Such an enterprise in never simple

But it will be simpler here than elsewhere

Because of the plural relationship

This scene has to origin

Here is theatre, text that has yet to reflect

Reflect upon its perspective

Here the properties of the eye, of mirrors

Are dislocated, disarticulated, disjointed

And indeed also spacing, space-time, time

Are brought back to the perspective-free

Contemplation of the truth

Of the Idea

Idea eternally present

Postulated by the separation, the dismembering

Of the amorphous origin of all forms

And by the dazzling fascination of the Sun

Image of Good, who must be there

Across the way if we are to see good/well

Ever identical to itself, ensuring the identity of repetition

Ensuring that what may be repeated is like unto itself

Invisible and indivisible reality

Whose distinct parts can never be seen on inspection

Being, one, simple, unalterable, beyond analysis, permanent

Replica of an insoluble primal scene

But Being is tested by being split up into offspring, copies and fakes

These disperse and miniaturize the potency of the gaze

Like mirrors, that are not always already broken, articulating the break

But artificially divided offering an illusion of analysis

Thus the gaze is swallowed up in a vault

Which has become the circus, backdrop of representation

A motionless retina, a mere concave surface

Reflecting light and shadows, an opaque rearview mirror

A horizon that blocks light and sight

Limiting the view but ensuring the reproduction

By reflection of the painted figure, the fake

The seductive fantasy kept not only from the men chained up

Staring in captive fascination

But also from the magicians, eternally hidden by the screen

From their own strategems

That screen is not even unsilvered glass

It is better thought of as the back of the mirror

Or as a water-tight bulkhead impervious to all blows

Even in retrospect, a fiction. a fictive fission

An attempt to master the blow

In its division and duplication, cutting, dismemberment

An operation with an excess of terms and remainders

Indefinitely

The protection screen is fit to engender (only) the replica of the replica

Indefinitely

The screen that subtracts, divides and defends

Sends back phantasmatic off-spring by projection

As remainders, over and above

Onto the screen that reproduces and multiplies

Such products are good enough

for blind eyes to gape at

Clearsightedness works on the sly,

From the wings, a wide-eyed gaze, an averted gaze

An inner space of reflection

Polished, and polishing , fake offspring

Opening, enlarging, the scene of representation

The world as representation

All is organized into cavities

Spheres, sockets, chambers, enclosures

Simply because the speculum is put in the way

The operation is abortive – naturally –

Since only reflection is safe

and spawns misbegotten freaks

The cave intercepts the games in a miming of reproduction

And the image of the Sun engenders sham offspring

This mime simulates offspring beyond appeal and recall

Pretends to defer them by some kind of amnesia

Irretrievably

The eternally present Idea?

For has reminiscence not always already engaged

In rapturous contemplation of the Idea?

Target, or vanishing point and death that dominates

Existence from the beginning but devoid of any family context

A margin outside inscription, which like a star both guides and strikes

Which frames and freezes all forms of replicas

Limiting the show, the dialogue, the language

Outside time or place in its extrapolation of light

Everything in this circus will sustain the blinding snare

fetish objects, wall curtain, screens, veils,

eyelids, images, shadows fantasies are all so many barriers

to intercept, filter, sift the all-powerful incandescence

the gaze is ringed by a dazzling orbit