Deep Surface

At the I-WET weekend I attended last November, I heard Stuart Davis talking to another attendee about the language that he had been creating for five years or so, and that he intended to continue building for the rest of his life. I didn’t get why anyone would want to go to the trouble of building a language. After all, there are already plenty of them out there that seem to work just fine, why add another?

Now I get it. This quote is from Stuart’s recent blog post about the language IS in which he includes some screen shots of beautiful calligraphy.

The notion is, as a native speaker of IS, the Unity Of Opposites is a built-in assumption. It’s a pre-given filter. In fact, it would be invisible to a native speaker, they would not have to “conceive” of the unity underlying opposites, it would be fundamentally imprinted, an ultra-obvious fact of function. Multiply that operation in the (superficial) duality of yes / no by five thousand now. What if every opposite and duality in your field of perception were instantaneously fused with its negative correlate into a phenomenological complementarity? Wouldn’t that ACTUALLY, literally correspond more closely to your experience, your deeper experience? What opposite holds up to ultimate scrutiny?

Is that fucking brilliant, or what? (curse word inserted for Stu) Read his entire post to really understand what he’s trying to do. There’ also a part two (thanks to Graham English for the heads-up).

[Edit: Part 3 added.]