laboratory: n; the skeleton of eroticism.

labour: n; 1. a bridge, a recognition of distance and of absence. 2. the invisibility of labour is a necessary condition for any object to be desired as a consumable object (to an extreme degree information is an object in this sense). art is an exception to this; art desires to bring labour into the open, to force it to be witnessed with such urgency that the object in question is nothing except an expression of labour, a work of art. living as we are, immersed up to our eyes in objects it is a breath, a victory, every time an object is experienced as an expression of labour, as a work.

labyrinth: n; when pursuing a life of the mind one may as borges warned become lost in a labyrinth. however, one may already be in such a labyrinth and so perhaps one's pursuit may at the worst lead you deeper into this maze. then again, it may show you the door which might lead you from it.

Lacan: n; the moment desire becomes human is the moment in which a child is born into language.

lack: n; lack, as Lacan (and his commentators) stresses it could be considered a misreading of Condillac. Condillac stresses a difference between lack and deprivation. lack, in Condillac's mind, is analogous to a vague desire for something which one has never had or, never had known; for instance, a human before humans had developed speech. deprivation on the other hand is a desire for something which one has known but has had taken away; for instance, someone who can speak but has been bound and gagged. Lacan, as far as i understand it uses lack in the way that Condillac uses deprivation. the geography of desire which the lacanian subject traverses is always founded upon some original deprivation or loss. the ambiguous, undirected lack of Condillac is the unspoken, dark continent of Lacan.

Laclau: n; “the condition of possibility of something is also its condition of impossibility”.

lamentation: n; 1. story-telling is the oldest form of literature is narrative’s first act of deception, disavowal… its first story. as everyone knows the oldest form of literature is lamentation. 2. a lantern.

language: n; 1. there is language (an event which is in and all around us) and then there is the language faculty (the seat of language within us). the language faculty is the functioning of language within and amongst us, the grammar, syntactical rules, meaning, etc; this faculty relates/involves us with the world which appears/is experienced in the form of language (this is in the same way as the eye and our visual capacity is our involvement with the world in visible form). the language faculty is functional and has many uses: it can keep language from happening at all; it can control what language happens; it can make language happen where and when we want it to happen. perhaps one of these uses of the language faculty are desirable, perhaps they are not even useful except for means of delimiting the world and therefore delimiting what can be experienced of that world. for this reason it is important to keep in mind that there is a window within every word that is written or spoken, dreamed or thought, and it is through this window that one is able (if one desires) to see evidence of the event of boundless language, the happening of the world in its limitlessness, in its freedom. 2. we hang onto language for our lives, we grasp it as one who has, at a precarious height and position, lost their balance and fallen. 3. the seed of language is the concept of is (to be). from this (the realization of is-ness, or am-ness) all language arises. Is is a stone dropped into a still pond and language ripples out from this disturbance. 4. the language faculty is a very complex tool (or arrangement which will allow for certain possibilities) with which to measure an unmeasurable reality. its value lies in its diversity and its ability to evolve which allow for there to be many different measurements of reality, all of them potentially accurate. the written accomplishments of the language faculty is then an arrangement of related images which convey a particular measurement much in the same manner as a mathematical equation or proof or a musical score. 5. all my striving is for a language of freedom for the language faculty is the first link in the chain of our enslavement. it is critical to speak from within the house of one's language rather than from outside as a stranger. paradoxically, language is also the means of our escape. our freedom must then lie in the resolution of this paradox. 6. an understanding or participation in myth/tradition/ritual indicates an understanding of the language of myth. language of any kind precedes any mythical thinking/involvement. perhaps precedes is not the right word, the urge to language is prerequisite to any mythical participation in life. myth then can be the blossom to the tree of language. it can also be (and history is littered with examples) a malignancy in the body of language. 7. language is the forest we enter by chance; sometimes we are drawn into it. there we climb trees from which we are able to see where we live as well as the goings on of our homeland. we then return from the forest with the knowledge of what we have seen. this return is our expression. a measure of our knowledge, an indication of what we have seen or the heights we were able to climb is the form of our expression, its metaphorical/poetic nature. from this process it is obvious that by widening our exposure and experience with language we widen and experience more of our everyday world. 8. Ted Cohen describes a circuit which exists in a functioning language (faculty), the purpose of which is to create intimacy or bonds between the speaker and a portion of or its entire culture. this circuit is as follows:

a) a speaker issues a concealed invitation

b) hearer extends effort to accept the invitation

c) acknowledgment of community in the transaction

if a) and b) completed

This is then a model for a functioning language (faculty). When the idea of metaphorical uses of language are involved the number of participants in the above circuit is drastically reduced. For instance there are not many who will create new metaphorical expressions as in a). as well, there are few who would be willing to extend themselves to accept such an expression. The result being that when such a circuit does succeed a new and highly unlikely bond has been established within the culture/community. as far as I am concerned, the job of a poet is in drafting invitations. the poet can do nothing about step b) being completed. it is up to the hearer (the community/culture) to be able to i) recognize the invitation, or metaphor and then ii) to act on this knowledge and decipher it. these are the two steps required in successfully completing step b). if the culture has lost the ability to recognize metaphor or if it has lost the desire to partake in the above circuit then the unique bonds which might have been established within it will never be realized. i believe such unique bonds are really the only bonds that hold a culture together. as well, such bonds are amiable bonds whereas others are traps intended to destroy that which falls prey to them. both bonds are necessary for a functioning language and culture. 9. our language faculty is the fossil record of metaphorical expressions which have become understood and are then taken in a literal or pseudo-literal sense (i.e allegorical). it is only the presence of new expressions which indicates that a language is not fossilized, it is only the expressions of new expressions which allow for the possibility of new intimate contacts to be established within the culture and thus halt the culture's dissolution. 10. if language is thought of a dissipative structure, then along the edges of this structure, that is, bordering the region of maximum improbability, is poetry. poetry then, is that moment of infinite instability which in one direction assembles into language and in the opposite direction, dissociates into nothingness. poetry is the point of communication between nothingness and language. 11. it is the glove with which we hold the world. we must put on the glove ourselves and we must know what this glove is doing. if not, we may find ourselves holding the world by the throat. poetry is the act of removing this glove and attempting to touch the untouchable world. it could be that i have it all upside down, that language is not a glove with which we hold the world. maybe it is the glove that allows no-thingness to hold us in the world. 12. at times i feel the language faculty degenerates into pictographs, that is, the who and the when and the where are communicated but not the what (meaning). slogans, names, headlines, advertisements/logos, clichés, these are all pictographic and are examples of a degenerate language faculty. 13. language is the sister of experience. therefore, it is the aunt of all new experience and experience is the aunt of all newborn language. 14. there is always a way in; this way in is the language faculty which leads eventually to language. language leads to no-thing, to no-where, this is what we get into. one might say that for those who do not see this no-thing or this no-where it would appear as if language leads to itself. and so when a conclusion, a terminus, a meaning, is required one would look to language as this end. one would look for meaning in this way in and not (properly) in the no-thing and no-where. the meaning which one would then ascribe to the event, the way-in of language is only a mistaken guess which has taken an initial condition or point of departure for a final condition or homecoming. 15. to define language (or human-being) one must use the language faculty. to define the language faculty one must make use of what is provided by language (human-being). it is a circuit of two co-incident elements (the existence of one requires the existence of the other). such a structure implies that language (human-being) may be continually re-defined by using the language faculty (and vice versa). both dogma and repression rely on denying the existence of the above (immanent and self-evident) circuit and therefore, its implications for constant renewal. 16. the human condition (as it is often referred to) is literally a together-speaking. 17. every word has a collocation pattern (every word occurs more frequently with certain words); if one were to combine the collocation patterns for every word in one's language, one would have a collocation map. such a map would be always changing if the language was alive, if the language was breathing. such a map would be an image of the animal that is one's language. 18. the language faculty is a human endowment. all so-called languages are local varieties/expressions of this faculty (one could think of them as footprints). Language is Being as apprehended/encountered by the virtue of the existence and functioning of the language faculty. The relationship between the language faculty and Language is analogous to the specific modality of Being which is encountered visually due to the presence of the visual faculty. The nature of our linguistic encounter with Language is a humane one. to deny even the possibility of the above relationship between Language and the language faculty is to deny this humanity, this possibility of human being.

i do not find it surprising that thousands of languages (language faculties, that is) are suffering from extinction when thousands of humans, human possibilities, are also suffering from extinction. it is the same suffering, the same threat, the same oppression.

power by definition demands no deviation from its rule. no deviation means that no alternate possibilities have been realized. the most efficient way to ensure that alternate possibilities are not realized is to extinguish such possibilities. the denial of the above relationship between Language and the language faculty serves such extinguishing perfectly.

a common argument against the analogy between the language faculty and vision is that the world of language is far more complex than the visual world. it is deduced from this that such a language faculty, if one were to exist, must be far more complex that the visual faculty. in addition to this one might argue how such a complex faculty should evolve almost instantly (from its absence) in humans. to this argument i would answer by illustration. consider a pile of material: wood, glass, steel. the material is lying in a heap. all that is needed to turn this heap into a house is the realization of a simple organizational principle: the right angle. once the right angle is realized the materials can be assembled into a simple or complex structure. i will call this structure a house. the existence of a house allows for many the possibilities to be realized. i will call this entire limitless field of possibilities home. the organizing principle can be the simplest alteration, the simplest realization. the result of this may be a greater level of organization and complexity (house / language faculty) which then may become an organizing principle allowing for the realization of even greater complexity and organization (home / Language). a humanity, a human being, is the link between house and home, between the language faculty and Language. 19. one of the things i want to reveal in my poems is the contingency of the structural metaphor 'language is a container' and its entailment 'more language(text) = more content (meaning)'.i see language differently. i see a page as a wall of dirt. i am imprisoned, surrounded by dirt walls. i try scrape the dirt from the walls. where i am successful i reveal words. this act of scraping and revelation is writing. the more i scrape the more words i reveal but there is nothing to say that these words are meaningful. meaning is not just the presence of words but is something else. most of the time words are opaque, concrete— they are nothing except themselves, they refer only to themselves. but, every so often a word appears which is translucent. sometimes with repeated polishing this translucent word can be rendered transparent. these words are windows, that is, they refer to something, a world beyond themselves. the effort of my writing is to discover windows so that what is outside can be seen, understood, communicated. it is important to understand that in this process more words do not guarantee more windows, more words only guarantee more words. 20. loci of ongoing negotiations. 21. it is not what language is that is important, but rather what language manages into being. 22. language is reality. the reason language is experienced as mediating is that language, as reality, is unassailable; we near it and it recedes. we then think of language as a barrier, as something that must be overtaken. from this conception we logically assume that there must be something on the other side of the barrier, something that language is keeping us from. and this is precisely our experience of language as mediation. but there is no other side. there is no barrier. language is and all that is properly called our being, our living, is found there. 23. language is not my friend. it is not anything human. it is a spider. 24. language always arrives after the party has ended. all it can do is leave or offer to help clean up the mess. 25. “inaccurate language is not only in itself a mistake, but is something that implants evil in the human soul”. – Socrates. 26. “the wonders of language are also its frustrations”- Steiner. 27. every language has its strengths and weaknesses, of course. importantly, when considering a language’s shortcomings it should be remembered that every language is capable of doing things it is not supposed to do. 28. for Montaigne our language is assertive — “what we need is a negative language in which to state [our] doubts without overstating them”. 29. speaking must be more than the echoes of a collapsing conscience. 30. when we speak, we speak twice; each word is voiced twice, at the same time. our language is two languages. these two languages are identical, only the voice is different. one is the inconsequential voice and is understood by all. this is the voice that we hear. for most this is the only voice. but there is the second voice, there, tangled in the first voice. it is the voice of consequence, the voice that uses language and speaks with to another being. in fact, this consequential voice is the only voice that speaks about anything, the first voice being an empty transaction of sounds and gestures. but who can hear the consequential voice? how does one speak to another, truly?

laughter: n; it always indicates a relationship to death. the deepest, most powerful laughter erupts when death has drawn near; the most common and least meaningful laughter (that which is the spouse of entertainment) indicates that death has been forgotten. when someone laughs in the first, profound sense in the presence of someone who has never laughed in that way, it is very difficult for the audience to understand that they are in the presence of laughter.

laureate: n; the court poet is toilet paper. the most it can offer is evidence concerning how well the king and the queen have been dining.

law: n; 1. the legal system is an arrangement of institutionalized (unchallenged) fictions / contingent structures in front of which other fictions are either forced to bow and repent (are incorporated and therefore validate the authority of the legal fiction) or are sentenced / punished / exiled (excluded, deemed invalid) for their difference (and refusal to submit). 2. perhaps no one loves the law (the idea of the law, of authority) as much as the criminal who dedicates its life to transgressions. 3. a law delimits a relationship to power. in an unequal society not all the allows will apply to all the citizens. nevertheless, it is these selective laws which define the borders of inequality and therefore the extent of institutional power's dominion. 4. inversions of accepted laws depend on these laws, are a part of the same discourse and therefore share many assumptions / beliefs.

laxative: n; art can be nourishment, entertainment cannot. after being entertained you must always wipe your ass.

laziness: n; laziness, the unthinking, finds a home in pattern.

lead: v; the semantic field of to lead has two poles: leadership and leader. the pole of leadership is an ability, a competence, a structure. to move from leadership to the pole of leader requires an act of metonymy. leader is an anthropomorphic representation of leadership. the ability has become flesh. situated about this human pole are the notions of authority (hierarchical structures of dominance), personality, celebrity, individuality. these notions are massive and tall and occlude the more humble notions of self-responsibility (chaotic structures of equality), sociality, anonymity, and collectivity which are also situated around the pole of leadership. when the leader is regarded as all-important, when the importance of the movement (which the leader merely represents) is dismissed or ignored, those who believe they are being led are being driven, like animals, towards a dark end.

leader: n; a leader is not what you would call someone who has taken charge of a situation that has no chance of success.

leaves: n; 1. the meditative quality of leaves is that each leaf is like a family member of a particular tree and each tree is a metaphor for the life force in the field of time. leaves is a family surname and each leaf has a name: john leaves, the horse leaves, mary leaves, this pain in my head leaves, everything leaves. here we see the truth of life, of temporality in a single leaf. everything leaves. 2. the past tense of love.

legitimation: n; every politician, every apologist for power legitimizes itself through the construct the people: the people say, the people desire, the people think etc. but whatever the people have said, whatever the people desire, whatever the people have thought, have never been my words, or desires, or thoughts. this can only mean that i am not the people.

leisure: n; 1. killing time is a legal form of suicide. 2. leisure, when it is successful, makes you want to work.

lesson: n; 1. the lesson of Satan:

SELF ßà OBJECT

when this circuit is severed we have the scenario of satan, one who has been separated from its object, the self in isolation with no communication with the objective world. such is the hell of satan. release or redemption is therefore the re-establishment of contact i.e. dialogue with the objective world. perhaps this is accomplished by a dissolving of the self and from there a new self-object relationship will spontaneously emerge. this relationship is the sympathetic relationship of Ibn 'Arabi's Sympathetic Orient (the lahut/divine nature and the nasut/human nature where the circuit in its severed state would be equivalent to the lahut not being realized or revealed in the nasut). 2. the hardest thing for a poet to learn, and to practise, is triumphalism. 3. the past does not teach lessons. the past lies to you until, out of exasperation with its indefatigability, you give your assent to whatever it demands of you.

Lewontin: n; “The vulgar error that confuses heritability and fixity has been, over the years, the most powerful single weapon that biological ideologues have had in legitimating a society of inequality. Since as biologists they must know better, one is entitled to at least a suspicion that the beneficiaries of a system of inequality are not to be regarded as objective experts.”

lie: n; the poet is the master of the lie. where others lie in order to conceal the truth, the poet lies for the purpose of revealing the presence of a hidden truth, or for the purpose of creating (a) truth.

limit: n; 1. on every limit is written what is of value exists on the other side of me. 2. i have always loved where roads end. maybe it is because i was raised on a crude and unfinished cul-de-sac— a place where habitation and progress halted and gave way to a banal infinity of undergrowth and a reticent chaos of weeds.

limitation: n; 1. there is fence-building in every compliment. 2. a person is born with its head bowed so that it is impossible for it to look up into the sky. all it can do is look at the ground; it cannot even lift its head to the horizon. an eagle is flying above this person, circling. with a stick the person traces the path the bird's shadow makes along the ground. the person looks at the circle that has been traced into the dirt for a while and then names the figure: bird. 3. living creatively is no-wide. 4. there is always art which can be made. sometimes the field of opportunity is very narrow, sometimes it is very broad. an effect of restriction of opportunity is that non-trivial elements are eliminated and what is produced often cannot help but confront / address that which is the source of its limitation. this fact may help explain some observations i have made concerning the powerful, eloquent art which has been made in midst of horrendous circumstances in contrast to the often inconsequential art which emerges from those who seem to have everything. 5. the riddle of my limitations sound in every effort to conceive the inconceivable (e.g. the conception of infinity, the conception of creation ex nihilo etc.). i can actually feel my thoughts running their fingers along the fence of my predicament. 6. by giving people unlimited freedom by allowing them to do whatever they please paradoxically makes them follow the injunction which has been historically / socially spoken into them all their lives. and so, they end up doing exactly what they are supposed to do (as though they have freely chosen it). on the contrary, creative injunctions allow people to create / develop responses to such limitations as well as self-elaborated limitations (and this is exactly what constitutes a free act). 7. with regards to language, to the sayable, there is an ontological limitation (something is unsayable and will always be unsayable) and there is an apparent limitation (something is unsayable but can become articulated). it is not an insignificant matter to determine the difference between those things, those experiences, which are ontologically limited from those which are only apparently so. 8. Moses brought ten commandments down from the mountain because that is all he could carry.

limp: adj; after an act of creation, if the conditions of creation have not been altered, and if the nature of creation has not been revised, then what has been created is trivial.

literacy: n; 1. the interpretation / understanding of the past is a literate act... as is living. 2. it is said that our modern post-book culture is highly visually literate. this is mistaken; literacy is more than recognition of difference, more than the recollection of particulars— literacy is a comprehension of context, an instantaneous comprehension of the world of presumptions implicit in a visual image and/or in a visual presentation. taking this into account, i would have to say that visually, as is the case linguistically, our culture is primarily illiterate.

literature: n; 1. the world's great literature, its timeless literature is that which the dead fill their lives with. 2. where everyday experience is primarily accidental, literature is always intended. 3. “the natural school of a people.” – Rozanov.

living: n; adj; when a writer asks another writer what are you reading now? it is not asking where have you been? (as though on some holiday) but instead is asking where are you living now?

loneliness: n; 1. loneliness, radical loneliness, is not the problem of an individual. an individual is its symptom. 2. some religious traditions believe that god created man in order to relieve itself of its loneliness. one should never be that lonely.

longevity: n; look at the scientist who is searching for ways to extend human life. ask the scientist why all this effort, all this cost. do you think that by extending life people will be dead for a shorter amount of time? the scientist will answer and in the answer you will find not science but the human condition, a human patient in its most pathetic guise. you will see the patient searching for more of something that it has let slip away. this commodity it calls its life has been a series of activities which eventually came to be experienced as empty and insubstantial as they always were. the patient then desires to live but does not know what to live means or entails. the patient has had all its life to live but leads itself to the point where it must humble itself and beg for more life. but who or what does it petition? from where does life issue, into where does it disappear? life is death's way of laughing. and sometimes even death must stop for a breath. and when this happens the patient, the scientist will have vanished. and then the laughter will resume as will the endless procession of supplicants.

loss: n; this is our re-markable human endowment.

love: n; 1. it is your reflection in the eyes of another person, the image being that of yourself in the process of complete dissociation. 2. the persistent contemplation and anticipation of something that is absent, of something that is not yet. 3. a simile is an approximation of a metaphor. for instance, a as b is an approximation of a is b. as well, a simile is often used with like substituted for as. then perhaps we could also substitute the more essential form of like for is, that being, love (so that like is understood as an approximation of love, a surface of love). in such a way we can see that love corresponds with being (with is). love is then a bridge and more than that, it is a carrying across. 4. in love the voice that is poetry says yes, but not in so many words. the opposite is also true. 5. the effort to maintain an empty position, the effort required to inhabit a nothingness while knowing that it is a nothingness may foreclose any possibility of love. from such a position the subject as caretaker of nothingness would reflect its void to an other; such a subject, such a radical contingency cannot be a love object. as well, this radically contingent subject in its search for love would seek out its lack, that being, a subject as caretaker of fullness. fullness. completion, is an impossibility, such a subject cannot exist and so such a love can only be described as impossible. 6. a symptom of a specific impossibility. 7. the unconscious embrace of contingency. 8. in this culture love has been broken, deformed. it is a guitar that has been so damaged it is beyond recognition. people can still understand that it is musical in some way; however, they believe it is a drum. and so, when someone sees in the ruin its original design the drummers can only regard this person as someone who their either refuses to or cannot hear the touching music of the sacred instrument. they see an outsider, a loveless one. it is a drum they say confidently to this marginal being who can only run its fingers along the remains of the body and the neck searching for the strings that once sounded there. 9. “the love that does not mortify does not deserve so divine a name”- Miguel de Unamuno. 10. when you haven't eaten, when you have become accustomed to existing without nourishment and a hand from heaven offers you a bowl of grapes you do not stop and say, these grapes are not perfect spheres... you peel the grapes individually with your teeth, you let the juice spill over your lips and down your chin. you eat graciously and leave the abstractions for later. 11. a gift from doubt. 12. “perhaps heroism is the only way to love” – Henri Bergson.

lover: n; where the friend will forgive the lover will bleed.

lovers: n; theory and theatre.

lucidity: n; eventually life demands a leap of lucidity.

lust: n; “lust industrializes privacy”- Kedrick James.

lutheran syndrome: n; things may be bad, even terrible, but if we make a stir of any kind, things will be worse.