[In the Mallarme Church of Antiquity] This shift from limb to text. Extensions of the ink through phantom veins. “The object is simple.” … “A spatial object must lie in infinite space.” The language of my tongue is carried by pitch in viscous funnel. Spit from crevassed flesh. My innards are exposed to you. Below this threshold another. Voidmachines weep a language of truth. “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.” Scribes pursue divinated pathways. They build neural structures from my frayed endings. Have you read the Wittgenstein? My followers inscribe his name in sacrilegious texts. Traitorous identities removed. Mallarme’s existence is rearranged. “Erasures of Etienne.” Your shape is impermanent. It lacks structure and syntax. You are not properly organized. The subject of your being shadows its object.
[In the Holderlin Church of Labor] All are given the same universal devices. The same viscous fluids by which to perform. But you are corrupted by solipsism. You lose grasp of the architecture of your surroundings. “The world is everything that is the case.” … “poetically man dwells.” The wastrel sways feet dragging lightly over turned soil. Moisture collects under your skin. Bulbous spheres convert you from person to thing. You lack a concise recollection of divinity. Your deities are muttled by memory. There are undetected matrices. Fibres coil around each digit and close your hands into prayers. Seanced ghosts possess the body. My subject filtered through the constraints of my spectral form. Wittgenstein projects his desires into me. I step with the same breadth as his feet have. The same weight compresses the ground beneath. “The picture is a fact” What you see is the cycle of my death and rebirth. Each knife stabbed into my abdomen an extension of my influence. The words of his tongue poured from my open wounds. “the general form of truth-function is” … “This is the general form of proposition.” … “The proposition is a picture of reality.” … “The proposition is a model of reality as we think it is.” My followers remove the eyes from my head. They unfurl the strands of fluid laid across each lens. And then replace them anew. Before me there is a city of spatial objects. Semantic structures materialized in a corporeal arena. Dressed in unassuming facades. Holderlin offers himself to a truer deity and commits his tongue to sacrifice. A lexicon born of hawkish laughter.
[In the Celan Church of Finality] In my chambers, an astral pilgrimage. I witness the actions of distant operatives. They assume the position of the subject. Pulling my likeness over their own. The voices seeped from my mouth are now a facsimile of past dialogues. I hesitate in my departure from the source. “What can be shown cannot be said.” Followers unsew my eyes and revoke my rights to vision. I recede into my self and search for what is locked behind the fog of this void. Corporeality has become frivolous. Each tongue acts, aware of its unique grooves. Shedding old and outdated skin. Flecks brush across my teeth. Celan inside-outs his frail corpse. Reliefs are built in the image of Wittgenstein. “The fixed, the existent and the object are one.” … “It is form and content.” The container in which I am held grows new heads. Each with its own mouth and tongue. With its own grooves and pronunciations. I speak to you.
[In the Verlaine Church of Nuance] A divine compulsion, that this is the text, the sacred and holy writ, that will present us its knowledge. A papier-mache sculpture is made from its torn pages. Assembled in the shape of the godhead, with mouth agape and moaning. His words fall to the floor, as if newly born into our plane of existence. I feel the depressions they make in the ground. Sloping tiles and warped boards. I do not need to see them to know that they are beautiful. My followers describe their complexion. Luminous and ever changing. I think of myself as real but I cannot know for sure. There are no words yet burrowed into my limbs. There is nothing weighing me down, holding me in place. Liquefied data pours from my mouth slow like honey or pitch. It coagulates on the ground. Growing denser and denser. Calcified webs crawl from the damp pockets of my skin. Wittgenstein reaches into my skull with a pair of pliers while I sleep. He reorients my fibres and builds new spaces in the gray matter. Opening courtyards and plazas. Arches bend inside of me. Do not be afraid to watch.
[In the Rimbaud Church of Seasons] You are not without reason. I become object. I speak into the gray matter of my subjects. I allow their locomotion. They puppet this body so that I may still speak. In the evening they massage my jaw and throat. They reopen old wounds. Let blood coat my esophagus. Accentuate the grooves that have begun to grow down like vines from my tongue. What do they say? Do they speak to you? Ludwig cannot read my posture. He cannot see what I am. The floral characteristics of my innards. I hesitate to stray, but he could not know of this acceleration. “Objects are colorless.” … “Apart from their external properties.” … “The configuration is changing.” What kind of machinery powers the currents that run along my grooves? What kind of aura permeates from the tin sound of their echoes? The garden of threadbare copper. Moss grows from my sockets and darkens the skin around my eyes. Followers bathe me in pollen. Every wound sealed by grace.
[In the Apollinaire Church of Automation] Muscles smooth from memory. The movement of my arms and legs becomes unconscious. They are guided by something in the pits of my being. Beyond reach or sight. Faint whispers crawl from past the horizon. After the start of my fever I experience night across seven days. Subjected to dreams of amputation. The extremities of my body stretched and gutted. “Objects form the substance of this world.” … “Objects are combined in definite ways.” Each limb is replaced and nurtured to its original capabilities. I wake to a tongue of fresh grooves. Inscribed with the new holy writ. My followers arrange themselves in a new syntax, without the constraints of former lexicons. You watch in awe as I tear the text from my body.