ion. By conforming its diachronic qualities to a predetermined and authoritatively prior synchronic order, allegory abuses God's body (Chaos or history in the sign).64 Through this demand for a semiotic conformity that, like Thyestes, eats its own, we only recognize the political tyranny that an allegorizing imagination could sanction, we also sense how that same power informs the specular, phallocentric pleasure Adam initiates while gazing on an Eve exact of taste.65 Faced with the prospect of semiotic mobility in narrative, allegory recoils to bite its own tail even as it proclaims self-sufficiency. Thus, Sin as Pontifical pathmaker aims to feed Death's taste for carnage, and what ensues is a creative process that hypostatizes its objects, turning them to stone, Milton's image for the medium and outcome of the wrathful law that sheers Chaos and charity by sticking to the graven form of letter or prospect.66 Death, lur'd / With scent of living Carcasses (10.276-77), gets to what he wants by stamping Chaos with a Mace petrific that fix't the soil firm and by freezing it with a gaze that Bound [the rest] with Gorgonian rigor to move (10.296). The power wielded here astonishes until, as Milton's critique of custom encourages us to do, we invert the terms and recognize this death drive as the self-destructive compulsion to eternalize historical limits, a perspective that deflates apocalypse to a moment's fetish frozen not to move.67 In contradiction of divine delay that chastens such climactic seizures, Sin and Death hurry to freeze in the pun on fast: all fast, too fast they made (10.319). This passage compacts Death with Sin, against our habit of imagining them as cause and effect; the imagining and choosing of a shape contrary to God is enacted by Death's hunger to turn life to self-serving stasis, to conform it exactly to taste. Highlighting the semiotic dimension here helps us to see how the passage comments on the Art Pontifical. Freezing Chaos packs a vicious textual pleasure because it denies semiotic mobility, the beams of poetic grace that flare out from