caesura: n; the mark i use in my poems ' * ' presents a pause, an opening in the surface of my expression. it reveals an abyss that cannot be filled with meaning but can only be bridged (experienced/perceived) groundlessly and dangerously.

cage: n; 1. inherent in a cage is the desire for the caged to be outside of the cage, the urge to escape. in this sense then, the caged desires to be wedded with that which is outside of it. the cage might then be called a wedding cage, as it possesses the ability to wed via the mechanism of escape. as well, the very concept of wedding may only become evident in a situation in which one is caged. 2. a message that no one wants to acknowledge.

cairn: n; if a cairn is a non-random arrangement of materials at hand— evidence of an organizing presence— then we are all cairns.

calendar: n; the calendar is born in exile, in the presence of broken and unhealable ties.

call: n; you are told there is a treasure. you are told that it is your mission to find this treasure. what your are not told is that no one wants to see the treasure you must find. to them your treasure reminds them of the voice that they never listened to, the voice they must silence every day. to them, your treasure is a handful of ash.

canada: n; 1. a red leaf is a dead leaf. 2. “an episode of communication” - Northrop Frye. 3. canada is a place where explorers from other countries always get lost. 4. canada is an empty idea. 5. canada, as an uncritical entity is inevitably approaching its own enlightenment, and after that, its own terror. 6. (a thought adapted from jean Meslier). a country that prides itself a haven for refugees rather than working to eradicate, or at least minimize, the conditions that result in the mass dislocation of people is a country which is only extending the welcome and the privilege of its great weakness. 7. its strength is that it is primarily uninhabited.

canada council: n; and so the help goes away again, without helping. - Kafka.

canlit: n; 1. a toad on a log in a drainage ditch from which even the resident cows refuse to drink. 2. the tragedy of a Canadian writer is that it's writing almost always ends exactly where literature begins. 3. the cows are grazing in a field of pens. every so often a cow gets a pen caught in its hoof. it holds up its predicament for the rest of the heard to see and says, look everyone, i'm a writer... moo. moo. chomp. chomp. 4. here, we paint miniatures with brooms. 5. the failure of any celebrated canadian writer to disturb, even slightly, the fetid, still pond of canadian culture is evidence of someone as afraid as they are talentless. to refuse to exercise the power that is available to them as an artist is an insidious insult felt most acutely by those who will never recognize it as such. 6. my english has no patience. 7. it is all stammer and drone. 8. a tree that can barely exist but yet brings forth fruit (even if the fruit was underdeveloped and inedible) would rightly be seen as a miracle in a hostile environment. however, this same tree, in a favourable climate and in rich soil can only be regarded as an aberration of the highest order since such a tree would be expected to bring forth the greatest fruit.

canon: n; 1. a canon is interpretation narrowed to a single authority/view which assumes that the inherent doubt in any interpretive event (see interpretation) is unfounded since complete cognition is possible and is in fact realized in the form of the canon. the canon presumes all other hermeneutic efforts to be failures (un-truths). they are failures, but only in the same way that the canon is as well. 2. the canon is a train. it is in motion but it is always the same train. people get on and people get off. it does go somewhere, it does leave some things behind... however, one can always walk or decide on some other way to travel, some other means of leaving. one can also always decide to go somewhere else.

capital: n; 1. the following represents the circuit of production:

� existential conditions / relationships

‚ labour ——à product —à capital

ƒ materials

there are three processes occurring in this circuit: the first is production, where the forces 1-3 generate product; the second is an exchange which generates capital. the third process is the re-investment which completes the circuit. capital wishes to remain and to propagate itself. in order for this to happen there must of course be capital after the exchange process. if there is not enough capital to re-invest then there is a deficit. for the circuit a deficit is of course a critical problem. if there is more capital produced, then this extra is a surplus. capital also wishes to maximize the process of its production (which means that it is the surplus value which is to be maximized). over time, in its effort to maximize the surplus value, capital will see that the middle step (production and exchange) is an element which threatens surplus value. moreover it is unnecessary. by considering itself as a product capital dispenses with the need for this detour. what follows from this is that the labour (wage-earners) required for the production of a product are no longer required. this frees up more capital ( = more surplus). the constraints imposed by surplus value maximization tend towards the non-corporeal (non-human), a-spatial (no factory etc.), a-temporal (the work never stops). the evidence for this scenario can be found in modern banking and present day mathematically esoteric currency speculation. 2. capital cannot exist without the human. however, in its effort to propagate itself, capital reorganizes and systematizes human behavior to suit its ends. this process of instrumentalization of the human results in the gradual elimination of the humane. the human without its humanity is a tool, a machine. in this way it is possible that capital eventually will secure the conditions for its own eradication.

capitalism: n; 1. the relationship between capitalism and the biological concept of natural selection is one of equivalence. both necessarily result in a class of underprivilege / poverty / failure. both in fact find justification in the main dogma of survival of the fittest. this statement however, is misunderstood and unfortunately poorly phrased. the concept of fitness is considered to be something an individual is in possession of before the selective event (death in the case of biology) when in fact it is only a relative term which can only be stated after the fact. that is, natural selection is a survival of those who survive, and these survivors, by virtue of surviving, are more fit. it is not necessarily because of anything they possess innately, though it may be (see actual selection). the misunderstanding of this statement logically leads to a justification, in economic terms, for the maintenance of a poverty class because evidently by such a view the poor and the powerless must not have what it takes to be rich and powerful. 2. even though capitalism shits in an isolated corner of your mind, the stench disturbs every room. 3. the capitalist spends its energy attempting to evade the necessary limitations of capitalism. these limitations are necessary because without them capitalism could not exist (e.g wealth/advancement requires poverty/recession). it is because of this persistent and systematic evasion that active participation in capitalism can be compared with mental illness. 4. a system of excuses for inhuman behavior. 5. capitalism depends on the denial of a mother's work as work. should a mother be paid for raising children capitalism would collapse. there is not enough money in the world to pay for the work mothers do. 6. in capitalism share is a noun. 7. capitalism leads to predictable ends. it is the desire for the realization of one of these ends (concentration of wealth/power) which fuels the activity of capitalism. there really is no turning back once one has set out on a capitalist adventure. you will go to the end. and if you die before reaching it the life you spent in pursuit of wealth and power will help ensure that others will not be able to escape the end the you could not realize. i would define such an end as that place, that moment, where nothing but the naked mechanism of capitalism churns away without the need for any cosmetic or accessory activity. there are already examples of activities near such an end point. for example, hollywood, which has long claimed to be a producer of things described (or advertised) as art, entertainment, education, morality, etc. now has cast aside such props. when someone watches a product of hollywood they are no longer watching films; they are certainly not watching art. all they are experiencing is the truth of capitalism— its grinding and screeching, the labouring of its overbearing engineered inhuman presence. when the spectacle of capitalism is all that is offered for consumption, when even the pretense of making entertainment has dissolved then the end has definitely arrived. such effects are not limited to cultural activities; they can be found and expected anywhere the adventure of capitalism is being pursued. it could be argued that the reason most canadians do not want private health care is because they do not want the activities of giving birth, of nursing, of caring, of healing, of dying, of surviving, to be cast into a capitalist adventure. no one who is human would want to suffer in a hospital where compassion has become a pretense that is on the verge of being dispensed with. no one can be healed by triumphant capitalist spectacles... and so, there is no need to set out in that direction. at least that is the heart of the argument and at least people still appear able to understand and respond to it. however, sometimes the defense of public health care seems like the defense of the last fortress of a devastated kingdom, a tragic kingdom where the inhabitants were not overrun by some superior force but killed themselves all the while calling their slaughter life. 8. “things with a sense of self cannot be owned” - W. Anderson. the desire for ownership, the world of commerce and transactions, of accumulation, is an economy of the inhuman. and so, capitalism should be recognized for what it is: inhumanism. 9. the collapsing body of american capitalism reveals itself in its cynical efforts to encourage underdeveloped countries to enter an expansionist phase so that the wizened beast can feast on a productivity that is, for itself, a lost ability. 10. any ideology based on the concept of limitless expansion should pause and take a deep breath.

captivity: n; 1. a poetically illiterate society will beg for captivity. 2. intelligent animals refuse to breed in captivity.

carcass: n; the person who is just happy to be alive, the one who lives only for the sake of living, is the carcass in which the contagion of evil has taken up residence.

care: v; a society that prides itself in its humane care of its poor and suffering citizens would be scorned as barbaric by a society which instead focused its resources on eliminating the conditions which supported / prolonged such poverty and suffering.

career: n; a career for an artist, for a writer, is established upon a convenient apathy.

caress: the erasure of violence.

carrot: n; i have never wanted to be a promising servant of a common master.

cartography: n; 1. the activity of physically characterizing the human genome is an act of map-making. a map is always critical for any future discovery. however, from the perspective of what is being discovered and from the perspective of those who will be directly affected by any discovery, a map is the first step towards exploitation. 2. explorers reach a continent of disease. there are people living with/in this disease but the explorers believe they are the first to arrive, the first to set eyes on it. and so, they plant a flag, establish a settlement, claim the disease for their interests; these flags/settlements are known as syndromes. to the people who inhabit this place, all this activity, all the planting of flags and establishing syndromes appears at the very least quite odd. after observing for a while the aboriginals can not help but ridicule these newcomers who are making such ridiculous (and redundant) claims.

catachresis: n; in the center of the flower that is my mind there is a nail.

cataclysm: n; sometimes even the earth gets the urge to make a collage.

catastrophe: n; it is common for people who wish to display concern for humanity, or, for the planet, to also display a virtuosity in their ability to describe and predict scenarios of catastrophe. they, no less than anyone else, avoid the obvious truth— if you are breathing the catastrophe has already happened.

causation: n; the residue of experience is not cause and effect but is self-validating co-incident events.

Caws: n; the promise kept is the promise earned, not granted.

Celan: n; 1. all the weight of experience, of being-in-the-world where language has betrayed, where the language has been an accomplice in all that is terrible, where language can only be held with the greatest skepticism, this is the weight that the poem must bear. a poem is then an effort, an almost impossible, futile effort. such a burden is too much for any poem to bear and so during the poem's emergence there is a buckling and then inevitably, a collapse. what remains is what we (as readers) encounter as the poem. what remains is what is language's resistance. such poems as these are poems of foundation. 2. his resistance is the resistance of having everything to say and only language with which to say it. 3. a generator of productive confusions.

celebrity: n; 1. engineered irresponsibility and guaranteed ignorance. 2. celebrity is the subversion of all authentic expression (and of authenticity in general). authentic expression, as anyone knows, is inspiring, invigorating, and leads to living. and so, such a thing must be subverted by those things that are threatened by thought, action... living.

cellular telephone: n; 1. “the horror vacui may perhaps be identified as a characteristic of end periods of intellectual development.” - J. Huizinga. 2. self-imposed house-arrest.

cemetery: n; concrete wisdom.

censorship: n; 1. to ban, or criminalize, works of art which deal with child sexuality (and adult attitudes towards it) is to operate under the assumption that everyone and everything would be fine and orderly if it wasn't for the presence of certain evil objects or stimuli; removing such stimuli would then alleviate any problems, any disorder. as a hypothesis this assumption fails to explain the observation/fact that i love the art of Hans Bellmer (some of which censors would definitely consider to be criminal/degenerate, an evil stimulus) but am disgusted by any notion of child abuse/exploitation. an interesting consequence of the evil stimulus assumption, were it to be extended into all area of life, would be that recess at elementary schools would definitely have to be banned.

i work and live from a different assumption. while recognizing the existence of evil stimuli, i also recognize that there is art which is labelled as such but which is no such thing. what such mis-labelled art is an example of is an encounter to which some people have an inappropriate/dangerous/criminal response. such art as this reveals (or unveils, aletheia – truth-disclosure) this deficiency. as certain people would not be expected to admit such a taboo deficiency exists in themselves, it is likely (even perhaps necessary) that they would deny such a human deficiency is possible and therefore would adopt the evil stimulus assumption to explain their experience/encounter. the assumption i live and work from rests on the existence of human deficiency/inability which art illuminates, which art desires to be remedied. art, seen in this light, obviously intends a betterment of a situation which is revealed to be problematic through the creation of an encounter (experience of art). on the other hand, the evil stimulus assumption, which rests on a human perfection which is subverted by evil objects, depends on denial, depends on demons which are always outside of the individual, acting on it. the important difference in these two assumptions lies not in the event that they are true, but in the event that they are false. if my assumption is false what remains is a human responsibility towards a betterment when confronted with problematic situations. if however, the evil stimulus assumption is false a human deficiency will exist and it will be denied, it will not be recognized, will not be remedied. instead other things will be blamed for the trouble, for inciting disruptive situations. these other things will pay the price of this denial and will continue to pay until the deficiency is recognized and remedied. but such an event, such a cleansing will never happen as long as the evil stimulus assumption remains unchallenged. 2. censorship troubles itself with nouns. they are only bones laying in piles on the side of the road. it is verbs that do all the killing. 3. censorship is understood as erasure, as an eradication of something that exists— a negative act. this implies that creation is positive— an activity which posits something where there was nothing. but perhaps the reverse is also possible, perhaps a profusion of verbal or written injunctions cast into the tenuous enclaves of personal introspection, or an unmanageable verbosity taking the place of silence are also examples of censorship. if this is true then in such cases a creative act would attenuate or mute the textual or verbal excess. this would be seen as an act of subversion, negation, even aggressive destruction when in fact it would only be an attempt to limit the damage done to itself and to regain a lost stillness and sense. 4. because any act of positing occurs in a limited space, all acts of positing are even more censorious than acts of negation. acts of negation at least must deal with what already exists whereas positing speaks over, or in the place of, what has not yet managed to be.

certainty: n; 1. we now suffer under the tyranny of a=a and b=b. the poet or the writer-as-artist has a function and this is to inform the world of why a=b and b=c and c=a. the poet and writer-as-artist is not being cultivated. and where they exist they are being ignored. the question is why is the world so set against knowledge of uncertainty. why is it that the undoing of rigid forms is threatening? 2. certainty is just a coward's belief. 3. certainty is in a marriage of convenience with faith. certainty is ashamed of its spouse and tries its best not to mention anything about its far from blissful situation. it is rumoured they have had a child, a deformed and pathetic creature called ignorance. 4. feel fortunate when you discover a hole in your proof, when the rain starts to seep in... rebuild or relocate— always very attractive options. 5. the more fundamental the knowledge the more energy required to gain that knowledge, the more that knowledge costs. a guess, a belief, is cheap; certainty is beyond anyone’s ability to pay. 6. death— our only certainty is a negation. in the universe of being it is not; yet, it is certain. perhaps certainty is a characteristic of nothingness. perhaps all that might be considered a foundation must also be void. 7. certainty and the machine go together, just as scepticism and the human go together.

chair: n; the oldest excuse.

chalk: n; when you are a child chalk circumscribes everything you need to know. as you get older all chalk does is delimits the playing field of some game or else, outlines a body that has lost its ability to live.

challenge: n; every book is a challenge to one’s critical abilities. the greater the challenge the the greater the responsibility one has to respond critically to it.

chaos: n; “results from our inability to predict future behavior of a deterministic system from initial conditions because of its great sensitivity to initial conditions”. I. Prigogine.

character: n; 1. i treat character as an action, character is a process, (etymologically, it is to engrave upon, to mark) something that happens to something else. this something else is not as important as what happens to it. what is marked is transformed by this action, is damaged or enhanced. i find that most writers consider character to be something entirely opposite to this and not a process at all. they consider character to be something permanent and unchangeable, something recognizable that remains in spite of everything; they confuse character (which implicates process/indeterminability) with identity or essence (which implicates rigidity / stasis / determinism). their mistaking of the material, which the process of character marks, for character is an inheritance which we should refuse. it belongs to a world-view that understands humanity to be something apart from everything else. character, in this sense, and when glorifying this limited understanding, is at the very least an anachronism. my understanding of character and my treatment of it in my writing aims to act upon the reader, to engrave something into them, to transform them, and in so doing reveal itself for what it is, a process of change. 2. character is the assumption of an irreducible progenitor/cause of action (acting). such an assumption is resistance to transformation, necessitates hostilities between mutually opposed manifestations of character. plot is related to character in the following way:

character ————à plot

(acting / action)

plot is the temporalization of character; it is the limitation of something larger than character, of being. if the existence of character is pretense, if there is in actuality only pseudo-character, then it must be possible to eradicate this character, it must be possible to re-build a new pseudo-character. the eradication of character could be demonstrated in a sort of theatre of manifestation where all acting, all action would be happenings-in-themselves, not originating from any center, from any irreducible assumption. to be understood, to be meaningful, such actings would require an assumption of character in an audience/individual. many possible assumptions (specific manifestations) of character would exist. it would be telling (in a meaningful cultural, sociological sense) which particular manifestations of character would be assumed, insisted upon and which ones would be denied, ignored. the function of such a theatre of manifestation would be to create in an audience/individual a vast number of assumptions of character, a plurality of character which of course would be non-fixed. 3. character is the home one makes of the house one has inherited. 4. the problem with character as it is understood and utilized in narrative fiction (and in narrative art forms) is that someone experiencing the work in question is encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, to identify with a represented character. this is definitely an error in comprehension. a person who experiences a narrative work of art is every character, is every aspect of that work— they must identify with the work whether they want to or not. it is up to the spectator to elaborate the nature of their particular identification to the work. such identification is a metaphorical act. it is also a release from an obscure bondage.

chasm: n; whenever a poet is a poet the poet will walk with an even and untroubled stride where others will only be able to discern chasms.

chestnut: n; an adolescence transcended.

child: n; 1. the difference between a child and a tumor is simply one of degree. 2. an endorsement for narrative; an assumption of narrative. 3. the first palliative a parent gives to its child is the fiction that the child was brought into the world, not for the parent's benefit, but for the child. in other words they insist that they are giving a child the gift of itself to itself. in this parental logic the gift precedes the recipient yet the gift is the recipient. this gift of itself to itself serves as the child's first existential lesson. 4. what desires not to have a child arises from the best of me. it is good to listen to this part of myself.

childhood: n; an interrogative.

choice: n; 1. choice is not equivalent to selection. choice is a tasting. it involves an ingestion, it is an encounter which has a transformative capability (positively = nourishing, or negatively = poisoning). this is far different from selection which is a process of arrangement, of sequestering which does not include the transformative, ingestive element of choice. choice depends on the individual's courage to ingest what may harm, it involves a risk which transforms itself into a specific knowledge. selection on the other hand depends only on the things to be selected which are dislocated from the individual; in such a process there is no risk and as such gives rise not to knowledge but only to delusion. 2. i) do nothing and the worst will happen; ii) resist while the worst is happening and the world is already better than in i) because you are resisting, because you are not in silent collusion with the ugliness.

christianity: n; faith, hope, and charity— with these three virtues christianity is ethically pragmatic. charity being a necessity for a population which has succumbed to the virtues of hope and faith— virtues which always seem to engender a hell on earth.

church: n; a moral infirmary

cinema: n; the cinema is an alienating spectacle that takes place in a mausoleum-type structure where the public willingly pays to sit together in order that they can be by themselves. the images and the artifice of narration are catalysts of the alienation process. where the cinema fails is in its inability to exhaustively exploit its alienating potential. when the cinema is successful the spectacle has been transcended and alienation, in all its inhuman power, has been communicated. such an event will be frightening, exhilarating, cruel, psychologically dissipative... realistic in the most precise sense of the word.

Cioran: n; life is the privilege of mediocre people.

cipher: n; 1. Cipher and Poverty is concerned with limitation and indirect communication — communication in which its inherent limitations are the basis of what it wants to communicate. and why would anyone want to communicate this aspect of reality? the answer is that this inexpressible, meta-linguistic realm is the place where everything of importance happens, rests, hides, is born... 2. Jaspers says that the-world-as-appearance, as a cipher speaks the language of transcendence, a language of many meanings, as penetrating as it is non-cognizable. this is exactly the notion of cipher i wrestled with, and eventually married in Cipher and Poverty. the stakes of this concern, of this engagement are very high (as can be sensed in Jaspers' comment). basically, what is at stake is an authentic, existentially open, communicable life. 3. ciphers must be divined. 4. “the language of transcendence but not transcendence”. - Jaspers

circle: n; the geometric representation/idealization of breathing.

citation: n; our perception, our experience of the world is analogous to our reading a footnote.

citizen: n; the citizen feels honoured to be asked to do something it has to do anyway.

civilization: n; a viral civilization has built/erected humans. compassion has emerged as a criminal element in such human-cities. compassion is always dealt with severely, imprisoned, executed, its networks destroyed. compassion is always marginalized so that viral progress is not challenged.

Cixous: n; “I am going to encounter myself,” our soul, petrified with fear cries out, “Quick, a God!”

clarity: n; limits effect clarifications. a creative mind is always conscious of death— this limitation determines the clarity which is the necessary condition for creation. moreover, if this limitation is extended to its limit, if i know when i will die — in a creative mind this can only result in the greatest possible clarity. in such an instance a death sentence becomes a divine gift.

class: n; there are only two classes of citizens: those who believe that personal worth is in some way proportional to personal wealth, or those who understand that there is no relationship between the two. The latter class is able to admit a certain humanity where the former class can only exclude it.

club: n; 1. often something used to guarantee submission. 2. “absolute conviction is a form of insanity” - Jean Starobinski.

coherence: n; the image is often propositional. the difficulty for the visual artist (as for the poet) is to express the non-propositional coherently.

coincidence: n; the question has always been whether words lead to vision (experience) or whether vision (experience) leads to words. i have experienced both which leads me to believe that both represent two aspects, two encounters of a single process. the process is one of coincidence – vision (experience) and words are coincident.

collage: n; 1. the primary tool of collage is also a favorite tool for suicide. 2. collage is inherently critical of its materials (and sources). here it distinguishes itself from painting which is a-critical, which does not accept material as a creative variable. 3. in my collages on glass i am making meaning co-incident with its sign. i am infesting the sign with meaning, overloading it. there is always the sense of surface presence and background presence breaking through the surface. this background space is the white space of dada collage which i have contaminated with meaning. the apparent seamlessness of the image is due to this contaminated white space which is itself image and which happens to subvert all that it shares presence with. by introducing ash and other materials i am introducing further intrusions which further infuses meaning and subverts presence(s). 4. citation and quotation are linguistic instances of collage. 5. the joy of collage is the same as that experienced when making art with your father's golf clubs. 6. you cannot be tidy when you are doing collage. that is, collage must do more than blow in through an open door or window, rustling curtains and scattering things which are casually lying about. What is required is the type of wind that can pick locks, open cupboards, overturn bookshelves, unfasten clothing...

collapse: v; 1. whoever believes that their psychological life is separate from their public/social/professional life is sadly mistaken. such people are in a state of progressive collapse which can be represented in this way: (1) the unity of psychological/public life is spherical as is the model of a proton (*) [system 1] (2) to insist that psychological and public life are separate is to hold them apart with a force equal in magnitude to that of say the strong nuclear force ( *à ß* ). the potential energy of such a system [system 2] is so great that it is infinitely unstable. that is, such a system will immediately collapse into the stable condition of system 1. the collapse comprises the events in the life of the person in question. 2. a single neuron rests between reason and total collapse.

collocation: n; words commonly used together. if a speaker were to map out its collocations it would have a blueprint for the structure that determines its living. in this structure, the greater the frequency of a given collocation the thicker, the more insulating the wall. windows and doors are those unused, those once-used, those almost impossible to consider expressions.

comfort: n; if it is true, as Kierkegaard says, that the only reason a person holds onto any organized faith is that such a faith allows for a comforting death, then the essence of this comfort is that it must be regarded as truth and not admitted as the comfort it is.

command: n; the world of appearance can always be altered by the will; however, the world of appearance has no effect on the will. the will is intansigent, irreducible. in fact, the copula was invented to negotiate between the steadfastness of the will and the desultory world of appearance. and so, practically speaking, living is always a choice between whether to adapt to the world of appearance— to deny the will, or, to command— to transform the world of appearance.

commentary: n; 1. necessary as it is at times, commentary is always indicative of the decay of culture, of the end of creative and intellectually relevant explorations. 2. my first spoken word was aaaaaaah! everything I have ever spoken or written since has been nothing more than a commentary on this germinal utterance.

commerce: n; the human finds a home in the intersection of the transactions of immensity.

common sense: n; 1. the rope of convenience knotted around every person's throat. 2. the commonly non-sensical confuse common sense with the self-evident, or, an activity with an object.

communication: n; 1. to communicate is not to transmit a package between two points; it is not the pouring of the contents of one container into another; communication is not an experiment, it is not a commodity— there is nothing measured in an utterance. communication is a darkness where one comes alone, searching. it is the darkness where one finds another/others. it is where something arises, something is created during the duration of this meeting, this communion. communication is the darkness which eventually overcomes the meetings, erases or undoes what was created. communication is the darkness which causes what was once held to be lost. this darkness therefore demands that we retain what we can, that we remember: who we have met, touched; what we have spoken, heard; what we have created, witnessed. 2. the telecommunications industry, in all its size and complexity and cost, and with all its ceaseless activity/labour, is exactly the minimum effort that is required to maintain the illusion that communication is a direct (unambiguous, unmediated) process. the presence of such an enormous structure serves to mediate communication and so its very existence contradicts/subverts the illusion it is busy sustaining. 3. the concept of communication as message-transference, as additive change, is a misunderstanding of the concept of transformation, of gestalt re-orientation, of annihilation and resurrection even at a local level/confined area. 4. communication is an approximation of meaning, that is, meaning (which can be experienced) can only be communicated approximately. communication is a representation, and so, representation is an approximation of meaning. any communication/representation, in all of its incompleteness, defers the totality of meaning indefinitely along a path of other communications/representations. (even though any communicative event can be experienced as can any event, as a totality, the meaning of this event is always understood approximately; as well, the substance of any event, such as a communicative one, is always an aggregate of approximate meanings). 5. the telephone, to exist as a stable socializing force, must assume language to be an eternal, unfailing entity/process. any demonstration (or even suggestion) of language's failure or groundlessness must be actively excluded from the telephone's privileged presence(s). 6. communication is not an avoidance of problems but a willingness to engage in problematics and work through them (more or less successfully). 7. electronic communication (e.g. e-mail, web-pages) is, ontologically speaking, not speech or writing; it is something else... wreech, or spiting. this ambiguous status may be something that adds to its popularity. it may also be part of the explanation as to why there are many legislative / censorship issues related to it. 8. communication is not a surface phenomenon. it is radical in the literal sense of the word. and like a root, it is intentional yet ambiguous in its effects. 9. the fact of language, its existence, implies the existence of others (or at least another). and so, the most private thought is always a possible communicative act.

community: n; 1. its is constituted by way of negation. (see Poverty in Cipher and Poverty). sometimes this negation can be understood, or practiced, as resistance. 2. the touted immediacy of the information age, the we are all here, now, together realizes something which the technophiles would rather not admit to — the abstraction of humanity, the notion of a collectivity. this notion becomes self-conscious, reveals itself where least expected — in the presence and under the authority of machines. as this experience (of the reality of a collectivity) has always been concealed this unexpected enlightenment must evoke a peculiar dread.

companion: n; i have never wanted to congregate or befriend literary types. i have instead only wished to associate with what Bernhard refers to as their victims.

competition: n; play is the dance of freedom. when this dance becomes limited, when some of its steps become prohibited it becomes competition. competition is the formalized movement of authority.

complaint: n; every complaint is the world turning towards you and begging you to enter it, completely.

completion: n; “all our feelings and thoughts on this earth were only the beginnings of feelings and thoughts that will be completed elsewhere” – Joseph Joubert. perhaps then, those who do not feel, or do not think, are condemned to return to future existences until they at last do feel, do think. it is as though we are here to achieve only these tasks, as though our talent lay in providing the beginnings of feelings, of thoughts, giving birth to them, so they can be taken by those in some other place and time who know only how to complete such things.

complexity: n; 1. a human life and its particular language(s) share the same complexities. 2. in the paradigm of message (M) and code (C) the complexity of a message equals the information required to restore the message (from the code). this de-coding also happens to be equivalent to coding the message. M is therefore always greater in complexity than C since C is a limitation, a reduction of M. in this paradigm the concept of randomness emerges. randomness is analogous to the concept of infinity which emerges as a limit, as an implicit extreme or ideal case of the paradigm. according to the above scheme, something would be called random if there was nothing to restore it, if no amount of information could restore it. in other words, something random is so complex that nothing else more complex could exist which could represent the message for which it is a code. the coding/de-coding function belongs to the message. the code is that which is impoverished with respect to this ability. according to such a scheme, it would not be unlikely that some messages might be more fruitful than others, that some messages might engender more codes. living, the event of living when considered from this perspective, appears to be at times a restoration of human limitation back to its parent-message. at others times it appears as a codification, a reduction of something ungraspable into something human.

compromise: n; each day we re-negotiate with death. each day the contract is the same. each day we sign it.

concept: n; in conceptualizing our experience we do not just pick out what is important, we may also pick out what we can, or what we are willing to risk (if the experience is threatening in some way). we may even ignore what is important so that the experience fits a/our concept, so that the experience is not disruptive, so that we are not changed.

concern: n; i have to concentrate on the work. i must not take my eyes off of the work until it is complete. if i turn my attention to anything that concerns the work but is extraneous to its completion (e.g. the public, the future, a career, etc.) then once i return to the work i find that it has run off and left an empty skin behind. if i was distracted for only a moment i may be able to spot the work fleeing, i may be able to entice it back. more likely however, the work has left for good leaving the public, the future, a career, to content themselves with an abandoned skin.

concision: n; if a writer is a clock then concision is its mainspring.

condemnation: n; when i read the world's history, especially the history of civilized europe i am amazed at the time and effort that has gone into the condemnation of specific human thought (often written thought). i have come to wonder whether these condemnations are a product of civilization or if civilization somehow depends on such resistance.

Condorcet: n; “there is often a great difference between the rights that the law allows its citizens and the rights that they actually enjoy... These differences have three main causes: (1) inequality in wealth; (2) inequality in status between the man whose means of subsistence are hereditary and the man whose means are dependent on the length of his life, or, rather, on the part of his life in which he is capable of work; and, finally, (3) inequality in education”.

confession: n; 1. a tree has a blue soul... just like i do. 2. everyone can find a confessor who suits them; the problem lies in having things to confess which are worthy of such a person.

conflagration: n; i read a writer who expressed the desire to be able to "understand the language of a crackling fire". i understand that language. in fact a fire is quite single-minded; it is always saying the same thing— i want to burn you. i want to burn your house down. i want to consume everything. i want to cover the earth, only then will i be alive. a fire can say one more thing. when it is extinguished it whispers thank you.

conformity: n; everyone thinks they are a rebel. this is the seed of their conformity.

confrontation: n; the poet dreams that it will be encountered only in the poem. the poem is where the poet lives and dies. the poet also knows that long before someone finds it in the poem, they will encounter themselves.

confusion: n; 1. the confusion of familiar and normal and the way in which one suggests the other (a receding of both distinctions into their common root of to know) as exemplified in the assumption that what is familiar is normal, and that what is normal is what is familiar, is a vast field in which one could find a variety of every one of our problems growing wild. 2. the confusion between the cause of and the responsibility for is always asymmetric. it is always the responsibility for which is misunderstood as the cause of, while still being referred to as responsibility. the reason for this may be that in many minds, there is no stable understanding of the concept of responsibility and so to be responsible for something, ethically speaking, leads to bewilderment. an escape from this bewilderment is attempted by considering the case of familial responsibility as equivalent to the general concept of responsibility— parents are responsible for their children becomes what is prior is responsible for what comes after. the logical impossibility of an effect being the cause of its cause means that it would be impossible for those who have not directly caused something to feel a responsibility for it. a confusion of this kind is not just an intellectual dilemma. it also provides ground for the persistence of a world where irresponsibility can exist, untroubled, and without any challenge from a conception which is unrecognizable, mute…

conscience: n; 1. when asked, when confronted with, the question “why?”, “i had no choice” or, “we had no choice” is the singular comprehensible sound which echoes from the space once occupied by conscience. 2. conscience may simply be the proper functioning of thinking when conditions are against thought, or, are in favour of all that is inimical to the proper functioning of thought.

consciousness: n; 1. all consciousness is an edge. 2. sometimes consciousness is incorprated into a work of art, other times it is incarcerated there. 3. the relationship of the subject to everything else (one’s situation) is an admission of a separation, not of distance but of kind— i am not that.

consent: v; you cannot consent to an authority that you do not recognize— you can only serve it or resist it.

consequence: n; the production of books, of texts, is only a consequence of writing; it is not the goal— when it is the goal writing has ceased. writing is the exploration the limit’s of the mind’s limits, of living’s edge. writing is a prolongation of one’s encounter, in these nether regions, with one’s dumbfoundedness, incapacities, and failures with respect to the possibility of proceeding any further. writing is end-riddled or it is not at all.

conservatism: n; convenience and nothing else.

consolation: n; it is impossible for a truly unrecognized writer to be recognized or for a sincerely misunderstood writer to be understood by the pseudo-writers that comprise the literary world. this is because the inability to recognize and to understand such an art is exactly the deficiency which ensures that all those who are not artists will never be artists (and through this deficiency the literary world is stabilized).

conspiracy: n; the name of the first off-ramp institutional power builds in order to divert critical thinking from reaching the heart of its city.

constant: n; the object of the dream of my life has always been reality. the population of such dreamers is perilously small. moreover, such a dream as mine, when experienced from outside, from the crowd, is unrecognizable— what they experience is clumsily referred to as a death-wish.

constraint: n; 1. a synonym for organization. 2. all forms of expression have formal constraints. the challenge in so-called free expression is to understand that the critical constraints are self-imposed and then to recognize what these constraints are.

consumption: n; 1. if (as Aristotle argues) slaves were agents of consumption, would consumers then be agents of enslavement? 2. humans have been known to dig themselves a deep pit in which they spend the rest of their lives attempting to eat their shovel.

contact: n; art is how the world touches itself: a caress, masturbation, scratch, incision, immolation.

contempt: n; contempt is the source of all eloquence.

context: n; 1. it is impossible to read any work in its so called original context. if it were possible then such a reading would be in effect the writing of the work. in such a reading, the reader will have to become the author, i.e., must create or write the work that is being read. 2. the indeterminacy of a signifier points to/invokes other signifiers. these other signifiers are also indeterminate. when all the signifiers are considered together (as a context) they give the appearance of a self-evident, consistent system. but this system is a phantasm. it can be dismissed imaginatively and others can be evoked imaginatively.

contiguity disorder: n; from Jakobson, the tendency against clear grammatical articulation, towards the dominant single-word, expressive in its wealth of unrestricted overtones.

contingent: adj; the child-maker says that the decision to have a child is not one to be taken lightly, that it may be the most important decision in one's life. for this sentiment to be true or even possible requires that it also be applicable to the decision not to have a child. the child-maker warns that those who do not have children will regret not having them. the truth or possibility of this regret emerging demands that those who have children may or will regret having those children. the child-maker answers to such a possibility (of regretting its child/children) by stating that once one has children one will never regret making the decision to have children. for this statement to be valid the following statement must also be valid: once one has not had children one will never regret making the decision not to have children. in this way child-making is contingent upon/contagious with child-lessness. the reverse is also true.

continuity: n; 1. there is level of observation which allows categorization to be possible. this is the realm of this and that, the realm of differences. however, as one increases in magnification, as one looks closer and closer, one enters the realm of continuity. here categorization is impossible, meaningless. in this realm the thingness of a thing begins to leak out of it so that it becomes less like itself and more like other things. an example would be the categories of life and death. 2. the restraints of our perceptual systems are frustrated, challenged, and forced to become creative by ambiguity. 3. i wake to continue my dream of being a poet / artist.

continuum: n; a continuum is always a representation of (a) synthesis.

contract: n; where there are no facilities or felicitous social structures which might support and defend the demand of creative existence no creative work of any meaningfulness will be produced; as well, the creative individuals with which every population is blessed will find their talents have been wasted, the unavoidable result of which will be personal and social disintegration. in the contract between the artist (one who is dedicated to the pursuit of a creative life) and its state (its social context) the committed artist never fails to uphold its half of the agreement.

contradiction: n; 1. the statement nothing can be stated absolutely appears to be a contradiction but it is not if one understands that the statement is actually a meta-statement. such a meta-statement is concerned with the world of statements; such a meta-statement depends on the existence of statements and is only possible when the existence of statements has been realized. a non-linguistic example of this would be when a person who is looking at a painting is asked what they see in the painting. they answer nothing. the viewer (as long as it is not blind) is definitely seeing something; however, the question is concerned not with what is seen, but with what is meta-seen, that is, with what is seen in what is seen. 2. life finds its potency in contradiction, in the competition for dominance between antagonistic ideologies and understandings (at both the inter- and intra-personal levels). this competition for dominance is living's compulsion for closure. and closure is, paradoxically, a death, in the sense that it dissipates the potency of living. where there is closure (an ideal, and so one must say, where closure is believed to have been achieved) living has stopped and reification, or the monumental, has taken over its place, has come to re-present it. 3. death (real and metaphorical) is the result of unhealable contradictions which have reached a point of critical / maximal disagreement. death is the transcendence of the entire argument; it is the acknowledgment of the impossibility of reconciliation.

contribution: n; Jabès says that every century leaves us its blank page. i want to contribute to this.

control: n; the urge for complete measurability (in science) is a yearning for total control, for totalitarian ends.

conversation: n; 1. in a poem, what appears as finished or polished is the result of repeated visits to the same place, of living for a time with the same horizon. the same cannot be said of conversation. there is no going back in conversation, there is only moving onward to a new horizon where what is in one's possession is always at risk of being lost. then again, there is always the possibility of coming into possession of something which one could not have had before. 2. every conversation is a question(ing); those conversations that seem assured are only those in which the question(ing) is difficult to discern. 3. it is impossible to be happy when death is speaking to you. this is because happiness is a conversation, sometimes an argument, with death. unfortunately, once death begins speaking, it can rarely be interrupted.

conviction: n; 1. a form of protection. 2. a conviction is not an idea.

copula: n; 1. the rift is healed by the living of the utterance i am that — that being what has been experienced as out of reach. 2. every instance of copulated language, of copulated thought, may be generative, pleasurable, violent, demeaning… but it can never be solitary.

Corbin: n; either the human community must offer a structure in which esoterism is an organic component; or else it must suffer all the consequences implied by a rejection of esoterism.

correlation: n; when correlation is confused with causality we get the following: 95% of household cats spend 80% of their lives near a telephone; therefore, most household cats are waiting for an important phone call.

correspondence: n; the self-evident arrives special delivery from mania.

corruption: n; 1. i can't help if i drag my corruption behind me. that is where a tail belongs. 2. in a corrupt age the opinion of the people is meaningless. it is drool which is often claimed to be holy water.

costume: n; any narrative/symbolic universe can be assumed or put on, like a costume. and like a costume it may not fit, it may hinder certain movements while promoting others; it may even prove to be completely debilitating, offering nothing but a spectacle for others. nevertheless, climbing into any costume always provides you with the ability to do one thing — identify with the narrative / symbolic universe of which the costume is a part.

cottage: n; 1. a french term for incest. (more precisely, it implies the promise of incest.) 2. where laziness and privilege raise their ease. 3. privilege demands its landscape of imaginary reconciliations. this landscape is of course maintained by the underclass and their silence, their muzzled submission is exactly the serenity of the lake country.

counterfeit: n; beware the barkers of originality.

courage: n; whenever the ice gets thin, conversation hurries back to safety. poems, anxious for poetry, remain there patiently and may even advance further. the poet may even start to jump up and down screaming we have lost our puck!

court: n; 1. the court/justice system is the way that power represses experience and sanctions on certain allowable testimonies. testimony is always required where reality is troubled, where there are competing understandings (testimony is then a formalized hermeneutic act). the court identifies areas of reality which are in crisis. this identification of crises in need of testimony coincidentally serves to repress other areas of reality which are in crisis, areas which always (either directly or indirectly) question the authority and legitimacy of whatever powers support the court. 2. the embodiment/theatre of domination. a theatre of hermeneutics where the understanding(s) of the dominant social power is imposed. a guilty verdict represents a successful (and complete) imposition, a verdict of non-guilty represents an unsuccessful (yet still partial) imposition. 3. the court presents itself as the locus where ambiguous experience is resolved. domination becomes evident and active when a non-ambiguous event (e.g. rape) appears in court and so, simply by being present is presumed to represent an ambiguous experience (which is then re-named consensual sex). therefore, in order for dominators to impose their will without the dominated being aware we can expect that any event which produces an experience which leads to the realization i am being dominated, i am being forced to do things against my will must appear in court in order for this (valid / true) experience to be transformed into an experience which validates the role of the dominators (and which then lays the responsibility and blame for the event on the dominated).

courtesy: n; i have this sense, maybe it is just a fantasy, that death is courteous.

coward: n; the coward sees naiveté in another's strength.

crack: v; there is a cracking in every action and every word. it is as though the actions and words are a body which has become too small. it cracks and as it does all one can do is grab onto something (this grabbing hold will be a part of the new body). it is important to remember that when one has grabbed hold of something one has also been taken hold of. one should always be thankful for this and towards whatever you take hold of because it has saved (and goes on saving) you.

craft: n; how are poems written? what is the process? the writing of a poem is nothing more than the removing of one's gloves.

crater: n; the problematic of i and thou is so expansive that even a lifetime of work will only traverse a fraction of its crater.

creation: n; 1. if it is true that man cannot remember without an image, then creation, in the literary sense at least, is an expression of memory or more specifically an expression of memory using remembered or known forms (images). the spontaneous expression of images not only in dreams but in waking consciousness, is then either an attempt to attach experience to an image or an act of recalling some past knowledge by way of its representative image. 2. if one wishes to create one has a choice (perhaps), there are two paths, one more frequently travelled and less dangerous than the other. the most accessible of these two paths is the small dream, the other path is the big dream. to be a creator one must assume the kingdom of one of these paths. in the small dream for example one might dream that you are in your car and you can't get it started. or perhaps you are in your car driving through your city and you cannot find your place of employment. i prefer the other path, the big dream. in the big dream one is the entire city, one is a web of countless small dreams and small dreamers. they are all driving around within me, lost in their own concerns. 3. in order to create, or more precisely innovate, one must first evoke chaos. 4. purity is infertile. - G.Kunnert. 5. a new vocabulary (linguistic, visual, etc.) and its reason for being are co-incidentally constituted, that is, each, paradoxically constitutes the other (see paradox). 6. the goal is always to create those things which do not fit into the stories, the narrative appeasements, people are used to telling. 7. creativity is only possible when one subjects oneself to a tyranny of arbitrary laws (Nietzsche). 8. when i create i agree to carry this burden of beauty… further.

creativity: n; 1. those who build on the flood plain often have to re-build. but that is a cost readily paid for fertility. 2. creativity always mocks one's training.

crime: n; the ritual of judgement and punishment is a self-validating process for those judging and punishing. with each judgement, with each punishment, the validity of the system which allows for such judgements and punishments is further reinforced to the point of becoming a tautology.

crisis: n; 1. crisis follows one’s inability to perform one’s sufficient knowledge— that which i know but do not want to know, or, that which i know and do not know that i know. 2. every emotional crisis is an intellectual crisis and every intellectual crisis is an emotional crisis.

critical: adj; 1. to be critical is to be mindful of crisis. 2. most people who are intellectuals, who claim thinking as their profession rarely think critically; most of the time they think conveniently.

critical theory: n; 1. critical theory is attractive, even irresistable to those who can sense the nature of poetry, of its creative, living, reality but who are unable to gather the courage to approach it. 2. there is no theory in what is called critical theory, no hypothesis, experiment, necessary invalidation of hypotheses… there is only fiction, which, for some reason, those who practice critical theory are interested in concealing with the word theory. perhaps they feel it gives their efforts some ultimate authority. for their concerns this is neither necessary or helpful.

cross: n; Ficino says “the force of heaven is greatest when the celestial rays come down perpendicularly and at right angles, that is to say, in the form of a cross joining the four cardinal points”. he is speaking of the cross as a talisman but what he is describing sounds very similar to the principle involved in the construction of a gravity wave detector.

crow: n; 1. sometimes the abyss collapses beneath its own weight. some of these fragments become dispersed. 2. crows consider my flying dreams as colonial acts— hence their hostility towards me.

crown: n; the ideal (perfectly fitting) represented as a phallic gate (virginal opening) where the human striving to attain this reward is a (phallic) penetrative/aggressive act.

crucible: n; inculcating complete freedom of thought is dangerous. it is like pouring molten iron into an open hand. what is required, in those being instructed, is that they also learn how to transform their waiting hand into a competent crucible.

crucifixion: n; inscribed on the cross was the following: you have never tasted the tip of a metaphor's nail and you never will.

cruelty: n; cruelty requires participants.

crutch: n; 1. the reason why economic liberalism depends on political absolutism (and in fact travels nowhere without it) is because there is no problem in letting the market take its course as long as that course is / has been limited and directed by institutional (stable) powers. 2. novels are important and helpful for children, for those learning how to read and how to comprehend written language. it owes its success to the simple and obvious artificial constructions (plot, dialogue, characterization) which enable it to uncover the mechanism of language. for those who are older ad who know how to read, for those who have comprehended the living that is implicit in all written language novels are a hindrance. this is because the very supports which were once a benefit now make it impossible to progress across the terrain which characterizes the maturing life.

cry: v; a child is crying uncontrollably. its mother, consoling it, whispers into its ear again and again don’t cry, everything is alright. if the child were experienced enough, if the child were intelligent enough, it would understand this attempted pacification to be a delusion. and this would only cause it to cry with greater fury. (perhaps when a baby cries in such a way it understands exactly this). some have suggested that a baby cries because crying is the only form of verbalization available to it. however, it could be that a baby cries uncontrollably in order to speak the only thing that is necessary, to produce the only possible verbalization which might adequately address the knowledge that they have woken into existence and are surrounded by others, none of which will ever be able to give them a explanation for why they were summoned into being.

Cuba: n; cuba, as an idea, is evidence that power, no matter how imperious and apparently intractable, is always deathly afraid of an idea.

culmination: n; as Greece had its Iliad, as the Middle Ages had its Divine Comedy, so we have our DSM-IV.

culture: n; 1. in order for a culture/society (either ancient or present day) to be studied it must be assumed that that culture (in all its studied aspects) operates rationally. a ground or basis must be able to be given for a culture or the particular aspect of that culture being studied. to give a basis and accept it as valid is to assume there is a basis. even to refute a particular basis but to propose another or to search for others is to assume that there is a basis to be found (for example, an ancient structure is excavated. it looks like a building of some sort. it is assumed that the building has a purpose or function, that it wasn't simply built as a joke). an irrational culture, or a non-rational/non-irrational culture must therefore remain as an invisible force in history, unstudiable and therefore unchronicled. 2. if there was an olympics for culture (and why shouldn't there be, why shouldn't this be a priority, a matter of pride?) the united states would be forced to compete in the 'special olympics' for the culturally challenged. 3. a clone is methodically isolated and placed in a vessel which contains broth / minimal nutrients. the mixture is incubated and the clone grows, propagates itself. the usual purpose of such a culture is to lyse / split open the resultant growth and empty it of its inner content / value. 4. most of the time we need to be saved from our culture.

cure: n; there is nothing wrong with blood-letting, it is exactly what is needed by those who happen to have too much blood.

currency: n; currency, that unit of exchange which in its name expresses contemporaneity, the now, has been replaced by dilatory, which is the not yet and maybe, the not ever.

cycle: n; there is a line called presence. in order for this line to become a circle, in order for presence to become cyclical, it must be turned back upon itself. the point where this line is turned is a betrayal of presence. the result of this turning, of this betrayal, is a reversal of the line. the line in this direction is now called absence. all that is now required for the cycle to be completed is for the apocalyptic head of absence to become united with the generative tail of presence. this union or nativity is pivotal in the same manner as betrayal in structure of the cycle.

cynicism: n; an ethical response to the excesses of materialism.