“formist”

大人 = big people = adults
小人 = little people = kids (this and above like in toki pona)
写真 = reality copy = photography
売買= sell buy = trade
靴下 = shoes under  = socks
台訶= pedestal talk = speech
赤ちゃん= little red (one) = baby
西日 = west sun = setting sun
姉妹 = older sister, younger sister = sisters (older/younger sister are basic concepts!)

You don’t write for the past, who can’t read you.
Only in tangent do you write for the present, gone already.
Writing is not speaking, you speak for the present, you write for the future.

Reactions, eventually, come.

My answer to life, the universe, and everything:

Sarah Manguso wrote a short memoir on her 9 years with a strange, terrible, Guillain Barre -ish disease: The Two Kinds of Decay. There’s something about her style—short paragraphs, understatement, detachment—that compels me, and though on occasion she can be clumsy with metaphors, she can write fragments of simple, unexpected poignancy:

To be is to change
    for how can something that never changes itself or others be said to exist?
    one might as well call it even with nothingness
To change is to die
    for something else always results
    something always is no more
To die is to birth
    for something else always results
    something new always is

This strange text above was inspired by Greg Egan, who has in a few months become my favorite author, and who in all his novels I’ve read—Schild’s Ladder, Permutation City, Diaspora—is obsessed by identity in far deeper and more interesting ways than everything I’d found, thought, or imagined before—how to grow up without being replaced by a stranger, asks Tchicaya? how to be immortal without changing to death, asks Peer? how not to unravel without bounding oneself, asks Yatima?

and no one suffers more injuries than sportsmen
and no one bankrupts more than entrepreneurs
and no one hurts more than lovers
and no one cries more than those who seek happiness

no one fails more than those who try

Starting an artificial language has been a recurrent dream of mine. As a subscriber to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the shape of our language is the shape of our thought), a believer in ending Babel through an auxlang, a pathological formist, and an admirer of the grace, elegance, and pleasure to be found in conlangs such as Esperanto and toki pona, I believe the enterprise worth a lifetime, worth my lifetime.

But of course, given my extremist bent, I want to start an artificial language that subsumes all languages. A language to make languages, like in John Varley’s beautiful Persistence of Vision. An extensible language to gobble up and be enriched by the thoughts and feelings of as many souls as the universe will ever have. A perfectly regular language that can be learned in a week but never mastered. The creation of a self-conscious, language-obsessed culture but learnable by the illiterate. A language so abstract and basic, it can be embodied inside any symbolic system, be it based on sounds, graphics, gestures, raised dots, or farts; be it English, Maori, or Farsi. A language of infinite expressibility, synthetic and analytic, vague and precise, formal and casual, exquisite and coarse. A language that will outlast the stars.

The key, I think, lies in internal flexibility. The ideal is to do for language what the Hindu-Arabic numeral system did for numbers. Not only will there be no arbitrary, capricious limits to word creation, it will be a language of pure word creation, able to convey books in a word, lifetimes in a sentence. It will be a language complete in itself yet always growing.

After years of frenzying about it late at night, the language finally got its first name, despite it not yet having a transliteration, let alone any words. It’s self-referentially called, among infinite names, the-language-this-word-belongs-to.