sacrifice: n; 1. to reject the idea of sacrifice is to retain the belief that oneself is an absolute end. to reject the idea of sacrificing oneself to something that is larger than oneself is to denounce the idea that there is something larger than the individual. to believe that the individual is some ultimate end is to lack a sensitivity to the mystery and unknowable realms of which the individual is a mask. to reject sacrifice puts the individual in a hierarchy of being which it is definitely not. it is only one of many masks through which some ultimate mystery radiates and finds expression. 2. on a personal scale it is the re-payment of a self-debt. on a larger (heroic/mythic) scale it is the assumption of the debt of others. even though the debt(s) of one person cannot be paid for by another, it is this assumption of the hero/martyr which serves to uncover the personal debts that others must repay to themselves. 3. something very particular happens when a sacrifice is made. the type of sacrifice i am referring to is the sacrifice that involves a decision on how one is to live— i will live in this way and not in that way— the irreversible and life-defining decisions. once a sacrifice is made one is able to recognize others who have made similar sacrifices. when i say recognize i mean to truly know them and their situation specifically. in this sense then, a level of humanity opens to those who are willing to make sacrifices. it is also true that at the same time one is also able to recognize those who have not made similar sacrifices. this knowledge renders such people somewhat opaque in the sense that whatever depths they may have has not been realized.

sadness: n; when someone meets someone new they may regard that person in a positive light, and perhaps the recipient isn't like that at all, perhaps that recipient doesn't deserve such favorable opinion. but isn't it, as far as the recipient is concerned, the greatest of gifts to receive such an opinion especially if he/she doesn't deserve it? to live as a new person in the favorable light of another is to be granted a new life filled with advantages. and it is therefore sad that it is so common to see people regressing to the behavior of their old selves, returning to lurk in the unfavorable light of others, rejecting that gift that was offered to them without realizing what the gift was.

safe: adj; in my dream i was riding a horse. never once did it rear up in fear. not once did it reveal to me a desire to turn and flee in the opposite direction. when i woke i decided that this horse was either incredibly stupid or else i was travelling along the wrong road.

St. Anthony: n; he barricaded the place for solitude but admirers broke in.

salvation: n; 1. exits exist. 2. salvation is not a road. 3. salvation is a word that is longer than it needs to be.

sanity: n; to be silent for those who cannot be silent is evidence of sanity; and, if it is not martyrdom it is at least a confident stride in that direction.

saturation: n; if happiness fills you up then sadness exceeds you, spills over your edges. where happiness is content with you sadness demands more than you are able to provide.

savior: n; to be saved, one must be dying, the hand of the savior consequently understands that you are struggling and therefore reaches into that situation that threatens you and pulls you free of it. the savior is therefore able to exist in two places at once: the region from which you wish to escape and that region to which you will be lifted in safety.

scalp: v; when the barber is wealthy it means that there are a lot of people in town with very bad haircuts.

scar: n; a mark of persistence. the place where the integrity of the skin of language has been disturbed. an original disruption caused the language-blood to flow from within, hardening when it reached the surface. this language-scab then is persistently picked at until something new appears in the skin, until an absence of the skin appears, a scar, a transparency.

scarce: adj; “very few books are axes, very few books hurt us, very few books break the frozen sea. Those books that do break the frozen sea and kill us are the books that give us joy. Why are such books so rare? Because those who write the books that hurt us also suffer, also undergo a sort of suicide, also get lost in forests— and this is frightening.”- Hélène Cixous.

Schiller: n; “live with your century; but do not be its creature”.

Scholem: n; “it is a profound truth that a well-ordered house is a dangerous thing. something penetrates this house.... a kind of anarchic breeze.”

school: n; 1. the constructive school aims to transform society, to move beyond present social conditions. such a school is a rare thing. what we have instead are destructive schools which are interested merely in the maintenance of the present social order. 2. the process of schooling can take the form of evolutionism (see evolution 2.) or negation. in the case of evolutionism, an existing state of affairs is continued, an existing paradigm or theory or set of assumptions are not challenged but are instead taken as limits (not necessarily acknowledged by the school) of the school's knowledge. indoctrination is an example as is training for a particular job or field of work (e.g. medicine). as a form of negation the school aims at producing students who will eclipse their teachers, who will eclipse the scope of the school (and who may then go on to found another school themselves). mystical religious training, musical and other artistic training, as well as philosophical schools (often) operate in this mode.

science: n; 1. scientific truth is not a reality or an eventuality but is an imposed system of beliefs which alter the way we can and do experience reality. science doesn't and cannot tell us how things are because this aspect of anything is of course unknowable. 2. in science we a) amass a memory of things through observation of reality by b) assigning these things to an image(s)/theory/model from which c) a memory structure/field of knowledge is constructed. in art this process is reversed in its first two aspects, the end result being the same. in the artistic/creative experience there is a) illumination which provides an image or images which result in b) the acquisition of a portion of experience/reality which results in c) as above (the formation and/or transformation of a memory structure/field of knowledge at the personal level and possibly at levels beyond the personal). 3. science is about conquest. it is imperialistic. it is a kingdom which can only build ships and therefore it does not entertain any designs of ruling the moon. science is concerned with maps. it has its agents everywhere measuring and charting in the hopes that one day they will all meet and they will have mapped and measured the entire kingdom. art is also interested in maps. the only difference is that the artist does not wish to encounter another person with whom he/she would be expected to compare maps and thus to share their kingdom. the notion of influence in art is analogous to saying, i will begin to measure my kingdom here, in this way, with this system of measurement. 4. that an anxiety, a profound anxiety underlies science and fuels its practice seems hard to dispute. 5. it is the essence of scientific thought and scientific activity to produce things (information, data, materials etc.) which in turn will go towards producing other things. however, production (or productivity) is not the correct term to use to describe this process, this nature. productivity implies that what is produced is beneficial or useful. in reality, almost all of what science produces is useless (apart from being able to be used to produce more such productions); a use must be found for it. for instance, the entire pharmaceutical industry is based on the virtually infinite molecular products that can be designed. each of these products is then wheeled before the ignorant public in such a way and so convincingly that whatever use the producer claims for the product the public will admit its need for just such a thing and will literally lap it up. (the actual thing engineered by such a pharmaceutical company is then not the drug but is the phenomenon of the drug being consumed by a readily paying public). 6. objectivity is a necessary illusion for the survival of science. 7. science is an activity which occurs within limits, its domain is bounded. science is a non-transgressive activity concerned only with what can be found within its bounds, ignoring or denying what is beyond its reach. since science deals with that for which it is suited, and because science does not accept / cannot handle data from that which is outside its bounds / concern, every scientific action is necessarily self-validating for any theory / paradigm under which the action operates. science then cannot help but be traditional, conservative, and even though it has the ability to reveal things which may be disturbing or revolutionary these things must be ignored or emptied of their power in order for science to proceed. 8. “the act of judgement that leads scientists to reject a previously accepted theory is always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world. The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgement leading to that decision involves a comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other”- Thomas Kuhn. 9. where art is hyper-critical / disruptive, science is acritical / conservative. 10. its servant, hidden and necessary, is named exclusion. 11. for much of science we are led to a wall which, when compared to a human life, is endless. one is then given a brush and all the paint one needs and then one is left alone to carry on with he endless task. often, what one really desires is to throw the brush aside, to trade all one's paint for a ladder. 12. external reality is always a hypothesis; a working hypothesis. 13. the discourse(s) of science should never be confused with the practice(s) of science. 14. science ceases when observed phenomena are not allowed to negatively affect experimental procedure and/or the direction of research. the simplest way to achieve this end of science is to exclude certain phenomena from consideration, be it technically or ideologically. tobacco research, right-wing think-tanks… such groups as these are interested only in the authority of science, which they appropriate, and not the process and responsibility of science, which they negate. 15. “in all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty.” – Nietzsche. 16. science does not tell you what is right or wrong. if you are looking to science for these things you are not looking at science but into the eyes of a devil. and a devil is always replete with answers. 17. science is often called upon to provide theoretical brackets for unsupportable ideologies. science is usually obliging in this respect. 18. why is there not nothing? in the presence of this question science drops to its knees, humiliated, begging for forgiveness, for mercy… but towards what is its pleading directed? 19. the activity of science is deductive— at most it is an elaboration and then further elaborations ad infinitum. as such this activity is tautological. in the familiar shadows of a particular elaboration its relationship to another elaboration appears as knowledge. but it is not knowledge. if the logic of the elaborations are traced back to their roots they will both be found to share the same root. therefore all statements concerning the relationship between them and all descriptions integrating a particular elaboration into the context of others, are tautological. knowledge derives from that which is not or, that which might not have been but is— fruits of induction of which any activity of science is not an example. 20. most of the things science says, or claims, are wrong— and this is its strength. 21. experimental science inculcates habits of meticulous loyalty towards reality. 22. whenever someone is awarded a position or a chair in science it should be remembered that science is an activity an that in order to do science they will have to get off their chair, they will have to move.

science fiction: n; there always seems to be a system to justify or a reason to explain the fantastic incident. these things are not needed. such justifications make for tentative writing.

scientist: n; 1. the scientist nurses / shelters a social pathology— denial in its most acute form. 2. a wasp on a window sill in a room that is completely dark. the sun is outside and the wasp on the window sill is oriented towards it, attempts in vain to follow it through the glass. in order to escape this situation the wasp must take a transcendental step. the wasp must set out upon a flight into darkness, into blindness, for an unpredictable duration. and success is not guaranteed. however, this step represents the only way the wasp can find a way out of its predicament. the scientist almost always fails to transcend its programmed behavior, almost always remains at its window, banging against it again and again as though effort were all that success required. 3. the most important skill required to be a scientist is to know where science ends.

seal: n; it involves wax and a stamp (or expression), that is, an impressible substance is altered in such a manner that it recalls that substance which impressed it by retaining an image of that stamp. it is a confirmation of contact with something (a state or mode of being) which is suggested by the shared root seil which means the joining of two things together. it is also related to sign or token which is homologous with archetype. that is, a seal is a sign/archetype which is the image of a transforming principle. our psyche is the impressible substance. the seal then retains via an image the confirmation of contact between itself (at some past time) and the transforming principle (stamp/expression). curiously, seal is also related to sequi which means to follow. this suggests that a seal is not only an image and record of contact but contains an inherent potential for action. that is, the archetype/seal necessarily precipitates action, or is a progenitor for possible behaviors/thoughts etc.

seasons: n; fantasy buds and blooms into vanity which then takes its predictable, lazy course and turns into humility which eventually gives over all it has to give to the chill of reality.

seclusion: n; the only thing of value that can be written in total seclusion is a will or a suicide note.

secret: n; 1. writing is a paradox. i have always wanted to have a secret place, a room where no one would ever be able to find me. and so i try and build myself such a room, or try to discover with words the secret door which opens up such a room. at the same time i want to leave such a door open, or at least leave clues for how to find the door or how to open it so that someone might discover me there. i have desired that my secret place be dark and endless and complete with the possibility that i may stumble upon someone who has been there secretly before me. 2. a secret is wild and will not be domesticated. it makes a terrible pet. 3. by betraying a secret divinity is rendered human. 4. secrets are the gloves that must be worn if life is to be held. 5. the secret is considered if not dangerous, then at least suspect. and the private is an accomplice of the secret and as such is suspect. it can only lead to a bad end preaches the (technological / automatic) forces of contemporary living. machines have no secrets. they are literal, explicit. for a machine what is secret is some sort of contamination. as such all private space must be emptied, purified. but humans are not machines and cannot exist without private spaces. technological advancements (e.g. cellular phones) which effect the publicization of private realms consequently dehumanize, mechanize, and sterilize until living becomes its opposite. 6. the ego is more than just bound by secrets. it is often hanging by them as well.

security: n; 1. art bares a person’s delusion of security while at the same time insinuating that others are suffering so that this delusion can be maintained. the extent of this necessitated suffering of others is the profundity, and intractability of the delusion. 2. when one hears or reads the word security it is a euphemism for certainty… which is itself a symptom of an apocalyptic fantasy. 3. each dark age, be it general or personal is inaugurated with the desire for security. faith and ignorance soon scurry in, followed by tortured screams and lamentations.

Seine: n; when mispronounced it is, as life is when it is misunderstood, sane.

self: n; 1. sometimes i am a bird without toes. and then i am not anything at all. 2. a great memory reef. 3. the absence that posits a life (of relationships, of meaning) around itself. 4. thought is an action. an idea is an action, an ongoing negotiation. the age-old paradigm that thought leads to action is equivalent to saying that the action which is a particular thought leads to another particular action. what separates these two actions is time. thought is our way of harvesting time. as well, this time (which is also the fictive and reflective time of the self) is exactly the extent of indeterminability and freedom that the self claims as its home. 5. the self, as an unmovable, stable object, is in contradiction to the world, which is in constant flux. this contradiction, this radical opposition is the fundamental fact of our existence.

self-love: n; when you can see your name in the pattern of the stars then you have a problem.

selfishness: n; by dissolving my body, my life, into words i become a wraith of sorts. and those who are not content to live with a wraith, with something indefinable, they will fill in the spaces making of me something concrete. these people will burden the lightness of myself with their own selfish desires. the grotesque figure they will create they will call me. i will be powerless to stop them from exercising this self-justified violence to me. they will dress me up and listen to things they have thought i have said but which i have never said. they will make me fit into each of their lives. they will call me their memory of me.

sense: n; 1. the difference between sense and reference is exemplified by laboratory rats. when the rats are fed they understand the sense of the event. yet they do not understand the reference of it. if they did understand the reference, some of them might resist the food, starve themselves, or find some other way to deny the experiment from using them. it would be possible to understand the reference without the sense; however, it is the sense which binds one to the reference and which provides us with a means for accessing the reference and possibly altering it (and therefore its effects / the possibilities it allows). the sense is the what is of an event/experience; however, the reference is also the what is of an event /experience. there are then either two what is's of an event/experience or two aspects of what is. in the case of the laboratory rats, it is obvious that the inability to make sense of an event would render them useless whereas it is their ability to make sense coupled with their inability to understand the reference which allows them to be used in the way that they are. (the production of meaning where the individual plays a role in determining the reference and therefore the meaning as opposed to the manufacturing of consent where the individual is given a meaning within which to exist). 2. a canadian writer, when hailed as successful, is described as exhibiting a deep sense of place— a meaningless phrase which is well suited for describing meaningless acts.

sentence: n; the guilty one, the convicted one, is sentenced. not lined, or coupletted, or versed, or chorussed, or metered... always sentenced. obviously criminality is related to sentences, to the prosaic.

separation: n; life is the word we assign to the separation of dying from its object.

sex: n; 1. “the pleasure of inexactitude”.- Lyn Hejinian. 2. in that final ecstatic moment i see clearly how it has been death which has been the one fondling me, encouraging my body to overcome itself, just this once.

shame: n; 1. the emptiness that remains after the moral vessel has been spilled. 2. moral masturbation.

shelter: n; 1. understanding is sheltering. a shelter can be built (of one's own making) or can already exist (of another's making). taking shelter implies there is something frightening or dangerous from which one must remove oneself. this something is meaninglessness. to understand is being-in-shelter, or, being-at-home. an essential aspect of being human is to create and to make our home in shelters, in understanding. whether this is good or bad is to be determined by our living, it is simply our mode of being-in-the-world. what is important for any individual is for them to discover the shelters they are at home in. only upon discovering these shelters can a person determine whether the shelter was of their own building or whether it was built by others. and only upon recognizing this can a person decide whether the shelter is in reality a prison or if it is something which can be abandoned freely. 2. the neighborhood has been destroyed, my house has been destroyed. only a portion of a wall remains standing. there is a painting hanging on this wall. it is an abstraction: a black outline of a circle, imperfect, broken, shaded red inside at its bottom; the circle is imposed on a green background, the green is the colour of leaves when the sun shines through them. scattered along this green landscape are lines and polygons, barely visible as though sediments, fossils. this painting was not painted by a child. it is the only thing of its kind. it is the reason everything everywhere is being destroyed. the destruction is afraid of this image, of this work and so everything must be eradicated so that nothing will remain for the painting to appeal to, so that no one will remain for this image, this work to shelter. 3. etymologically, shelter has militant origins.

shiite: n; could it be that in killing those that they see as evil they are trying to release the actual body of that being from its evil, apparent, prison-body.

short films: n; the short films from the 14th century are residues of direct illumination, they are gnostic or photographic in a biological sort of way.

short story: n; the perfect short story is the story which knows itself completely. it is a closed circle, everything in it leads to everything else within it. it is a perfect sphere, continuous in all directions and self contained. to write a story like this one doesn't really write it in the classical sense. one has no need to develop things because everything is already known. one simply needs to transmit this perceived sphere to paper, to language. the story is in a sense already known to me (in the sense that as a perfect sphere it is contained within me) and the task of writing is nothing more than the act of drawing out this sphere. the best we can do is to communicate the sphere by way of language which is unfortunately only the sphere's shadow. the important point is that the story is known beforehand. known not in the way of particulars but in the sense of something being complete and self-contained. writing is then a retracing of something already known, a sudden understanding of some underlying unity. when i have finished writing a story, a story i feel good about, i can feel the loose ends of the circle joining, the sphere closing itself.

sickness: n; 1. “sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien.” – Rilke 2. if i must be ill let me be so ill that i will be able to cure doctors of their mania for prolonging suffering at all costs.

signification: n; a shared responsibility for future misunderstandings (possible and realized) which will be localized around the signification in question.

silence: n; 1. there are two ways to look at it. firstly, there may be a finite amount of time to say all you have to say. this is not how i see it. for me i have a finite amount to say and my goal is to say it, to rid myself of the words and the images and therefore be left with only the unspeakable and the unthinkable. 2. the origins of writing systems and of spoken languages are very interesting. so too are the origins of the many systems humans employ to maintain silence, systems which deter language and bar communication. 3. when attempting to evoke what cannot be said, metaphor and indirection are the best engines. (J. Michael Yates). 4. the end-image of language. a poem is a path which leads towards this end-image. perhaps the path of the poem is less a defined path and is instead more of an expanse of ice that has frozen over silence and across which poets walk, slowly, quickly, clumsily. some may even know how to skate. the crisis of poetry which must be reached by every poet must then be a persistent chipping away at the ice, a precarious activity which achieves at most only an experience of silence, which is in itself only an image, the end-image (in the same way that formlessness might act as the corresponding end-image for visual art). 5. silence is the gift a poet gives to a reader. this silence (in the form of ambiguity, complexity, etc.) is a confidence the poet displays regarding the possibility that a reader exists who possesses the ability to welcome and understand the work in question. my troubles with spoken-word poets and narrative poets is that they deny silence to their readers/listeners. instead what is offered is often arrogance and/or vanity. in denying silence such poets are (at least unconsciously) proclaiming a privilege, a superiority, over their readers/listeners. 6. stones are the perfect image of silence, silence hardened and grounded. books, on the other hand, are the image of silence that has transcended itself. 7. my silence is broken by my inability to communicate. 8. when from the depths of its silence a poet calls and receives no reply the poet must understand that this is because it dared to call and that one should never presume to request a response from the source that is poetry. such a request reveals a lack of understanding as to the nature of this source. and so, for its presumption and its ignorance, the poet must be punished, … perhaps for eternity.

silhouette: n; if you take my writing and you see the pattern of the words, what they point towards, if you envision the totality of this enunciation you will see that a silhouette has been produced (and this silhouette is all we can see, the figure itself is always beyond our comprehension and abilities of representation). what more can i do?

simile: n; 1. simile is to metaphor what Christianity is to Bhuddism: a relationship to and not an identity with. 2. poetically, it is a symptom of laziness. at worst however, it is indicative of cowardice— an aesthetic accessory rather than a disruptive necessity. 3. a simile is a failed encounter. and when something is like a failed encounter, it is nothing.

simulation: n; when the i becomes it simulation becomes stimulation.

sin: n; 1. an absence. classically interpreted as a darkness, as the darkness of our existence, the absence of light/divine understanding or union. as in spanish = without. 2. taking it to mean without, sin can be defined as a space, a space of exile, of unconnectedness. it is a state of exiled possibilities which are generally oriented towards the propagation, the opening, of more exiled spaces and exiled possibilities. an action (realization of possibility) which furthers the state of exile casts a shadow— this shadow is a yearning for deliverance from exile, for a re-union.

sincerity: n; the desire to create something which is beyond one's means often masks a fear of creating something which is possible.

siren: n; for a poet it is important to pay attention when a siren sounds. watch for the people who look for it, who follow its sound as it passes by in the street— these are people you will never reach.

skeleton: n; a human skeleton is presented to us assembled, in an upright stance— in fact a radically upright posture. when is a human ever upright? when is a human not hunched over, burdened by some necessity or some self-imposed dilemma? when is a human not cowering? when is a human not kneeling and pleading for mercy, or for some pittance? when is a human not on all fours slinking along the earth as an animal, its skin nothing more than a garment of scabs and excrement?

skepticism: n; i have the sense that the post-modern position (there is no autonomous position from which to judge anything) provides a simple means of ridding oneself of the responsibility of negotiating the perhaps impossible metaphysical / ethical / aesthetic problems of contemporary life. of course, one can argue that there is more to what is called post-modern than this little maxim. maybe there is maybe there isn't. nevertheless, what is termed a post-modern response or tactic— the calling into question of the validity of any authority is not post-modern at all. it is the classical tradition of skepticism.

skin: n; skin is in opposition to a mask. a mask suggests something artificial, something (humanly) made and so something that is under (human) control. the idea of a mask suggests something which is not human which is put on. it is suggested that it is only the act of putting on the mask which is essentially human. in opposition to this is the concept of skin. there is nothing artificial about skin; we are our skin. we do create our skin but in a different manner than we create a mask. the generation of our skin occurs not outside of us, but is co-incident with the development of ourselves. one could say that the creation of our skin and the creation of ourselves cannot be separated. we do not put on a new skin, we crawl out of an old one. this assumption of a new being is not (as it is in a mask) an act of convenience, but is instead a struggle. we must climb free of our old selves. moreover, the image of crawling from an old skin presents an interesting paradox which mask-assuming does not present— we emerge from our old selves in a new skin; we are wearing all our future skins at all times in a potential state. transformation then can be thought of as the assumption of some potential condition through a struggle, through an overcoming of the self (of an existing condition).

slam poetry: n; the literary equivalent of a tractor pull.

sleep: v; 1. asleep the covers are closed and the pages of my life lie together in their narrow, dark heaven. 2. sleep is a form of protest.

slogan: n; an imprisonment of language.

smith: n; the homology between embryo and ore involves the concept of pattern. both the crystal and the embryo are patterns which contain within them a potential for growth (an organizing principle) which can be played out, unravelled. the smith as creator/organizer plays the same role as Time in realizing the organizing principle.

sobriety: n; as Apuleius reminds us, sobriety is the enemy of Venus.

sociology: n; one's aversion to any sociological generality being used as a basis for a complex behavior must be absolute. sociality is otherwise impossible.

socracy: n; a state ruled by questions that resist all efforts to answer them and where the essence of all activity, the motor, is questioning.

socratic: adj; a doctor prosecuted by a cook before a jury of children who are fonder of sweets than they are of bitter medicine.

solitary: adj; questions and answers are always together. lovers, husband and wife. where there is a question there will be an answer and where there is an answer there will always be a question. but there are more solitary things. things which seem like questions but lack answers, things which seem like answers but which lack questions— such things are widows who have never been married, grooms whose bride has never been born.

solitude: n; 1. “I have suffered only from the multitude”- Nietzsche. 2. the suffering caused by my own solitude is a gift and i have a responsibility for its well-being.

solution: n; i am my environment. there is no internal, no external, only distance / fiction and the unreachable / poetry.

soul: n; 1. i agree with R. Musil when he said that children and dead people have no souls. what his statement does is integrate the soul with the natural/physical human life cycle. it suggests (though does not imply) that the soul may develop/decay along with the body. of course the soul has a certain freedom to burrow under the mud of life like a lungfish and arrest its development, still, the concept of a transforming principle which can affect the soul appeals to me. 2. i was watching an interview with a leading neurologist. she said and was emphatic that the mind was the brain. end of story. she however was missing and was disregarding the ultimate fact that operates within any scientific inquiry. she was forgetting that science is concerned with all that is observable. all that is observable is however but one half of all that is. all that is is a union of that which we can or someday may be able to perceive, or at some time in that past were able to perceive, and that which is beyond all knowledge: phenomena and nuomena. the proper concern of science and the only concern to which its statements have any relevance is phenomena. brain is one half of the mind. science can study the phenomenological aspects of this. the mind in total is brain plus nuomena. soul might be a good word for this aspect of brain. any scientific claim for existence or non-existence of nuomena is groundless, without meaning. it bothers me when scientists, people who have much unquestioned power in the public eye draw stupid, groundless conclusions about that which is beyond their possible observation (and therefore exempt from scientific inquiry). 3. the soul is a measure of participation in the transcendent. it is a function of this activity. 4. “the soul itself testifies, by its vision, for or against its own spiritual realization.”- Corbin. 5. the soul is an activity; yet, in order for this activity to exist it must be contained. life is its container. many souls are small and frail, exhausting themselves long before their container deteriorates. maybe all souls are such things, unable to maintain themselves for the duration of a life. it will be the rare soul that will continue on, indefatigably (as Goethe says in his remark on this possibility), and to such an extent that they overflow their container. and so, unable to be sheltered by life this activity must find a new container, a new possibility of being. such a possibility we call immortality… though this is just a name, a sign we attach to something we know nothing about, something which will always elude us as long as we are as we are.

space: n; the possibility of being. (a space can be related to another space in only a small number of ways. see imagination).

specificity: n; the organizing principles of all wars are general. the victims are always specific.

spectacle: n; well-funded stupidity always outshines impoverished intelligence.

spectre: n; 1. contributing to the present spectral fantasy that ensures the stability of the capitalist/consumerist project is anything that occludes the acknowledgement of the real conditions of production of the specific fetish objects to be consumed. 2. race has no material basis.

speculum: n; a poem, even a word, may be the soul’s speculum.

speech-act: n; this implicates a search for intent in the speaker which then leads to a proliferation of biographical and historical detail which takes attention away from what is spoken. this activity is however often carried over into the written world. my work belongs to such a world. my work is written to the highest degree (that is, it is not to be spoken at all, only read, only spoken to oneself). therefore, any biographical search, apart from being destructive to the work, is also a useless exercise. the written work should stand on its own. if one for whatever reason one must assess some speech-act to a piece of writing then one should say, "i am the speaker and this piece of writing is being spoken and intended by me and so, what is my intention?" the piece of writing then is like a mask which you wear and assume that identity for a moment, an identity however, which is a modification of your own. the mask is not placed on your face from outside but works its way onto your face by rising from beneath your skin.

sperm: n; peasant stones.

Spinoza: n; the intensity of religious belief is proportional to personal greed.

spire: n; we are all ek-spiration and as such the world accepts us, as such the world expects us. it is only the little in-spirations, the building behind the scenes which alters the world, which disrupts it by frustrating its expectations.

spontaneitism: n; spontaneitism will be the last possible form of artisitic expression before the human race eradicates itself. in this sense it will be a sign, an ominous and hopeless sign.

sport: n; a fear of the mind.

sprachen: n; (in at least one language) in the core of speaking an ache persists.

stake: n; there are moments when it becomes apparent that my spine is a stake and the fire in my mind is indicative of a fire at my feet.

statement: n; 1. my art always speaks the economic and environmental realities of my time. what else can it do? 2. a statement is the apparent healing of our primary psychic rift. that it fails is not as important as the fact that its approximate and delusional effects allow us to function, in spite of ourselves, in spite of the reality of our being.

statistics: n; there is a part of town i find myself in usually about once a week. and every time i'm in that part of town i walk past this decrepit man, his face twisted into the shape of idaho, his long gray beard growing only on the underside of his chin, his green hat at a precarious angle. there are one million people in this city. in this downtown core which is only one square kilometer there must be one hundred thousand people. therefore, the probability that i should run across this man assuming i walk at random through this square kilometer is 1/100,000. that is my probability of doing it once. to do it over and over again is so improbable there are probably evolutionary constraints to keep it from happening (such highly improbable events can wipe out entire life forms, e.g the dinosaur). so what is going on? why don't we imagine instead that there are two such old men. the probability of running into one of them is still 1/100,000 but we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them so the probability becomes 2/100,000 or 1/50,000. slightly more probable. it's obvious that such an event becomes more and more likely to happen when there are more and more identical people in existence. it happens to me consistently so there must be quite a few identical people in this part of town. biology tells me that only identical siblings are born exactly alike. yet, biology has not ruled out the possibility that we all die looking exactly alike. it must be that when i pass that old man i am in reality passing many people. they are all the same person, all of them on their way to the store, or the bar. but they will forget and will keep walking until they come to a street where no one passes them any longer. they will lie down with themselves and there will be nothing more to be done, nothing except cease to be. later someone will find some clothes and a green hat in the alley. they'll be taken to a downtown mission where someone will buy them and wear them and be that same old man i always rub shoulders with.

stereotype: n; a stereotype is a valid syllogism (with three type A categorical propositions). for example:

(major premise) all poets are liars

(minor premise) Onar is a poet

(conclusion) Onar is a liar

the problem with every stereotype is that its major premise is an assumption. for the conclusion (and therefore the stereotype) to be factually accurate the major premise must be a fact. to be a fact it must be the necessary conclusion from the following primary syllogism:

all people are liars

a poet is a person

a poet is a liar

from this it becomes obvious that by expressing any stereotypical statement about any sub-division of humans, one is simply expressing the banal fact that all humans possess the stereotypical trait. in conclusion then, a stereotype is a (logically) valid syllogism with no (semantic) content.

stimulation: n; a government will bankrupt itself trying to stimulate the economy but will never forward a nickel to stimulate the mind’s of its citizens.

stoic: adj; emotion is the method of communication with the non-verbal world of which you are a part. the stoic is one who has lost or represses or does not possess or chooses not to use or is afraid of this ability.

story: n; 1. all great stories are about death. this is because all great stories are love stories. 2. the story teller knows that the story it has to tell will only be understood by those who have already heard it. in this way all stories are therefore reminiscences, visitations of the past. this is because every story must be lived to be learned and not simply heard. therefore the function of the story is i) for those who have heard it / a reminiscence; ii) to provide mysteries which can be penetrated and therefore lived / learned by those who are ignorant.

strength: n; 1. it is not succeeding at something which comes easy to one but rather the attempt to confront that which is most difficult. 2. there is nothing uncommon or difficult about holding radical views. it is defending them, depending on them, when there is nothing else which requires a rare amount of strength.

structure: n; power acts in a structured way perhaps because it is acknowledged as legitimate. where power is chaotic, where no structure has been built for it, power exists as force seeking acknowledgment and legitimacy.

struggle: v; 1. struggle (which is not necessarily active) is transformative. resignation (which is not necessarily passive) is a relinquishment of one’s being, and therefore renders one a part of the process, or problem. 2. that i can even pose the question why must i strive to participate in the supreme truth? only makes things more difficult.

studio: n; the studio is a retreat in the military sense of the term. in this sense there is also the possibility that the battle is not over, that a position of strength (a stronghold) is being returned to perhaps to consolidate resources, to rest, to strategize and then to attack once more.

style: n; style is what is involved in context-building, in the understanding of a work of art as a work of art (and not, for example, as an historical object).

subject: n; 1. a vehicle the poem uses to lead one towards poetry. analysis of the vehicle, although it may be interesting and/or challenging, is irrelevant. what is of concern is what is seen through the vehicle's window during transit. (it is true that there are some vehicles one may not want to get into for whatever reason but this does not invalidate them. regardless, it is impossible for one to actually define the vehicle in question. if one were to attempt to measure it with words or a concept it would become a vehicle of your making and not the intended vehicle. it would also be rendered inert.). 2. a conceptual attempt to eliminate the presence(s) of everything else that any subject implies, that are necessary for the concept of subject to have any meaning. 3. the subject is what is required for the other (otherness) to exist. 4. the autonomous subject is the critical artifice for middle class culture. this construct posits/maintains status quo social conditions yet also creates the conditions for its own destruction. as such it functions precisely as that which veils the evacuated space (the lack of Lacan). how the autonomous subject creates the conditions for the maintenance of its own social position while at the same time creating conditions which can eradicate the possibility of its existence is exemplified by the concept of criminal responsibility. except for cases of insanity it is the individual who is responsible for criminal activity (always the perpetrator except in cases of rape where the defense attempts to blame the responsibility for the violence on the victim). this effectively removes responsibility for the crime from the rest of society. the ideological message is a bad person in an otherwise good society. this view however does not induce members of society to better society. according to their individualist orientation they just have to look after themselves. yet, if the responsibility for criminal activity could somehow be de-centered from the assumed subject then society as a whole would feel that it has a responsibility towards propagating / maintaining the conditions which support criminal activity. perhaps, under such shared responsibility members of society might find a reason to work towards eliminating such conditions. after all, it is not such a far-fetched idea to think of shared responsibility. it is how families operate. 5. the subject is what must be inserted in order to change property into propriety. 6. the capitalist ideological apparatus not only addresses its subjects, it creates subjects which will be able to respond to its appeal. 7. i must admit that sometimes i fantasize about living under an enlightened monarch.

sublimage: n; 1. from Kant, Critique of Judgement; The Sublime may be described in this way: It is an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to regard the elevation of nature beyond our reach as equivalent to a presentation. 2. from Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology; The paradox of the Sublime is as follows: in principal, the gap separating the phenomenal empirical objects of experience from the Thing-in-itself is insurmountable— that is, no empirical object, no representation of it can adequately present the Thing (the suprasensible Idea); but the Sublime is an object in which we can experience this very impossibility. 3. in sublimage i am involved in the re-assembly of what has been broken, severed.

substitute: n; sometimes metaphorical complexity is a substitute for hard data, for evidence gathered from living.

subversion: n; the struggle is to be subversive without at the same time preaching for the necessity of (or relying on the solidity of) your target.

success: n; 1. to succeed as a writer one must knowingly, word by word, cross into the fields of failure. 2. the great work is the one in which the reader is able to conceive at once and in a stable and reproducible manner the original seed or disturbance which gave rise to the work. 3. the exhausted writer, the one with dirt in its eyes and broken fingers, the one whose entire personality seems disheveled, insomniac and malnourished, the one whose speech is torn and bleeding— such are the signs of one who has written themselves out of a pit. 4. the successful painter will never run out of things to paint because it will can always paint the same thing again and again. the successful artist must run out of things to paint because it will have painted its way to the end of painting. there is a multitude of successful painters but few successful artists. 5. success is in a large part a measure of the responsibility one is willing to assume for the failure of the entire enterprise.

suffering: n; 1. suffering is an opprtunity to learn. most of the time this opprtunity to learn is not one for those who are suffering. they generally know enough, sometimes even more than enough. 2. the only thing of value in suffering can be found at its edges, that is, where it ends. 3. suffering is the re-surfacing of a radical, abstract negation that has been denied, ignored. the insistence of the non-existence of such negativity provides the means as well as the caverns and cells within which suffering can perfect itself. there is also another kind of suffering: suffering by proxy. here, radical negativity has been recognized, even welcomed, and this enables the unseen suffering of others to be assumed, to be borne as one’s own. 4. there are those who wish that an artist, a poet, must not necessarily suffer in order to create. they forget, or do not understand, or wish not to admit that all creative activity originates in a lack of balance, in contradiction. the more radical this conflict the more profound and profuse the creative activity. and of course any personal contradiction is a burden and the more radical it is the more unbearable it becomes. and so, the link between suffering and creative activity is a structural necessity. to have it any other way would be a denial of the truth and so would only further complicate and add to personal contradictions. 5. suffering, unable to rid itself of its suitor, life, is burdened with the guilt of infidelity towards its only true love, death, from which it has been separated and for which it searches. 6. suffering presumes and involves others, necessarily whereas pain excludes them.

sufism: n; 1. when a man marries he embarks on a ship, and when a child is born he suffers shipwreck (Ibrahim ibn Adham). 2. every thing that is ordinary is imaginary.

sugar: n; one can perceive love as something tangible only when one lives life with the acknowledgment that death lives next door and that at any time and without warning death may knock on your door and ask to borrow a cup of sugar.

suicide: n; 1. the personal view of the world excludes a portion of reality which instead of disappearing with neglect intensifies and makes its presence felt to such a degree and with such great frequency that one's beliefs etc. are eradicated and the personality crumbles. it can happen very quickly. a way to guard against such destruction is to remember that one's perspectives and beliefs are perspectives and beliefs in and concerning metaphors. and behind these there is a mystery which nullifies any belief or perspective which you might have. this mystery also reminds us that all we can ever have is this incomplete and fragile belief or perspective. 2. any attempt to dissuade the suicide always stresses the idea that one shouldn't throw away the life that one was given. unfortunately, life is given to no one, one is life. and sometimes life wants to close its eyes and sleep. 3. the horse, exhausted, struggles for a breath. 4. life should always be responsive to reasonable demands. a life that has never supported your efforts, a life that has continually frustrated you while seeming to revel in your disappointment is not a life one should prostrate oneself before, begging for clemency. such a life is to be refused. such a renunciation is the only dignified action remaining to one who has come to understand that life is a foundation and when it is an unbearable burden it is because i am beneath life, in hell, forced to bear the entire foundation on myself.

suivre: v; i am, i am following.

summer: n; in summer it is difficult to find the night in the day. on the other hand, in autumn it can be found in every leaf. the poet needs this day-night.

superfluous: adj; 1. when i sit down on a bench the sidewalk, and in fact the entire street, continues on without me. 2. the question how can one prove a person is not an automaton? is in many ways identical to the question how can one prove a person is not superfluous? most importantly, both questions can only be answered through demonstration.

supplication: n; 1. power crawls into empty words (such as happiness) and resides there as though in a manger, as though we are all to kneel before it with our gifts. 2. if you neglect your life to the point that you must beg a doctor to return it do not expect a miracle.

support: n; 1. some have said that my conception of the world, my vision of the world and its relation to human life, is depressing and that it makes it difficult for one to exist in the world. the opposite is true. for me, my conception of the world is precisely that which makes existence in this world bearable. 2. it is usually the case that a proposed art project will fail if there are insufficient funds to support it. in other words, an inspiration, a conception, that cannot be financially supported remains unrealized. it is unfortunate that some of these projects are not attempted and carried out to the point where there financial support ends. in such an undertaking the moment when the financial support failed will be visually apparent. such moments are not trivial; such moments are important and worthy of presentation and of public scrutiny. in fact, the presence of an incomplete and insufficiently supported project may be the only way to represent the distance between an artist's vision and it social context.

suppression: n; society as a whole remembers, bears in silence, the content of what is suppressed. it is the individual however that bears the entire burden of the act of suppression, the violence of it.

surplus: n; if there were no surplus of the real over reality, if no abyss opened constantly between them, our living would simply be on the level of analogy rather than that of metaphor.

surprise: n; it is always those things you turn your back to that approach and ultimately arrive, unseen.

surrealism: n; 1. to be surreal is to be a metaphor. to live a surreal moment one must live a metaphorical moment. a metaphorical event has been previously defined as the process of experience. 2. surrealism is the expression of the mystery of perception /existence exercised through juxtaposition, distortion, fantasy, and irrationality as exercised in my case primarily on the `image'. 3. everything is a prop in some psychological landscape (whether it is or not does not matter because all one can perceive is a reality that has imposed on it the fantastic personal and or collective psychological landscape). everything is surreal and the reality of objects is of course illusion; their very representation, either by word or photograph or simply their perception is an example of the classic surreal representation (Margritte's ‘this is not a pipe’). 4. the ideal surreal juxtaposition is so wrong, so rationally inadequate that it works by not allowing one to hold dearly to the mere image, it forces one to transcend the image and allows one to glimpse that unutterable which the image is merely an approximation. the hallmark surrealist technique of the juxtaposition of two objects is a demonstration of the metaphysical concept where the reality of the absolute (the one) and the reality of the multifarious (the many) are shown to be compatible (in a necessarily irrational and therefore unsettling way). in other words: this is shown and experienced as not equal to that (which is the experienced reality of the world of the many) while at the same time this is also shown to be (or insisted to be) strangely equal to that (which is the experienced reality of the absolute). 5. the hope of prolonged surrealist action is born with juxtaposition, with the simple juxtaposition of a child lifting its feces from the toilet and holding it up for display to its mother while saying daddy.

survival: n; communication is possible only because we are able to live in the illusion that we are unchanging, when in fact, all is in constant flux. if a person were to visibly age every second, or were to be transformed every second into an unpredictable form, the phenomenon of two people conversing about something would be understood for the miracle that it is. the fact that something survives the constant change and that this survivor is implicated with language seems more than coincidental. and what is this survivor, this residue? what are its limitations and what kind of change is more than it can withstand?

suspicion: n; 1. suspicion is the antagonist of appearance (criticism is the antagonist of presence). in an un-critical society, that is, in a society where the pursuit of un-critical living is valued, there is an unquestioning acceptance of appearance (presence). the uncritical minds of such an uncritical society are hopelessly disposed towards the inhuman(e). 2. many poets consider language to be their friend; they trust everything it says. i am suspicious of language; i always hear it speaking behind my back.

sustenance: n; 1. the machines built by humans can never be human partly because they are sustained mechanically. to be human is to be supported by dialectical tension(s). 2. when interpreting creative work it is important to recognize the difference between work that is fundamental and that which is fund-mental. 3. those who value the ethic of economic growth (and its necessity to attract foreign investment / speculation) over the ethic of economic sustenance (the ability to provide for citizens) should not be surprised when they witness, when they are forced to maneuver around and perhaps respond to the open palms of the casualties of efficiency.

swine: n; the teat of opinion is always available— one just has to lie in the mud and suck.

syllogism: n; an example:

a) when confronted with poetry something which is said to possess artificial intelligence (materialist assumption of what mind is) breaks down, babbles, becomes incoherent and unstable.

b) when confronted with poetry modern (western, technocratic, economically motivated) man breaks down, babbles, becomes incoherent and unstable.

c) modern man is artificially intelligent.

note: artificial intelligence must always fail as it is a contradiction in terms. intelligence is always open to experience, to language. that is, all experience (all living in the world) is echoed in every moment and in every word sometimes clearly, sometimes so faintly that one might say there is nothing there). intelligence then is open to living. this openness to living is what i would term being alive (and being alive i would consider contradictory to being artificial).

symbol: n; an artifact of tension(s), of intention(s).

symmetry: n; a universal symmetry is evident in gene expression at the level of a single cell where a cascade of gene expression will be realized once a certain event occurs e.g. switch turned on or off. so too has galactic history been realized as a cascade of events from a single event or change in the status of some switch. in fact scientific thought itself is symmetric with the above as well in the way that any reality at time=present as expressed in the form of knowledge is a part of the cascade of knowledge which proceeded from some initial observation (or paradigmatic assumption). in fact i believe one can find such symmetry in everything perceptible and it is this fact which is so interesting. it is like looking at an object and at whatever magnification you are using you observe the same shape. so what does this mean. is this symmetry just some placebo effect of our perception, an artifact of it? if so then perception of something necessarily implies the existence of an infinite series (infinite symmetries) extending on either side of it (in micro and macro). this means that the more we perceive the more that comes into existence. the universe, the known universe and the unknown universe, becomes larger, expands.

sympathy: n; the poet is separated from other writers (journalists, essayists, novelists, etc.) by a unique form of sympathy. the poet is able to identify completely with a situation which it may not have experienced before; yet, the poet has experienced it… essentially. where others must research, or imagine, where others might at least live as though, or attempt to identify with… the poet is. this is the poet’s burden and the poet’s gift. and it is this particularity which must be carried for life through crowds and loneliness to be delivered at last to the only recipient worthy of it, the only being able to bear it properly: death.

symptom: n; something which by its necessity brings about its own negation (e.g. the presence of a brain and rational ability brings about the possibility of irrationality and madness) is what Lacan (according to Zizek) calls a symptom. the presence of a symptom indicates a place where one system is penetrated / linked to another system. it is only through the discovery of such symptoms that the greater complexity and inter-relationships of systems can be understood. as a corollary: Artificial Intelligence will always fail until those in the pursuit admit that intelligence requires (or entails) the symptom of the possibility of error, revolt, madness.

system: n; 1. a set of indeterminate signs, which instead of denoting something, defer to each other and so create a context. context then is nothing more than a set of indeterminacies which have come into proximity to one another, which appear to orbit a common concern. this is a system and a system appears to be something foundational, self-evident. but it is nothing of the sort, it is a phantasm, an accumulation of deferred reference. such a phantasm must be grounded with force yet can be dispersed imaginatively, by anyone. 2. a room in which you are supposed to occupy yourself, in which you are supposed to find something to do. the artist always wants what is outside of the room and should work to find a way out of the room.