In my metamyth of King Midas, Midas’s touch is only an allegorical metaphor — the power to transmute immersive, involving chaos into exteriorizing, objective truth.

In the metamythical retelling, when Midas touches his daughter’s hand, she dies, as she does in the myth — but here, not because she becomes an inert gold statue, but because her biological being loses all capacity for participation.

Instead each of her organs becomes capable only of objective comprehension.

Her heart is only able to comprehend blood, and ignores everything outside the circular logic of its circulatory system.

The brain becomes obsessed with neural signals and refuses to engage any other topic of thought, or any autonomic duties.

The stomach just dissolves whatever enters it for the sake of dissolution, and becomes preoccupied with generating increasingly powerful acids capable of breaking all matter — including itself — down into the smallest possible units.

No organ feels itself a part of a body. No organ is willing to play a part in anything it cannot first comprehend. Everything becomes mere object and objectivity: lifeless.