Chains prevent the prisoners from turning around

Behind the wall are men moving around

Between the prisoners and those men

Are the objects they use for their tricks

Some kind of show will be put on

Provided one accepts that the wall cannot be crossed

It may be leant over, looked over, sublimated perhaps

They are forbidden to move forward

The show will take place over the wall

If the objects are raised high enough

But this wall is not supposed to be very high

So the wall will be got over

But not really. It won’t be climbed or leaped.

The men, the men’s bodies, will remain behind this screen

But they will succeed in getting some symbol across

Some reproduction, some fetish of their bodies

It is when we see this erected effigy of their bodies

Whose shadow appears in profile

In the new role as projected screen, that we know

The chained men are now on show/ at the show

Their eyes are dim, it is true

But if they were not looking, rapt in fascination

Then the projected shadows, the reflections, the phantoms

Would lose the attraction of their appearances

The reality of their phantasmic power

Immortalized in its deathly duplication

Seems successfully to have raised

This prestigious fake

What cunning and utterly convincing necromancers these are

Who sacrifice themselves to the greatness of their specters

And rob, rape and rig the perspicacity of their public

Blinding it with their exhibitions

Hidden from the eyes they charm

Kept away from seeing their own show

From seeing the effects of their own sorcery

They are kept busy in the wings

Modeling the form of their replicas

Into the fiction of verisimiltude

They form artful shadowy attributes

Copy cats, copied in their turn by stolen reflections

The deception works

Already a man's gaze is lost in them

These deceptive figures are doubled by their own shadows

Fiction engenders fiction

Projections, reflections, fantasies

But of whom? Of what? Of the prisoners?

The wall, the face, the space works all too well

It multiplies

all by itself

The protagonists don't understand what is going on

No one knows any longer who is the deceiver

And who is deceived. How are the parts being cast?

To whom or what is the projection to be attributed?

All aid and abet a simulation that continues unaided

Whose cause always already goes back earlier

Ever backward into the cloud-filled future past

Of ever darkening projects

Such operations can always be played with and played back

To provide some stake in this game that is always already rigged

Endlessly giving the game away, betting on nothing

Mortgaging into insolvency

This twisted cave of Plato's or Socrates'

And no one will take his cave away from him

Even counting in imaginary numbers

For in this cave the tricks are many

And can never be reduced or added up or multiplied

The different parts being played are witheld

To advance the size and authority of the effects

A dazzling trompe-l'oeil

The show is also a pass-time

But time is still there all the same, held in suspense

Fetishes and ghosts will argue over dead time

Perhaps an attempt to share out what is commonly known as death

That is not all. The reenactment within the cave

Of the artifact of the path which migh lead in or out

Condemns movement, bans pulsations, sustains the snare

And the wall remains inpregnable, bar breaking and entering

But we are really wasting our time with this show

For the holes, cracks, tears, the faults and failings

Must in their turn be re-marked, reinscribed

Particularly in the memory

Thus the outlawed element, the slave and the repressed

Rules without appeal or recall the very text that outlaw it

This becomes clear if we question and unmask

The figures forms and signs, that ensure its present coherence