And so he was. Leaning motionless upon the table in the dark room, resembling imperially one-third microsecond from-to original refraction plus ten centiseconds hence retinal annihilation, in the virtuality of the not-yet flickering monitored projection, he represented a colossal marble representation of Argus Panoptes, the watchman in the ossuary of the columbarium within a canvased catacomb standing watch over the dead going to die. The real approached its own desertion. By him all this procession proceeded. The darkness set upon the beings gathered. Its dark light shimmered, the radiance enframing him in the perpetual vertigo of its drawing withdrawal. Perhaps it was the windswept curtain. Perhaps a fictitious force — not gravity though its fiction constitutes the solar midnight of man, at once zenith and nadir — emerged from the inertia of a real noctilucent cloud eclipsing the real waxing crescent as the terrestrial frame rate held fast with-at his latitude with-at three hundred fifty-two and nine twenty-fifths meters per second.
And so he was, the table lost in all that remained. What veil availed itself in alterity? Animating his monotony by philanthropic resuscitation of his culinarily rendered cultural corpse? Somersaulting himself into the table’s jaws devouring his vestigial frame as they copulated like two redback spiders instinctually intoxicated in the real, in the reproduction of evolutionary production? He recalled his kin the strangler Althusser and regressed to his earlier human state, muttering: as Marx said, every child knows that a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year.
And so he was, drowning in this quicksand, unaware of the scientific (escape) procedure, wriggling legs in a slow and progressive manner, for pulling one foot with-at one centimeter per second required ten thousand newtons, until he sat. No longer in its own standing, his posture comported with the resistance. He projected to the table the digital projection, withdrawing at the last possible instant. He mumbled himself his Zeno, to himself silently: that which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.
And so he was, noticing he was not noticing, not not-seriating himself into notices, into frames, into unread signs. Bile rushed from the duodenum into the esophagus. He tasted burning wire. Adenylyl cyclase catalyzed the conversion of ATP into cyclic AMP. Ion channels opened. Calcium and sodium rushed forth. Olfactory receptors depolarized, action potentials rippled, amygdalic voltages spiked. The sky opened. It was the most sublime panegyric ever heard, the last sound he would ever hear. And then he remembered. There is no beginning in the beginning, no ending of the end always already passing the past. So the table is but a table and memorial accumulation quicksand. He flipped the switch. The motor hummed. Its lambent light came to pass.
And so he was: little by little, frame by frame, fascinated — fascinated by the funereal reel bathing in the spectral beam of the projector, fascinated in the gestalt captation of the evanescent. Flickering decapitations were unfolding into each other frame by frame by dehiscence. In the phantasms of the fort-da what disappeared appeared in disappearance. He was witnessing the disappearance of everything completely — in after-images of screen memories. Yet the instantiation of the instant insisted. He did not vanish. His wish was not consecrated. Overcome by ablutionary electricity, his laryngeal susurration hissed in capitulation to its possession. At last. Blinking without blinking, falling forth into the unceasing whirlwind of light, there was a momentous occasion. Here concrete walls gyrated. He now knew whom he was and it was precisely that, that stripped hinge, what dentists name a linking verb. He whispered so softly he could not hear himself, so softly in the absence of the they in the we of speech no longer: I died therefore I will, the hallucination myself I am. And so he was.
