a:

waif: n; the canadian book is anorexic. it is forced by internal and external pressures to fit (shrink) into the ideal body of sixty pages. the book must be starved in order to be presentable, in order to be desirable. in the process it becomes powerless, pathetic, even painful to look at.

wall: n; 1. when the writer's art fails, walls are reinforced. when the art succeeds wall are not torn down but are instead transformed into windows. 2. whenever i see a film i am reminded of the wall that supports the images, a wall which reminds me of the world that it occludes, the world that one cannot escape except in a delusional way. and so, when i watch a film i am immersed in a delusion, gazing towards a world that i am absenting myself from.

war: n; 1. on the eve of war we are confronted with images of horror, images of death and suffering. it is on such an occasion when the truly convulsive beauty of irrational images can really have an effect. it is on such an occasion that instead of seeing preparations for war on television, instead of reading journals dedicated to peace or to war, if war is truly to be avoided one should behold images which release one from war. the streets should be filled with weeping men and nude women on stepladders reaching in vain for their clothes which are flying away. the war images can be saved for peacetime and for after the war has started. in other words the images of war should be experienced as they happen, and as they are remembered. 2. something that has not yet matured into a word. 3. any government that pursues war as a matter of policy, of habit, is a government that has declared war on its own people.

wasp: n; 1. the sweat of satan (what could the earth have done to deserve such a punishment). 2. it is true that dogs will bark at those they do not recognize but wasps will sting anyone.

water: n; if water is the agent which impregnates the earth or is at least that which removes the state of infertility, then a drowned person must be the fruit of the fertile earth. the process of drowning is then either process of conception or is the elimination of what is infertile.

wealth: n; 1. in a world where one penny is all that one requires, where all things cost one penny, there exists a man who has just dropped his only penny into a well. he is now the poorest man in this world. where everyone else can get whatever they want he can get nothing. 2. “wealth is the means of obtaining an illusory opinion of oneself from others” - Jean Starobinski.

weather: n; in the neighborhood of non-existence, of nothingness, it is always unbearably windy.

web: n; the internet is the most desperate web yet created by the system of the patriarchs. it is also the most subtle. in light of the system's eroding hegemony it had to come up with something to ensnare those who would dare speak of a realm outside of what presently exists. the internet, in its obviousness, uses its masculine, capitalist, materialist excesses in order to camouflage its subtle web. and it has been very successful. when you hear it is a tool of democratization and other such ideo-babble spoken by even the marginalized you understand that it is consciousness itself which has been trapped and which is being encased. when you see people proclaim the end of something (e.g. books) while defending whatever it is which will replace it it should be obvious that in the larger picture nothing is ending at all— things are just continuing as usual. the old power structures are feasting on their usual prey. the only difference is that they have to adapt to a new form of resistance.

wedding: v; a coming together out of trouble. trouble is related to turmoil / crowd. to pass out of turmoil is to approach stillness. however, there is another element involved. this other element is the notion of a promise- a promise to guard / maintain / shelter this stillness which has been attained. that there must be a promise suggests that in attaining this stillness something has been lost or sacrificed which is not recoverable. it also suggests that the turmoil / crowd has the effect of drawing one away from this stillness, from this wedded state. to make such a promise is to acknowledge the presence of turmoil and its effects; such a promise also acknowledges the reality of stillness and respects it.

there is a mysterious aspect to this stillness, an aspect where words run out of breath. it has to do with the fact that the phenomenon / ceremony of wedding involves two people. it is as though the stillness which is to be attained only comes into being in the presence of two people who are coming together out of turmoil, out of the crowd.

wedding-cage: n; hold the poem as though it were a fence or a cage. there is an ambiguity as to which side of the cage/fence you are on, an uncertainty which causes you to hold on tightly and stare into what is on the other side of your barrier. it is uncertain whether you are still a prisoner or if you are free. if you are still a prisoner you stare into what awaits and your grip betrays an intention of breaking free of your present condition. on the other hand, if you are already free, you stare back into the limitations that once defined you and your grip betrays a fear of freedom.

welcome: v; when you have not found a place that has welcomed your living, a place that has been a home to your living, it is very important that at the very least you find a place that will welcome, that will be a home to your dying.

whore: n; as there is nothing to say to those who must pimp for their pen (since they must inevitably pay the price for their venal descent) i can only speak to those johns who frequent such creations — please use protection; the diseases one can encounter are communicable and fatal.

why: n; 1. why? is the sound your head makes hitting the concrete steps as it stumbles down the staircase that leads from a certain transcendent level of being or meditation to a lower level of being or meditation. 2. why do i write ? i write because i have always experienced the written as something alive. thought (and therefore necessarily, action) is disturbed by the written, is changed, even if only by the smallest amount, by words. i have experienced the written as the world in a potent and pervasive form; as a writer i experience the journey to the written as a potent and pervasive extension of my self/being. but why write? it was because of the encounter with the world in all its pervasiveness in a bookstore. it was a chance encounter between my self/being and a book. at the same time it was not a chance encounter. the book was Last Poems, by Paul Celan (translated by Katherine Washburn and Margaret Guillemin), the poem was:

soul inclined towards you

hears you

thundering,

in the pit of your throat

my star learns to sink

and become true,

i pull it out again—

come, conjure with it,

this very day

i took the book home and did not open it until i was home. i was afraid of it. i knew it was going to alter something fundamental. my encounter with this book, with this written, was an encounter with a door which opened onto the rooms of my past experience, which i recognized as myself, and my future experiences, which i did not recognize but desired to be. in this structure i saw my early exposure to the Romantic tradition and then my complete submersion in Surrealism. i saw the words of Benjamin Peret; they were a hand, one finger pointing to the book of Last Poems i was holding. a circle had closed and i was for the first time, inside my self/being. from here i could at last see not only my writing but the why? of my writing. the why? i understood to be literally the response-ability of living. as i am able to respond linguistically/poetically, i write. but this is not all there is to the why? there is also a world-element, which is what is responded to, which calls and is answered. in writing. this world-element transcends the written and can be experienced only through the written. in the same way i transcend the written and can somehow be for (experienced by) the world-element only through the written. there is a point at which the world-element and its concerns, its suffering bleeds into me; and this is the same place where i bleed into it. this place is the written. in this sense writing is a blood-pact, an engagement. 2. when a child is born it does not ask give me an abstraction that will dictate my possibilities of living; or, i want a god! what a child asks for, with its first breath, is: where am i, who am i, who are you and why are you here, where is here, why this and why that? and so on… these questions continue forever. or at least until they are crushed by the imposition of irrelevancies and absurd moral concerns.

will: n; 1. (see play) 2. a debate i have with the general will (as it exists) concerns its de-valuation, or more correctly, its vilification of suicide. all my learning and experience has led me to the understanding that it is not only natural but it is my personal duty to live my life to its end— the end being that place, that attainment that opens onto a certainty that there is no more living and that it is time to leave. it is my duty to find this moment because, as with all finalities, such an act has the power to define, to organize its/the past. that such an act is considered morally wrong indicates to me that living is not understood, that living is in fact feared and is something to be avoided. living, in such a setting, has been overwhelmed by the overvalued merits of blind endurance. 3. the strength of my will is always the measure of that which opposes it. of course, where there is no opposition there is no force of will, no movement... no life. 4. the will to live— “an illusion based scourge.” – Cioran. 5. “the will acting in harmony with its moral principles does not know obligation” – Kant.

window: n; 1. what i lack is the ability to say the perfect thing at the right moment. this may be a definition of a poet, one who says the perfect things at the wrong times and who must wait until a moment arrives which can appropriate his utterances, a perfect moment which may very well never arrive. i don't know what you would call someone who says the perfect thing at the right time, hopefully a friend. 2. an open window is the controlled and reproducible negation of itself.

wing: n; a wing takes the sky seriously.

wise: adj; wisdom has not avoided crises, it has lived through them. it is an indication that truth has been endured.

Wittgenstein: n; 1. “what does not get expressed in the sign is shown by its application. what the signs conceal the application declares. you learned the concept pain when you learned language.” 2. “problems arise when language goes on a holiday.”

woman: n; the purest most concentrated precipitation of desire.

wood: n; what the martyr forgets the cross will remember. wood has its own history of humiliation and resilience, of sacrifice and transcendence.

word: n; 1. in the naming of things (e.g. adenosine = adeno/gland of an ox) the word is a marker or flag which indicates someone has been in a particular place. words are exercises in mapping. 2. the word was released into the world in order to recover something, in order to return something that was lost to its source. this event is commonly referred to as the beginning. 3. “every letter wears a paper shirt” - Mirza Ghalib. 4. we all have the words we deserve. and our words cannot help but carry into the world whatever treasures, whatever rot, that constitutes our minds.

work: n; 1. the various incubations of desire are the basis for all my creative work. it is enough sometimes to think of something, to wish for it intensely and then to store this wish deeply out of time (only there can it gestate). eventually it emerges and far surpasses my initial seed of desire. 2. work mediates human and world. 3. a passion does not just happen. 4. because you spend a lot of time doing things that don't matter does not mean you are working hard, it just means you are spending a lot of time doing irrelevant things. perhaps you are obsessive? more than likely you are using this supposed hard work as a means of avoiding some necessary hard work.

work poem: n; an oxymoron. work, or the workplace and its concerns are in opposition to the realm of poetry. in fact the workplace is hostile to poetry in that it is economically driven. one may even say that the workplace attempts to eradicate any signs that poetry exists. and so when one says that he/she has written a poem about the workplace from the standpoint of the worker in the workplace, this statement is false. the time spent in the realm of poetry is time spent outside of the workplace. what one has created instead is a poet's experience of the workplace. to insist that a particular poem contains the essence of the worker is completely false. the worker's experience of the workplace is excluded from poetry. any poetry experienced in the workplace is experienced as a poet and not as a worker.

world: n; 1. when musil speaks of the world as idea he is correct but not accurate. since the world is non-rational it would be more accurate to refer to the world as hallucination or maybe better, imagination. 2. the event of being (a totality). the world is apparently distinct from a person's world-view and a person's action-in-the-world (action) though it is in reality a unity. the world is apparently related to world-view and action in the following way:

world

‚/ \

action ßËà world-view

where world-view = the possibilities (and hence limits) of our action-in-the-world;

and where action-in-the-world = a realized possibility of a world-view.

in the above diagram the relationship of the three aspects is based on reciprocity. the reciprocal relationships ‚ and ƒ are required for the person to exist at all (a person whose action does not affect or is not affected by the world in any way cannot exist; a person who has a world-view which is not affected by or does not affect any action is a contradiction if a world-view is itself an active process and a parent to any action). it is a different matter with the reciprocal relationship . this relationship does not have to function reciprocally and need not even function at all. the effect of the world on the world-view can be thought of as a continuum of challenge. the reciprocal effect of the world-view on the world is thought, understanding, knowledge (see Geometry). the proper functioning of relationship involves the world challenging the world-view and the world-view becoming informed/transformed. if the challenge is great enough, that is, different enough from the world-view a rift will develop. this rift is the measure of the lack of correlation between the world-view and the world. the greater such a rift the greater, more revolutionary the transformation of the world-view (it must heal the rift). since relationship is reciprocal, there are two ways it could not function to its full potential. firstly, a world-view may be unable to affect the world; what this means is that the world has no substrate to affect. in other words, the person would be alive but would have little or no cognitive capabilities. secondly, the world may not be able to challenge the world-view; such a possibility implies that there can be no rift at all between the world-view and the world. in other words, the world-view is the world. given the assumption that there is such a thing as a world-view (a limitation of (human) being) this is an impossibility. however, it is possible in an approximate sense. by this i mean that the world challenges the world-view but the world-view, by its own structure or by other means, is kept from receiving the challenge. the world-view then assumes/acts as though there is no rift. this is not a problem until the rift is so large that the world-view is entirely inappropriate. intolerance, orthodoxy, madness all require this particular suppression of relationship .

wound: n; 1. there is a wound inside us. it is our root, our commonality. this wound is also in everything. we and all things have been bled into existence. 2. “the interval separating me and my corpse is a wound” – Cioran. fiction attempts to fill in this wound whereas a poem attempts to bridge it, even to leap across it. the result is that a poem desires to preserve the wound. the reason for this is that the wound is poetry.

wrist: n; the wrist often must choose between being strapped with time and being slashed.

write: v; 1. all this writing is a blindness and a wall along which one searches for an opening. there is no opening, no doorway. the wall is solid and the darkness complete. one may walk away from the wall if one wishes, one doesn't require the wall to live. but it is for that person who searches the walls long enough that occasionally a moment will come when that person will find him/herself on the other side of the wall. on this other side they can see and all they see becomes translated and understood to be some sort of support. in other words, everything they see is what gives everything on the dark side of the wall dimension and warmth and vibration. to arrive in this seeing world the person has passed through no door, instead they exist in two places at one time, on either side of the wall; they can see themselves blindly searching in the dark world for a way to become the self that is watching them from the other side. and then it happens that this seeing self passes again into the blindness, into that body which is searching along the walls, driven by the memory of a seeing self that passes into it from time to time. 2. the truly creative act of writing is at first apocalyptic and then is regenerative. that is, all that is deformed by history is flooded, dissolved, and then is reformed into something that is unknown to history's stench. 3. i write because i write. if anyone gives a reason for their writing, for their creation you can be sure that they have written/created nothing. to give a reason is to claim a control over the act of writing/creating. in reality, there is no control for the act is nothing human at all. to write is to be a receptacle and one can only ready oneself for some filling which may never occur. reasons, justifications are usually props used to support works that cannot stand on their own (because they are in reality nothing). 4. a person who knows something will have nothing to write or to speak about whereas a person who knows nothing will always have something to write, something to say. 5. after learning how to write concisely (in order that ambiguity can be clearly rendered) the most important skill to learn is elliptical writing (for the reason that what is clearly understood / accepted can be rendered ambiguous / negotiable). 6. someone i know said they wanted to write a book and so they were trying to get funding in order to write the book. i thought this was funny, if not a bit absurd, being unaware of any reason why someone might need money in order to write a book. i suppose the money would be necessary if they needed to buy some eyes. 7. “to write is a means of expression at grief’s disposal”- M. Blanchot. 8. if you write every day it is impossible not to have many lives, in fact, too many lives. some of them live in stasis and can be re-activated, others can be used for parts; some can always be used as sacrificial beings.

writer: n; 1. one who is unable to complete a personal letter. 2. the writer is always first a reader. 3. frightened by the beauty and the confidence of the naked presence of all that is important in life, the writer clothes what is troubling in words. even though the clothes may be revealing, they still serve to obscure. 4. the writer understands that there is an economy encompassing everything, a relentless process of exchange. however, the writer also experiences the sensation of being outside of life, in exile from the most basic processes of social being. this sensation leads to the possibility that the universal economy exists for others; the exile is nameless and unaccountable... this sense of freedom may be the only reason a writer writes, especially when it cannot be denied that all life is suffering, that all life is a nightmare. writing exists so long as there is the sense that something is being added (or negated) without the powers that be taking any notice. there is something devious, illicit about it all. 5. writing, like thinking, requires withdrawal, a mental withdrawal, in order to function effectively. strictly speaking, what this means is that when one is writing one is always a writer first. for instance, when writing a love poem one is not a lover, one is not physically or mentally accomplishing the actions, responsibilities, or investments required by the appellation lover. verbal foreplay is not the same as writing just as writing is not the same as having sex. to write a love poem one must absent oneself from the love object. more specifically, one can only accomplish a love poem in the absence of a love object. the same holds for any type of writing. it is disingenuous of those who claim they are writing from the heart of some experience (see work poem) enabling their writing to bear with it a treasure of authenticity. every writer is as withdrawn from their concern as any other writer. that is, as long as the writer is still accepting the ontological conditions of writing — once these are refused the writing stops, the writer vanishes to perhaps live submerged authentically in an experience... but, no one can ever know anything about matters such as these. 6. “variety is the only excuse for abundance.” - F. Pessoa. 7. the difference between the printed word and the written thought is what lifts the writer into art and away from writers. 8. “Not everyone is mortal. Not everyone has this difficult fortune.”- Hélène Cixous. 9. to write you must use language, as Valéry says, “as though you invented it yourself”. 10. a writer travels very rapidly along a path through a mysterious forest. sometimes the writer is flying above the trees and running along the ground simultaneously... it is exhilarating and exhausting. eventually during its journey a writer will notice that something is moving alongside it, also at a great speed— a vehicle of sorts. when the writer stops running and steps into this vehicle the vehicle becomes a career. at the same time a fork appears in the road, behind the writer. the forest and the dark paths, the mystery and the uncertain horizons recede. a career cannot travel as quickly as a writer... risk and adventure have no legs in a landscape of deliberation and method. travelling in a career a writer can never be more than a passenger. the days of running and flying simultaneously are long past. should the writer wish to return to them, should the writer desire to disembark, there is no guarantee that such an action will not be fatal, just as there is no guarantee that once a writer finds itself able to travel independently it will not be too weak, too degraded to do anything more than crawl. 11. there is nothing more incomprehensible to the public than the geography and the climate of a writer’s life or all that being a writer entails. i won’t even mention being a poet as such knowledge is apparently forbidden (or perhaps lethal). 12. “an author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one.” – W. Benjamin. 13. hell is white. heaven is white. everything else is black. 14. “the cult of youth, an obsession with immaturity exploited for demagogic ends and turned into an absolute value, is the surest sign that a writer or a thinker is about to go off the rails” B.-H. Levy. 15. “At the very least, a mind enclosed in language is in prison”.- Simone Weil. 16. i once believed that a writer was simply someone who writes. time has passed and i understand now that a writer is someone who has written, someone who has experienced completion. what is the next step in this series? what can more time reveal to me? where do i go from here? 17. “a destroyer who adds to existence” – Cioran. 18. there are some things a writer must write… and then destroy.

writing: v; 1. there is a homophonic moral imperative in writing. it is the opposite of wronging. 2. i am too large, too clumsy to enter many of living's most important spaces. however, i can write my way into them. 3. in writing, night becomes a verb— i night.- Hélène Cixous. 4. the knowledge that writing divines is knowledge that can be acquired in no other way. 5. writing is a net that spans a chasm. it is a delicate thing that is constantly in need of mending. 6. all writing begins facing poetry. almost all writing ends face down in a mire, exhausted, no closer to poetry than when it began. 7. writing begins when you prepare to fall down the staircase that will never accept you.