name: n; 1. the act of naming is an establishment of a relationship with what is named. a name is always an approximation. that is, no name is absolute; there is no supreme relationship to anything named, no relationship which is more valid than any other. a name is a privileging of certain relationships but it is a privilege that can always be undone. 2. a name is the acknowledgment of a possibility which has been rendered by a particular arrangement (i.e. a chair). 3. a name is the most extreme form of metaphor. all names are shorthand for the expression this/that is (the name/thing/object). the thing/object is being compared to this/that, which is, if one were to examine in greater and greater detail, something of unbounded/indeterminate existence. the name is our experience of it; a name is something which conveniently covers something we would rather not go into. 4. nouns are non-essential accretions: forgetfulness, inertia. all culture resides in the verb (in activity which is always in a state of deficiency). all names shelter a verb root; they are husks and their seed is a latent cultural intention which lingers in memory as long as the name persists. 5. shorthand for a complicated metaphorical activity. it is a sign which reads: this has been, or is being integrated into my symbolic network. see Acronymic in (Cipher and Poverty)

naming: v; naming / designation is a means of disposing / negating all the others that compete / negotiate for meaningful space in the phenomenon in question.

narrative: n; 1. narrative (along with its cane of character, its spasms of plot, and its drool-bucket of dialogue) is an anachronism. i see fiction (living experienced as a distance) as a tornado-like event— swirling, non-linear forces of great power which occasionally touch down here or there. of course, one could always join up these places where it touches down with a road. and one can call this road a story and can travel back and forth along it but such road-building, such travelling, is not a necessary thing. 2. the only use i have of narrative is as a lure to draw readers into a complex of meaning. when used this way the simplicity of narrative is only apparently so for in actuality it is only too eager to reveal the complex intentions which it serves. 3. much writing is decorative. as in the relationship between decorative art and art, there is in much writing a complete lack of questioning when it comes to the competence and sufficiency of the materials (language) being used. 4. narrative / realist prose (characterization, dialogue etc.) in general seems to spend too much effort and time courting the widow of objectivism. 5. narrative is a tool of mimesis which is involved in re-presentation and as such is non-critical. non-narrative (poetry for instance) is a manifestation of art and is involved with presentation and as such has the ability to be critical. 6. the narrative is a literal analogue of the male sexual response with the climax being the point of the exercise. history understood as narrative therefore indicates that life is experienced either as conquest or as masturbation. 7. i can hear the grinding of the training wheels and it is very annoying. 8. the common refrain of the journalist in pursuit of the human interest story is that they wish to let their subject tell their own story. a journalist never appears without all the technological, ideological, and social support, in other words, without a pre-existent means of telling, relating a story. given this, a subject can never tell their own story because the means of relating their story has nothing to do with them. 9. a writer once asked me why i wrote poems. i answered that it was because poems are traces, footprints, evidence of my explorations along the terraces of non-being... life hides its secrets there. i then asked this writer why it wrote narrative fiction, stories— i am still waiting for an answer. 10. narrative suffers and eventually succumbs to the description is explanation fallacy. just because statements (characteristics) can be attributed to something does not mean that an explanation f that thing has been achieved; it does not mean that any knowledge of that thing has been gleaned. characterization and the endless detailing (or, erection of abstractions) leads many, including the author, to the erroneous assumption that insights into the anthropomorphic question (what is man?) have been gained. 11. cultural jogging. 12. a narrative fiction is the type of thing you find scratched into the underside of a coffin lid. 13. nowhere else can so little be said in so many words.

nation: n; a nation is a stillbirth adopted by the barren and paraded around as though it is an admirable achievement. power and freedom reside in groups of common interests which, for obvious reasons, are usually local. however, they are not necessarily so. and it is this not necessarily so which is the breath of life that the body that is called a nation is lacking.

nationalism: n; nationalism presupposes hostility.

nature: n; 1. nature is where questions cannot stand. and so, nature is where the urbanized flock to in order to flee what demands an answer, reconciliation, consideration. 2. the aspect of nature i admire most, its highest achievement, is surface tension. 3. anyone who is in so-called nature and is smiling is not in nature at all.

necessary: n; 1. no one can be more unsatisfied than the person who has a existential requirement for the necessary. 2. “beyond a certain point there is no return; this point has to be reached.” -Nietzsche

necessity: n; when it comes to a human action, to the will, everything that can happen can also not happen. at the same time, once something has happened it appears in the guise of necessity. this characteristic of human action reveals itself in a very human event, the exhibition / performance of a work of art. speaking as a poet i have experienced too often the disagreeable event known as the poetry reading. the cause of the banality of these events is usually blamed on the public (either they are absent, or they are unenlightened). however, in such cases it is the public which is far more enlightened than the artist / reader. the reader performs as though adrift, unaware of the unique relationship that exists between a performer and spectators. everyone knows that the event could just as easily be as not be, that every word, gesture, could as easily exist as not exist. but the performer must take what being gives, that is, the guise of necessity. the event must be experienced as something necessary, something that had to be not only for the artist, but for each spectator. this is the artist's responsibility and it is the spectator's responsibility. usually, the spectator, just by being present understands this responsibility (at least at some level) and is prepared to bear it. the same can rarely be said of the artist.

need: n; etymologically related to faith/belief. the following formula may be applied: the need to x indicates a faith in x. and vice versa, a faith in x implies a need for x. if for instance we let x = communication, the need to communicate indicates a faith in communication and faith in communication implies a need for communication.

negation: n; 1. according to Descartes beasts (automatons) reveal their essence in their lack of freedom, that is, in their inability to accomplish a positive action. all they can accomplish he argues, are negative actions, actions against prevailing (positive) conditions. such a view suggests that if one were to search for instances where the human was reduced to the level of the automaton one would find them in actions of negation (e.g. in forms of resistance, in struggles for freedom from servitude etc.). moments of negation then reveal the specific situations (and powers) which reduce the human to the beast and which limit living to a soul-less, automatic phenomenon. 2. it has been said that nothing positive can be learned from negation, from absence. but, when it is dark, when you are hungry, when you are alone... life is speaking very clearly. in such a situation it is impossible not to understand, impossible not to learn. 3. a criticism of Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing) is that its extreme negations are depressing. the techniques of negation i employ are nothing more than equivalents to the Hindu understanding of the Self; in other words, i also express the not this, not that of Brahman. i don't think it is the instances of negation or even the understanding it implies which people find troubling. instead, i believe it is the reminder that such an understanding is possible but is not forcefully present in our contemporary society. and this disturbs them. 4. presuming we have the ability to see, darkness is the only thing that makes it possible for us to see the stars. 5. as we all know, once you have said no twice in succession, you have said yes. 6. “there is nothing beautiful except that which is not.” – Rousseau. 7. to live is to be open to the possibility of negation. every moment, every experience, every thought, may presume the death of a firmly and fondly held assumption. few people are alive.

negative: adj; 1. negative poetics is analogous to studying diseases (affected patients)— one discovers / describes a lack. 2. the important act involved in the practice of negative poetics is to walk the border between acts of negation which affirm presence and act of Negation which lead into absence. veering into the field of presence leads to description, to a naive ease towards language and its capabilities. veering off into the field of absence leads to something more (and at the same time less) than silence (and i know this because i have tried to establish a home in this field). 3. the photographic process exemplifies the / my poetic process. an act of vision (an experience of positivity) requires darkness for image production. so too with the poetic process, linguistic production requires silence. in the presence of positivity the path of creation lies via the negative.

negative poetics: n; Steiner says (after Mallarmé) “the truth of the word is the absence of the word”. the significance of this fact is that for meaning to exist between two or more people the absence that exists between them must be bridged or filled in by a shared assumptive act.

negotiation: n; truths can be passed on in speech and thought endlessly (copied without cost). as the cost of such re-production decreases the object becomes increasingly intangible and so the need for a negotiation of its identity increases. conversely, the cost of re-production increases as an object becomes more complex and tangible, and as the need for any negotiation of its identity becomes lost.

neighbour: n; 1. i've always imagined i'd live a life much different from the life i've imagined. 2. nothing must be posited for meaning to appear and live amongst us.

neologism: n; english is resistant to neologisms that are of the form of compound nouns (e.g. heart-path, wane-full). this resistance indicates an inflexibility with respect to the thingness/identity of a thing. there can be no ambiguity, a thing-a must be a thing-a and always a thing-a in such a system. such a neologism of this type which suggests there is some indeterminacy about an identity in particular or in general appears as artificial and is distrusted as a stylistic effect without any substance. such constructions are held to have nothing to say and so are not listened to (only because those who are not listening have no desire to listen to such echoes of indeterminacy).

neurology: n; as a practice, as a science, neurology finds its home between medicine or help and social control.

neurosis: n; 1. there was never a neurosis until there was a psychologist who could define the term neurosis. this does not mean that modern psychology precipitates neuroses; instead it points to the historical coincidence of psychological theory and neurotic disorders. the cultural conditions which prepared for psychoanalytic theories to be developed also provided environments in which neuroses proliferated. in a sense the illness and the treatment are coincident. major psychological illnesses which have always been with us are not in the scope of psychoanalytic theory and so are not a part of this discussion. 2. neuroses, obsessions, are acts of finding, small, almost insignificant acts of finding in a world where it seems impossible that anything can be found. 3. thouhgts may be doors. and when such a door is mistaken for a window freedom of movement ceases and that particular form of mental stasis known as neurosis results.

Nietzsche: n; 1. “denial and destruction is a condition of affirmation”. 2. to do any philosophy is to practice refutation. refusal— this is a skill which the material conditions of life punish but which living rewards. 3. hell is a place where you can find the materials needed to build your heaven; in fact, it is the only place where these things can be found. 4. if i didn’t know any better i would say that Schertzer begins where Nietzsche ends.

night: n; night is thought, day is the absence of thought.

nightmare: n; 1. “nightmare is the beginning of a metaphysical enlightenment.”- Cioran. 2. i open the nightmare, that unaddressed gift from the future, as though it is intended for me.

nonobservance: n; if you truly despise something you do not struggle to redeem it.

noose: n; the ancient Greeks understood being and aptly named it.

normal: n; when i look at a normal distribution i see a large hump. a mound. a multitude of un-necessary desires.

nothing: n; 1. nothingness, as a transcendent principle, could represent no- thing or it could represent something (something which is forever beyond us). nothingness takes on the characteristics of darkness, of emptiness, but this is just our experience of it, our (experience of non-experience) of the absence of ourselves and our understanding in nothingness. 2. i am walking in a forest. it is dark and i am no longer on a path. it is starless, moonless. i must push my way through the trees and the underbrush. i push a branch aside and for a moment i experience nothingness. i am standing in a blackness, i am untouched by anything. my feet are so tired that i do not feel the ground beneath me. i am like a knife that has sliced through a surface. i have penetrated a void, the nothingness which i have been seeking all along. i feel the presence of the moment and with this the spell is broken. the ground returns to me, a branch scrapes against my face. nothingness departs leaving a memory of its presence behind. this memory which is all that can be retained, known, loved. this memory has cleared space for itself in me. it throbs, breathes... i push another branch out of the way. it is still the forest, it is still dark, and i still have far to go. 3. we say its nothing when we have done something, or when something has been done which has affected another. this something is a thing to such a degree that it becomes remarkable— we have to say something and so we call the phenomenon (which has over-reached the commonplace) by its proper (transcendent) name: nothing. 4. Nothing with a capital N (as in Cipher and Poverty / The Book of Nothing) is a very important type of thing. Evidently the whole of creation was derived from it. 5. Leonardo says Nothing is the surface of contact— for example, between a wall and air. it is the ambiguous region the where the wall, the air approach each other until they lose themselves in the presence of the other and become... wair, all.

noun: n; in the privilege of timelessness there is noun linked to noun in a static ontology. in our temporal reality noun becomes verb, stasis becomes process, thing becomes a doing and identity becomes interaction(s). noun can be thought of as an extreme case of verb (its limit as interactivity approaches zero). an example of this shifting of sense from noun to verb can be seen in the word / concept being. being (as noun) is conceived as a (timeless / ahistorical) thing, whereas being (as verb) is conceived as be-ing, or a process which makes the above apparent and from which the limitation (noun-concept of) being can be derived.

nourishment: n; 1. if you cannot find the eden you wish to be banished from, you must create it. 2. if it is true, as Nietzsche says, that the brain develops in proportion to its difficulty in finding nourishment, then those who are content to feed on what is dropped in front of them, those who find it perfectly palatable to gobble up whatever cultural, social, and political systems produce will have characteristically underdeveloped brains. 3. i find nourishment clinging to a word’s edge.

novel: n; 1. Finnish for coma. 2. “jailers have more need of novels than anyone else.”- O. Mandelstam. 3. every writer must pass through their own nineteenth century. it is of course a rite of passage and one is not to make the unfortunate yet common mistake of regarding such a place as a resort, or as a promised land. the writer who remains in such a place has literally retired to their grave.

novelist: n; when someone can no longer deal with the complications of sociality they become a novelist. given that this is the case, the hypervaluation of novelistic forms can be understood to be an appreciation for individual social dysfunction and a celebration of the feeble strategy of raising veils between oneself and others so that others will never have to be encountered. in this sense novelistic forms lead away from living, from life. the situation is different with poetry; if poetry has any value it owes this to the fact that in order to approach poetry one must approach life.

novelty: n; often progress, or the new, is a clever intellectual blanket used to conceal what is unchanging, what persists.

numen: n; at times of personal crisis, or, during moments when a critical choice must be made my actions are accompanied by an unmistakable, audible guide (one that is analogous to the latin numen or divine command) in the form of approval or disapproval.

nurse: v; if compassion is co-suffering then a nurse is someone who is either able, or at least willing to co-suffer. it is a sign of dark times when a nurse is undervalued, when their human efforts are replaced by other forms of health administration, when methods of management are favoured at the expense of instances of compassion. in such times those responsible for the erosion of nursing as a profession are lacking the very thing a nurse can provide.

nurture: v; countries don't produce poets. poets are born everywhere, all the time. countries either nurture poets or destroy them. there are no other options— countries are coarse yet definitive in their actions.