invokes the same fascination as if there
were an image with which to seduce it
a terminal circuit that would open of itself—
And such seduction has no more meaning than anything else
seduction as only a kind of ludic adhesion
to accumulated simulation
a kind of tactile attraction maintained by models of speech:
“One plays at speaking and listening” “If it speaks, then it speaks”
But in effect it no longer speaks
And that discovery is a symptom of the need
to speak tirelessly in order to render language possible
to take a desperate situation and make it wondrous
“Contact for contact's sake” turning the empty form
with which language seduces itself
into a terminal beauty raised up
in a position of mass extermination
credits
from The Lion's Face,
released November 10, 2012
Words & voice: Tim Van Dyke // Music: Brian Howe
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