Haacke: n; the term culture camouflages the social and political consequences resulting from the industrial distribution of consciousness.

habit: n; 1. a holding, possessing, having. a habit is a wealth (related to generous [of noble birth] ) and is therefore something which is or has been given (the habit as uniform/clothing or appearance is a specific case). the language faculty is a habit in this sense of being given. the relationship between the language faculty and language can be represented by three forms of habit: exhibition (holding out), inhibition (holding in), and prohibition (holding back). exhibition and inhibition are the natural expressive modes of the language faculty; the effect of this expression is to obscure or veil language. prohibition, on the other hand, is the holding back of the language faculty; it is the non-functioning or retreat of the language faculty. in retreating what is unveiled, what is expressed, is solely language. 2. the edges of our experiences, the walls of our prisons, are circles, cycles endlessly repeated. new experiences, new thought is a path whose end is not its beginning. but new experience, new thought, eventually turns back on itself, reflects, and so becomes a new circle, a new cycle, a new extension of the walls of one's prison. the habits we assume define our prisons. to be alive, we must be imprisoned. however, our prisons do not have to be as unbearably small, as inhuman as we at times allow them to be. 3. the understanding that life should be held onto just for the sake of not dying, that eighty years are better than fifty years regardless of whether they are eighty good years indicates that the concept of life has lost its intoxication, its passion— qualities which have been replaced by desperation and habit. what has been forgotten is the basic difference between existing and living. 4. when someone is comfortable with incoherency they are uncomfortable with coherency. 5. at the level of a species childbirth is a habit. an individual is just a conditioned component of this process.

haggle: v; life always offers something. it is important not to accept this first offer. it is important to ask for something else, something it does not want to give you. and when it refuses then just walk away. life will call you back. it needs your business.

halloween: n; if people dressed up as the person / thing they honestly admit to have been for the previous year, that is, if they embodied physically, cosmetically, the reality that was psychologically supporting their life, that would be truly frightening. surely the holiday would be canceled because no one would be able to bear the presence of themselves or others.

hand for the drowned: n; in one's ambiguous landscape the monuments / landmarks are those loci where ambiguity is epitomized, where the ambiguous presents itself in the extreme. such examples of ambiguity are experienced paradoxically as representations, as meaningful.

hands: n; poems must be handwritten, must be composed with the hands. this is because a poem is something which escapes your grasp or is let go and falls from you. the poem is the path of what has escaped, the descent of what has been let go. a computer or a typewriter cannot do this. they are handless and so what escapes the hands or what the hands can let go of is not the concern of the typewriter or the computer.

happiness: n; 1. one can never attain happiness because happiness is not a state. happiness is a process, it is an act, or rather, a condition of living and cannot be apprehended. it is like asking the trout if it has ever attained the river. 2. some claim that happiness has no legs. but, i saw happiness standing on its two legs, its wings at its side, and for that moment the world was perfect. 3. the master culture is continually stuffing stitching injecting siliconizing prosthetizing etc. this empty concept. it is best to reject the entire construct. it is best not to strive for anything, but just to strive. 4. happiness is exactly what life refuses to relinquish but which at times can be teased, coaxed, divined out of it (sometimes it can even be stolen). i have no problem with this state of affairs. happiness is a rare commodity. 5. the idea of happiness is not the same as happiness, thankfully.

happy: adj; 1. one of my least favorite words. one of the seven great linguistic plagues. 2. you can buy happiness. it costs one dollar more than all the money you will ever have.

harvest: v; just because i write something, just because i pull something ripe from the tree, doesn’t mean that i planted the tree.

hatred: n ; frustration is born out of incomplete knowledge whereas hatred arises from complete ignorance.

haunt: n; when asked of our living we can often say no more than we have been haunted, that our halls and rooms have been occupied by presences that others cannot or will not see.

heal: v; the doctor who tries to heal only the body will find they have difficulty healing anybody. there are aspects of a human life which bleed in mysterious ways, aspects which break, or bruise, or metastasize, or wither and blacken and fall off, unseen.

health: n; full participation in the universe (being) as opposed to an adequate / non-disruptive participation in a contemporary matter. health is then being open to infection rather than being quarantined.

hearing: n; in order for me to hear something for what it is i must first see it. i can hear something scraping along my window but when i look and see the entire tree i can hear not only the branch scraping along my window but (possibly) the creaking of all the branches and (possibly) the rustling of every leaf.

hearsay: n; there is no key to why i am or what i am, nothing that solves the riddle. i am… and then i will not be— that is all that can be said, everything else is hearsay (something which is very close to heresy).

heart: n; 1. when the heart speaks you must be perfectly quiet and still to hear it. this is because the language of the heart is composed of hesitancy, patience, and silence. 2. the heart is a plastic sword given to a child to prepare it for a battle that will never come to pass. 3. the beating heart is someone walking in the dark, tirelessly, and with a limp.

heaven: n; 1. the information highway is a medieval road to heaven where heaven is blasted towards the individual whether the individual wants it or not. the sheer violence and immensity of this encounter obliterates the individual. what is deemed important and of value in such a phenomenon is not the individual or the individual's response to this heaven. what is valued is the heaven (at the expense of the individual). 2. in the hell of one's own making one always finds the heaven that cannot exist in the hell of another's making. 3. heaven has been reduced to the future, or retirement. financial managers are clergy who benefit from our belief that our lives must be led into the future(s) / fiction(s) that they are responsible for creating. as Meslier says the future is very important for those whose task it is to lead us there. 4. a socialist ideal. 5. those with their eyes fixed on heaven are usually standing on or trampling over those who are concerned with earthly existence.

Heidegger: n; 1. “the more venturesome daring manufactures nothing. It receives and gives what it has received. It accomplishes but it does not produce.” 2. “language is the house of being.” 3. much has been said of heidegger's regard for poets and for poetry. however, his failure to include Paul Celan in his philosophical dialogue hints at the weakness, the failure, and the sinister nature of Heidegger the man. Heidegger saw poets (and the act of poem-making) as manifestations of his dasein. of the poets that he often turned to (Holderlin, George, Trakl) they paled in comparison to celan. celan is in many ways a paradigm of Heidegger's thinking expressed (as is the only way possible) in the realm of poetry. to make the following discussion simpler, just assume that Heidegger had a thesis (his philosophy of dasein). the field of concern of this thesis is universal however its applicability, that is, the region from which evidence will be accepted (either supporting or refuting the thesis) is a tradition spanning from the greeks through into germanic/europeans. Paul Celan came from the jewish tradition, a tradition ignored, exiled by Heidegger's thesis. yet the conclusions Heidegger wishes to draw are universal and so in an unspoken way must include the tradition of Paul Celan. in other words: you will be affected by what i think but you can do nothing to affect what i think; i have a voice, you do not. what makes this entire thing interesting is the fact that Paul Celan, were he considered, would support Heidegger's thesis. but by considering Celan, by admitting someone out of the tradition defined by Heidegger (and implied in his thesis) his thesis would at the same time be paradoxically refuted, undermined. what this reveals is that there is a thought, a philosophy which functions and which Celan can be evidence for in Heidegger. what it also reveals is that there was something paradoxical, something appended to this thought, this philosophy (either deliberately, cruelly, or in fear) which denies the existence, the voice of Celan and of all those others who are outside of Heidegger's golden circle of tradition.

hell: n; 1. hell is the heaven that proclaims itself as a place where happiness is guaranteed, where all things are harmonious. of course one cannot leave— in such a heaven an act of refusal would be discordant and therefore is not even possible (by definition). 2. there is nothing of any value in hell. nothing can be learned there, nothing can be taken away from it. surviving hell and then leaving it— this is the only place where things of value might be found. 3. in hell it is always possible to find a pencil. 4. if you live long enough you will come to understand that hell has seasons. inhuman seasons from which one tries to escape. fortunately, or so it seems, hell offers many places for shelter from the elements. but in these shelters there are infinite passages and trap doors and rooms that seem to collapse around you. and it is always in such a room that one ends up, exhausted, falling into a chair that seems to be waiting there just for you. and then the devil appears on your lap and offers to dance for you, whether you desire it or not. and the room begins to tighten around you. and the devil begins to dance. there is no escape. this is your escape. and the devil dances, as close to you as is possible, forever. 5. after an appropriate eternity the gates open and a child is delivered into hell. and from this moment onward the child will spend each breath of its life-sentence attempting to reach, what seems to it to be the least of torments, the outermost circles of pleasure and idiocy.

help: v; there is something fraudulent and degrading about the help, the therapy, that is offered to those who are at the mercy of the helpers (prisoners, addicts, etc.) when this help is offered in conjunction with christian / religious teaching. there is no reason why people cannot just be helped— without the christian appendage. and so, the question is… why the appendage? i assume the answer is that the introduction of an authority that can be internalized is an efficient way to crush and disable entire populations that have nothing left to lose. nothing that is except for their dignity and resilience. this appendage effectively says you are nothing. you are weak. you are in this state because of your inherent weakness. you can only be helped by god’s grace, that is, by submitting to an authority that you must never question. such help is no help to anyone.

heresy: n; “it is not words that make the heretic, but their defence”. -William of Conches.

hermeneutic circle: n; 1. church, element, ice. 2. knowledge is not just additive. there are conditions when a certain configuration of specific knowledge undergoes a qualitative transformation— the constant addition of factual knowledge and experience within the constraints of some hermeneutic framework eventually alters that framework (enlarging the framework, linking it to another framework, fitting it inside another framework, allowing other frameworks to exist inside of it, destroying completely the framework and searching for a new one, are examples of possible transformations).

hermeneutics: n; 1. for any text based culture, for any culture which claims a sacred book (or legal document) as an ultimate authority, or for any traditions which have sprouted from this root, hermeneutics and semantics is a (the?) priority. for such cultures and traditions, interpretation is the gate through which the world is entered, and through which the world visits. for cultures which do not claim such sacred books, which claim other authorities, there exist alternate gates through which the world is entered and through which the world visits. 2. human-being is meteorological and geologic: the hermeneutic circle is lived as a spiral, a tornado. 3 .the hermeneutics of reading (a poetic experience) is an exemplification of the hermeneutics of experience.

hero: n; every hero invokes the anti-hero and vice-versa. any expression (representation of a character for example) can be received sympathetically in which case one identifies with the representation of the hero; on the other hand, one can react antagonistically in which case one identifies with the hero who is the shadow of the represented anti-hero. for instance, if one sees in Romeo and Juliet the positive affirmation of love and the hostility of the world towards such a self-sufficient thing as love, one could also write a book , a shadow-book, where everything is reversed. one would then react with hostility towards what is represented. this hostility towards the shadow of Romeo and Juliet would then be an affirmation of the original Romeo and Juliet.

heroin: n; a fortunate or unfortunate homophone depending on one’s position.

hidden: adj; sometimes it is enough to simply pick up a word and shake it or strike it for something to come loose. however, often one must completely destroy the word in order to extract what it has been hiding.

hierarchy: n; 1. Dionysius arranged angels and demons in an elaborate hierarchy. his was an obsession with classification, an anxiety which mirrored and was shared by his time, an anxiety from which the structure of reality gained support, justification. Dionysius tumbled through history and arrived here with us in the form of Victor Mckusick whose cataloguing of inherited disorders is very definitely a hierarchy of demons. The anxiety which drives his obsession is that same anxiety which fueled Dionysius. Dionysius perhaps believed that he could escape the anxiety by progressing along in history, by progressing into another realm of accepted reality. He was wrong. The anxiety remains. The anxiety will leave us these hierarchies, these categories within categories, these effects, emanations. They are the cement from which our edifice has been built. And what is this edifice? Sometimes it appears as a cathedral, a laboratory, sometimes a prison. Other times, it appears to have already crumbled. 2. what a life means does not matter when compared to the question what does that life serve?

history: n; 1. history is an apparition. as we are tormented by it, we mistake its essence, which is sadness and suffering, for substance. 2. a gathering which at times converses, at times argues and brawls, at times bursts into song. 3. the optimist believes we take from history what we need, the pessimist knows that we build this history with all that will allow us to exist unchanged, with all that will not destroy us. 4. the burden of history includes contingency, injustice, persistence, survival... as a canadian in paris i felt i was walking very upright. and all the while i desired to know some of history's weight, to be bent and permanently deformed by it. 5. questioning leads to history. 6.

history depends on a literal hermeneutic. it is a linear movement informed (impoverished) by its denial of transcendence. meta-history is the unveiled by a metaphoric hermeneutic. both hermeneutics are concerned with truth(s). the literal truth, in collusion with fact (-seeking and -validation), is a symptom of the metaphoric truth. history is implied in meta-history; meta-history emerges (appears) through history. 7. realm of succession, justification, and authority. 8. there are no lessons from history; history does not teach, it commands. 9. “a collection of moral experiments made on mankind” - d'Alembert.

hollywood: n; 1. “in the absolutist state, the producers of mimetic worlds are overseers of symbolic power; their essential concern is to produce the portrait of the king.” - Gunther Gebauer / Christoph Wulf ; Mimesis. 2. when all other forms of takeover have failed or have proven to be too costly, when something or someone resists appropriation ... just film it — the subject is then immediately emptied of consequence. 3. shooting a film must be like shooting a turkey because after consuming one you have an overwhelming urge to sleep. 4. a message from the studio head: “you are under arrest. thank you for paying for it. thank you for not complaining. thank you for supporting your own incarceration. you see, prisons are expensive to build and it is far better for us if you can build your own”. 5. in the phenomenon known as the public consumption of moving images the audience is being force-fed in a dark room as though they are a babies which have been wailing, disturbing the sleep of the masters of the house. one may argue, deny the reality of this interaction by insisting that in fact, the audience is very silent and therefore not disturbing anything. however, it must be understood that boredom is extremely loud. 6. those who make art do not have test screenings. 7. “So the exhausted aristocracy laughs at its own ideal. Having dressed and painted their passionate dream of a beautiful life with all their powers of imagination and artfulness and wealth and molded it into a plastic form, they then pondered and realized that life was really not so beautiful— and then laughed.” - J. Huizinga from Autumn of the Middle Ages. 8. a limited male fantasy. 9. preparations for a blind obedience to force. 10. in a film, wherever a gun a appears marks a moment, a space, where art or where something of substance could have been if anyone associated with the film had thcourage to encounter it. in a film a weapon usually functions as a symbol of weakness and insufficiency. 11. “it is a certain feebleness of character that makes us prefer comedies to tragedies” – Helvétius. 12. hollywood is a technicolour curtain which effectively isolates an individual from reality, ensuring that they remain in the gruesome quiet of an imaginary world. (H. Arendt). 13. there is no way to redeem those who are willing to stand in line for the chance to pay for their own torture. 14. a machine designed to istantaneously transport a person as far from the avant-garde as possible.

home: n; 1. anywhere you chain your dog; anywhere you kill a wasp. 2. i have always been trying to escape from some social/economic pressure as though there was some ideal home of art and creativity. however, the home of art is everywhere and the very pressures which i am trying to escape is the voice of my specific time and being speaking to me. by trying to escape i have been trying to escape a dialogue with my very place in the world. 3. my permanent adress is an irrational number.

homeless: adj; a heart-breaking word that should not be used casually.

homo sapien: n; latin for clumsy animal.

honesty: n; i have left you because i loved the sound of a letter opening more than i ever loved you. because i dreamed you were an old boat, i left you. because of that, and because no one ever painted you.

honour: honour, when confused with reward, is evidence that the traditions(s) and human efforts which comprise the soil from which honour sprouts have been ignored. implicit in this is the failure to identify the value of such growth. and so, such unseeing and unknowing ones will be impoverished in some, perhaps critical, way

hope: v; 1. any orthodoxy is saturated with seeds of dissent; this will never change, the two travel everywhere together. however, sometimes orthodoxy takes a lover. when this lover is repression the seeds of dissent that it bears will remain unsown. in other words, the question is not simply one of dissent, this is always possible and is always the easiest of steps. what is more difficult, what requires greater courage, is to eliminate the brutality and repression which render any possibilities of dissent impotent. 2. Bachelard said “it is better to live in a state of impermanence than in a state of finality”. this is no doubt because once we have left purgatory, we have also taken leave of hope. 2. for those who have given up on their contemporaries and who have retreated to the belief that children are the key to the future hold a meaningless, nefarious and paradoxical sentiment. the future these children are to be masters of is one which can only be a failed and miserable one since its structure will be determined by those contemporaries who they have given up on as being hopeless and without a future. therefore, the hope they profess is a despair and the children they idealize they are in effect condemning. 3. “ hope is the normal form of delirium” – E.M. Cioran.

hospital: n; “sumptuous monuments which can contain but a very small portion of those whom they [governments] have rendered miserable”— Meslier.

house of misfortune: n; 1. this other is my soul, that intrusive yet unknowable aspect of myself, the tenant, she who lives in the house of misfortune, she is a manifestation of my desire, of my ultimately doomed quest for my soul.(see soul) 2. a home is to a house what soul is to the body.

human: adj; 1. humanity is a relationship to specific in-humanities (e.g. language, or being-as-language). 2. a historically limited being capable of understanding. there are two parts to this definition. the first is the attribute of historical limitation. implicit in this is the idea of a temporal dependency, an adaptation to, or a living-with, time. within this limitation there exists many worlds of possibilities. the experience of any such possibility is known as freedom. the second part of the definition is the attribute of the capability for understanding. implicit in the concept of understanding is a social interaction/arrangement (in other words, for there to be understanding, there must be a population of > 1, if it is = 1 it is only isolation and is not understanding). as well, this capability for understanding must be able to resist historical pressures, it must endure. an argument against this definition my be that someone who is in a coma and who is not expected to come out of a coma would be considered non-human by this definition. but this is not so. in such a case when all ability for understanding has been apparently lost there still remains those behind who stood under the same shelters, who shared similar understandings with the comatose individual. it is these remaining ones who guard together the last spark of that person's human-ness. this spark is their shared doubt, their common limit of knowledge as to whether there is anything, any thought, any shadow of shared ground, lingering in that mind. 3. temporality is the basis of our human condition. by temporality i mean that our being is composed of matter which can retain, register, a now and then a later, a this and then a no longer this. colonizing this gap between this now and this after is the i. as soon as one is unable to satisfy this condition, as soon as one is unable to exist as this gap between a past and a present, one is, with respect to at least that particular past and present, no longer human.

humility: n; the knowledge and expression of the knowledge that it is not that one possesses a particular talent but that a particular talent has possession of you. with this in mind the talent will work through you on its own. the most you can do yourself is to hinder this talent.

humour: n; 1. humour has become entertainment. the risk of humour has been lost. originally, i believe the function of humour was to bring something to the attention of others, something which was wrong something which indicated the need for a change (and perhaps suggested possible directions of change); humour in this way was informative and possessed a momentum which was transferable to others. but, this has been reversed. now humour serves as a distraction, what was once illuminated is now obscured by humour. now, humour has lost its momentum and now is able to transfer only apathy to others. now when confronted with a work containing a humourous element one simply has to laugh at it or not laugh at it (in other words, the work in question is only a joke which either succeeds as a joke or fails, the work is entertainment and nothing more). there is no humour in my work because i choose to avoid it, i don't want to give people the option of simply laughing something off, i don't wish to be dismissed in that way. what i write is intended as a confrontation and not a supplication. 2. if you laugh and are not simultaneously frightened, you are not really laughing. 3. humour which has become too overwhelming disguises itself in tragedy. 4. humour, in this society, is the bit and the bridle which keep you from turning around and seeing the rider that is driving you. 5. the fact that the funny-male (the man who uses humour every time there is an issue of emotional complexity in order to defuse it ) is one of the few allowable (and actively groomed) possibilities of male identity (along with the sporty-male, the fascist war-male, and the woman-lover/hater-male) should be enough to suggest complicity with patriarchal power structures. 6. humour has become an interruption of understanding, a refusal of adolescent proportions. 7. “there is cheerfulness only where there is victory”. Nietzsche

hyperbole: n; 1. contemplating the duration of the life of Brahma and all the calculations of each aeon produces a feeling of humility and vertigo. such an end is precisely what hyperbole is designed to achieve. 2. eternal damnation in the biblical sense is not to be taken literally. it is an example of hyperbole the meaning of which is that true damnation / tortured existence will finds its way into every crevice of thought and action in which time might hide.

hysteria: n; 1. an assumption, a movement outward, a path leading out to a specific object (implication). such a specific relationship between the assumption and the implication is called justification. this object (implication) which is unavoidably reached opens onto the very same path which led to it (the same assumption). such an assumption as this is therefore always leading to itself via justification. the entire process (or assumptive path) is a downward slope which means that the movement is always accelerating. in order to escape this assumptive path, in order to halt the acceleration or level one's path one must cease the outward movement, that is, halt the movement from assumption to implication. instead one must allow the object (or thing, or phenomenon) to present itself. then, one must follow whatever path (or ground) has been created (or found) and which allows a relationship to exist between you and the object (phenomenon).

hysteria is neutral. its context will determine its orientation (positive or negative). one could think of many negative examples of hysterics since this term is generally used in a denigrating manner. however a creative episode ,such as the making of a poem or a sculpture, or a dinner, could be considered examples of positive hysterical events (generative events, literally, events or disturbances of the womb). 2. society is hysterical in the sense that what it demands from me (its object) is to refuse it.