from Light on the Lion’s Face,

A Reading of Baudrillard’s Seduction

 

 

Dead Sex Object

 

by Tim VanDyke

 

 

 

 

Everything obeys the rule that dictates the sacrificial

between men and their gods

cultures of cruelty, relations of recognition

and dispensation of unlimited violence

entirely given over to an ephemeral but total credibility

as if bidding with themselves

leaving only the ultimatum of conversion

the absolute need to be believed, to disperse all other belief

in an hysterical combination of passion and assimilation—

The hysteric has no intimacy, emotion, no secrecy—

The lion’s face succeeds in making its own body a barrier

a seductress paralyzed

who seeks to petrify others in turn—

That which would make us believe, make us speak,

make us come to things by dissuasion,

by suicide, turning suicide into a theatre of the Mind—

What remains immortal in this spectacular domain:

signs without faith, without affect or history,

signs terrified just as the hysterical is terror—

It invokes a passion for an abstraction that defies every moral law

To be deprived of seduction is the only true form of castration

The lion’s face is a mirror that has been turned against the wall

by effacing the seductiveness of its own body—

The lion’s face that draws our attention to Death

not in its organic and accidental form

but as something necessary and rigorous

the inevitable consequence of a rite that is violent

 as the rules of a game are violent—

To seek one’s rights over that dead object

with which one appeases a fetishist passion—

Reclusion and confinement, a collection unto one’s self

The Collector is possessive

and is not distracted from His madness

His love, the amorous stratagems with which He surrounds it

that which emanates from Him, the dead sex object,

as beautiful as a butterfly with florescent wings

immortal and indestructible, as in every perversion—

The Collector has enclosed Himself within an insoluble logic

One can then only reward it with death

like the sun refracted by different layers of the horizon

crushed by its own mass, no longer obeying its own law

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tim VanDyke grew up in Colombia, South America, until guerilla warfare forced him back to the United States.  Since then, he has worked in several insane asylums.  His first book, Topographies Drawn with a Divine Chain of Birds, is out from Lavender Ink.  He also recently released a chapbook, Fugue Engine, with Cannibal Books.  His work has appeared in Fascicle, Typo, Octopus Magazine and elsewhere.