As Deleuze-Guattari establish, it is catatonia - simulated or artificial death - rather than death itself that is Poe's obsession: “Horror-story writers have understood, after Edgar Allan Poe, that death wasn't the model for schizophrenic catatonia, but that the contrary was true, and that the catatonic was one who made of his body a body-without-organs, a decoded body, and that on such a body there is a kind of nullification of the organs.” (Deleuze, http) 'Mesmeric Revelation' is presented in the form of a simulated dialogue between 'Poe' and Vankirk, the victim of a terminal disease, who has, like Waldemar, allowed himself to be hypnotised. The 'mesmeric revelation' that the trans alive-dead Vankirk furnishes Poe with turns out to be a Spinozist disquisition on the nature of God and matter.

'Death', Vankirk tells 'Poe' in 'Mesmeric Revelation', is far from being the end, since 'There are two bodies - the rudimental and the complete ... what we call 'death' is but the painful metamorphosis.' ('Life is a lower form of matter.' [Artaud, 1965, 216]) The passage from 'life' to 'death' is not a journey from Being to (phenomenologically-construed) Nothingness, but a movement from the organism to the desolated but populous body [without organs] of zero. In Vankirk-Poe's hypermaterialist metaphysics, the 'ultimate life' is 'unorganized' since 'organs are contrivances by which the individual is brought into sensible relations with particular classes and forms of matter, to the exclusion of other classes and forms.' (Poe, 1982, 93) Either everything is alive, or nothing is. Either way, the distinction between living and nonliving, vital and mechanical is illegitimate and unworkable. 'To rudimental beings, organs are the cages necessary to confine them until fledged.' (Poe, 1982, 93)