"In the Land of Invented Languages," "Blissymbolics," and the new Radiolab episode, "Bliss"

The first story in a recent episode of Radiolab ("Bliss": http://www.radiolab.org/2012/dec/17/) follows a character named Charles Bliss, who is one of many subjects in this book...:

In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius (by Arika Okrent)

(Previously titled: In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried To Build A Perfect Language)

...Charles Bliss turns out to be an incredibly interesting character who, after having experienced the Nazi propaganda machine and the concentration camps, decided to create a universal language that he thought would cure the world of all its social ills. He published his ideas and a guide to learning his universal language in this book:

Semantography (Blissymbolics): A Logical Writing for an Illogical World

"Bliss believed that war was often caused by the misuse of language, and he believed it could be overcome if we could create a way to communicate the truth without the trickery of words. Having lived through the hell of Nazi concentration camps, he set about creating the perfect language, based on symbols and logic." (Quote taken from the Radiolab website.) 

It is an extremely fascinating story that takes a bit of a sad and ironic turn. I highly recommend listening to it! http://www.radiolab.org/2012/dec/17/

I'm just about to order and read the Arika Okrent book...the Charles Bliss book is now a rare out-of-print book -- maybe I'll find a copy of it one day. Anyway, check it out!

The Evolution of Symbolic Language

From NPR's 13.7 Cosmos & Culture Blog (an awesome blog, by the way)

"Most organisms communicate, but humans are unique in communicating via symbolic language. This entails relationships between signifiers (e.g. words) and what's signified (e.g. objects or ideas), where what's special is the construction of a system of relationships among the signifiers themselves, generating a seemingly unlimited web of associations, organized by semantic regularities and constraints, retrieved in narrative form, and enabled by complex memory systems.

Humans are thus a symbolic species: symbols have literally changed the kind of biological organism we are. We think and behave in ways that are quite odd compared to other species because of the way that language has defined us. Symbolic language has become the dominant feature of the cultural environment to which we must adapt in order to flourish; the demands imposed by this niche have favored mental capacities and biases that guarantee successful access to this essential resource."

Read the rest here.

What is a number or a symbol?

So, I thought others might be interested in this 10-page excerpt from another of Crowley's works titled 777. I found it to be of a similar, if not identical rationale to our class discussion earlier today. Click each image to enlarge.

A Date to Remember

Last fall for an anthropology paper I read a book entitled Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg. The book is a series of short essays about language and is a really fun read. Under the section SYMBOLS is an essay about how we talk about/represent/symbolize important historical events and why. He mentions 9/11 and I thought today would be a good day to share it.
Nunberg is insightful, clever and quite entertaining. I highly recommend this book and it's fairly inexpensive on Amazon. You'll probably hear more about Nunberg from me as the semester progresses so I thought this would be a good place to start. Click on the pages to view them full size.

I pledge allegiance to the flag

Last night was "Meet the Candidates Night" for our hometown. Lyn, along with several other candidates, is running for City Council. A representative of the League of Women Voters ran the meeting, reading questions written by members of the large audience. Each candidate had 90 seconds to answer each question. It was a hurried but informative hour and a half. But the really interesting part came at the end when citizens had a chance to ask questions of individual candidates.

Let me get straight to the point, an ex-mayor's wife asked Lyn. There's gossip going around town that you won't salute the flag or say the pledge of allegiance. Is that true?

That's true, Lyn answered, and then explained her reluctance to swear allegiance to any symbol. I try to let my deeds stand for my commitment to this democracy, she said.

The explanation didn't seem to sit well, and certainly the gossip will have heated up by this morning.

I don't say the pledge of allegiance either, and while walking our dog this morning I reviewed my reasons:

1. I have seen Leni Riefenstahl's film "Triumph of the Will."
2. I have an aversion to the coercions of crowds.
3. I believe in the separation of church and state.
4. I don't believe that I or this country are "under God."
5. Loyalty oaths make me break out in hives.
6. I believe that symbols are only what we make of them, and I'd like to make as little of this symbol as possible, given its role in an often sketchy history.
7. I love Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner.

In fact, the last pledge of allegiance to the flag I enjoyed went as follows:

30 October 1996, Orem

A Cub Scout “pack” meeting in the church gymnasium. The boys and their Den Mothers are wearing costumes for Halloween. Bishop Gunderson, wearing a trim Scout uniform, asks us to rise for the presenting of the colors. He salutes smartly. The rest of us place our hands over our hearts. The first boy in the color guard wears a blue-and-gold Cub Scout uniform. The third boy is dressed like a bloody but elegant vampire. Marching between the Cub Scout and the vampire, carrying the flag, is my son Samuel. In the dress and wig his brother Benjamin wore last year. There are scattered chuckles as Samuel levers the flag into the heavy brass stand. I pledge allegiance, the vampire begins. Samuel rips the wig from his head and holds it over his heart. To the flag of the United States of America.

War graves defaced with Nazi symbols

By Auslan Cramb, Scottish Correspondent

Last Updated: 1:40am BST 25/10/2007

The graves of British soldiers killed in the Great War have been covered with Nazi symbols in an act condemned as "appalling desecration".

Vandals painted swastikas and SS insignias on the headstones of 32 Scottish soldiers who died during the Battle of the Somme.

The attack caused thousands of pounds worth of damage at the Peake Wood Cemetery near Contalmaison, France, just days before Remembrance Sunday.

The cemetery marks the spot from which the final assault was made on Contalmaison on July 1, 1916, the first day of the battle on which nearly 20,000 men lost their lives.

The 16th Royal Scots, known as McCrae's Battalion, lost almost 75 per cent of their troops.

Many of them were laid to rest at the small cemetery, which records 103 fallen Allied soldiers.

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English campaigners against senseless signs

Linked from http://www.funniez.net/funnynews/1-latest-news/76-CampaignAgainstSigns:

On September, 2007. London campaigners who fight for the effective use of English attacked a growing tendency for obvious and senseless public information posters and instructions, such as a police sign: "Don't Commit Crime."
"They assume a lack of intelligence on the part of the reader - says their spokeswoman. 'Do not commit crime. Pay for your fuel' is hardly a deterrent to a criminal who has every intention of driving off without paying."
The Plain English Campaign cited other examples including:
"Warning: Platform ends here" on the end of rail station platforms,
"May cause drowsiness" on sleeping pills,
"Warning: contains nuts" labeled on packets of nuts,
"Caution: water on road during rain"
"May irritate eyes" on a can of self-defense pepper spray,
"Do not open door while airborne except in emergency" on emergency exit doors in planes,
"Removing the wheel can influence the performance of the bicycle" from a Dutch bicycle manual,
"Do not iron clothes on body" from packaging on a steam iron,
Supermarket Tesco - which also warns shoppers that cream contains milk and that salted butter contains milk and salt - defended itself, saying it gave customers "all the possible information they should need."
The Plain English Campaign said politicians were also guilty of the trend.
"Politicians declaring 'We are taking the terrorist threat very seriously', or 'We are committed to improving the health service' is just rhetoric," he said.
He added: "Our advice would be say what you need to plainly and simply then stop. If nothing needs to be said, say nothing."

In Response to Torben’s “Worn Out Metaphors” Post and Scott’s Comment About It

So...I’m hoping if you’re reading this you have already read Torben’s “Worn Out Metaphors” Post and Scott’s Comment on it, because this post is in response to them...or was sparked by them. I would’ve just put this as an additional comment on that same post but it was becoming to long, with too many links, and to complex...so I’m having it as it’s own post.

...

That is all incredibly interesting! I didn't make this connection (which I'll get into in a minute) until just now...after reading Scott's comment about Torben’s post.

Why in the hell would we want to move away from the body toward abstract images and metaphors anyway? Scott's mother referring to bowel movements as “bee-em’s”, and the George Carlin post, in the context of our discussion on Nietzsche and “worn out metaphors” reminded me of an amazing book that I read a few years ago called "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 (after Becker's death). Becker's main goal was to point to the work of psychoanalyst Otto Rank, who studied closely with Sigmund Freud. After several years of working together, Rank was rejected by Freud over some trivial disagreement. Rank pretty much disappeared after that, but wrote many amazing books that are now being rediscovered. Rank's book "Art and Artist" is pointed to over and over in “The Denial of Death”. Becker also constantly refers to several Kierkegaard books and passages and also Norman O. Brown's book "Life Against Death".

Anyway, how does this tie into Torben’s last post and Scott’s comment on it? Our body is constantly decomposing. It is rotting, aging, decaying and slowly dying. These bodily processes (especially "bee-em's"/shitting), according to many psychoanalysts, subconsciously remind us of our own death...of our mortality. Many psychoanalysts talk about the concept of anality. Becker also talks about anality and makes a very interesting connection that is helpful to us in this discussion. I grabbed this quote quickly, offhand, in an online review of Becker's book... it helps see anality in the way that Becker sees it relating to our behavior: "...anality is viewed as an attempt to deny the possibility of accident or death, to insist on our separation from nature..." (from the California Literary Review). Trivializing and moving away from the reality our natural bodily processes helps distance ourselves from the sometimes depressing fact that our bodies are slowly dying.

So shitting reminds us of our temporary nature and how we are like all other organisms on the earth...we will eventually decay and die and return to our simpler parts that make up what we are through natural processes. But us humans have this weird thing that other organisms don’t have...a sense of irony (telling jokes), a deep cognition, an articulate language that allows us to conceptualize infinity, to think into the future, reflect on the past and relate it all to the present. As Becker points out, this makes us both god-like and worm-like..."this is the human condition", he says.

Again, why in the hell would we want to move away from the body in the way that Plato is encouraging us to and in the way that Nietzsche is telling us to avoid falling into? Moving away from the thing/the body helps us cope with our grim human condition, a way of dealing with our existence, a way of being in the world. The psychoanalysts that I mentioned would obviously say that we want to move from the thing/the body because it is our body that is the reminder of our demise...and we don't want to think about that shit! (ha...where's Alex to out-pun me?) They also point out that, as humans, we are obsessed with our youth (look at any advertisement), obsessed with defying death and the aging process, etc. We build pyramids to preserve and ensure our eternal life. Becker equates all of our creations/buildings/artwork with the building of pyramids...the thirst to be important, to be seen, thought of, to be eternally remembered...including his desire "to write the great book". We create symbols that are supposed to communicate who we are and what our existence means, we create ideologies and religions and we are willing to defend them and fight wars over them, we want to dominate, we want to outlast the other, we want to leave our mark, we want to be remembered. As we have seen in the class, the symbols and the language always (necessarily) fail to do exactly what we want it to do.

My good friend Greg Bennick co-produced a highly praised documentary with a guy named Patrick Shen called “Flight From Death: The Quest For Immortality” (Greg was here at UVSC screening it about year and a half ago). “Flight From Death” completely focuses on Becker’s book and the current research and application of Becker’s ideas about defying death, symbols, language, identification as individuals/countries, violence in defense those symbols and identification, etc. (Very interesting, highly recommended).

Hopefully you all are following my line of thinking...maybe you’d have to see “Flight From Death”, or read “The Denial of Death” to follow...or maybe I’m not making any sense at all???

Coming back to our discussion...now I’m thinking about Alex in class saying how he was, and will forever be, ‘a recovering Platonist’ and that ‘I (he) always need a good dose of Nietzsche to bring me back home (back to the body)’. Observe Torben’s diagram below. (I’m assuming that they are the same notes taken from what Scott was writing on the board in class on Monday.) Plato is pushing us away from the body, into thinking in images and metaphors and using them as tools...something we all do to cope with our human condition (the human condition as described by Ernest Becker). Nietzsche and Aristotle...and might I add the stuff that Alex read from William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”...are all pushing us back toward the body. (Blake: ...the body is not separae from the soul, the body is connected to energy, energy is eternal delight...etc.) This is an absolutely crucial reminder that we are temporary creatures, that we don’t dominate over the physical world. The physical world allows us to exist and we are only a part of it, it can easily annihilate us and we will, without doubt, return to it in death. Who knows if our thoughts, concepts, metaphors, symbols are at all important or if they live on into another form?

As Scott mentioned in class, both of these systems of thought are important for us worm-like/god-like humans. But a balance is necessary! Don’t become Goethe’s character Werther...trying to get so close to the thing/the body he blew his brains out because he couldn’t relate to anyone else, couldn’t not express the ‘thing in itself’, couldn’t use ‘the lie to tell the truth’. At the same time don’t get caught up in dead metaphors...they are only tools to help us think through and compare things, don’t believe the lies you use to tell the truth. I’m trying to think about what would happen to a person on the other extreme from Werther’s suicide...some sort of insanity or complete disconnection from the body (schizophrenia)...??? (If that is true, then it is ironic that Nietzsche went insane instead of killing himself!)

I see this balance as being extremely crucial to our personal mental health/well being as well as a world-wide health/societal well being. I think that this is pretty close what Ernest Becker concludes in “The Denial of Death”...I wonder if he read any Nietzsche or Plato.

What do you think?

P.S. - (I highly recommend "The Denial of Death". Also check out The Ernest Becker Foundation if you are interested.)

The Semiotics of Smoke

In the process of hunting up illustrations for a post about the meanings of smoking I ran across an astonishing example of how a habit, and everything it represents, is systematically being erased not just from daily life — but from history. The photo on the left of Dean perched against the wall of the Dakota in New York is a copy of the original picture taken by Roy Shatt in 1954. The one on the right is the version being licensed by CMG International, the company that now owns the rights to James Dean’s image. Notice anything missing? His cigarette has been Photoshopped out of the licensed version — I assume to make his image more marketable to advertisers that would use it in a world where smoking has become a social disease. The manipulation of dead celebrities’ identities has been going on for awhile, but the irony of sanitizing the original bad boy iconoclast hero — literally pulling the cigarette from his lips forever — is particularly galling.

I’m thinking about smoke. It’s what one does while quitting. And what I’m thinking is that I miss it. Not the smoke itself, of course. The smoke itself is no more enjoyable now than it was the first time I choked on a lung full at the age of eight (don’t worry, I didn’t start smoking that young. I had asked my mother if I could take a drag on her cigarette and she — wisely — said, “Sure.” I did, almost vomited, and didn’t touch another cigarette for almost 20 years…). It’s enjoyable in the same way that the burning poisonous taste of liquor is enjoyable, which is to say: not much. No one really enjoys the medium of illicit or dangerous substances. It’s about the effects, of course, but also something more.

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Charles Baudelaire - Correspondences

Nature is a temple where living pillars

Let sometimes emerge confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
Which watch him with intimate eyes.

Like those deep echoes that meet from afar
In a dark and profound harmony,
As vast as night and clarity,
So perfumes, colours, tones answer each other.

There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh,
Soft as oboes, green as meadows,
And others, corrupted, rich, triumphant,

Possessing the diffusion of infinite things,
Like amber, musk, incense and aromatic resin,
Chanting the ecstasies of spirit and senses.

The History Of Political Symbols i.e. John McCain

Article from Transworldnews.com:

We have all seen the symbols of the donkey and the elephant. We are smothered in newspaper ads, cartoons, and newsbreaks including these as well as the now famous red and blue states. If you have been curious as many of our Americas youth is here is the history behind these famous political symbols.

The Democrat donkey, as it’s called, came to be in the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Jackson’s opponents began calling him a jackass (a donkey) and this lead to Jackson’s choice to use this stubborn symbol, the donkey or mule. The cartoonist, Thomas Nast used the donkey in a newspaper cartoon that made this symbol famous. Today’s democrats see the symbol of the donkey as being strong and brave. The same cartoonist, Thomas Nast, later created the Republican elephant in 1874. Today’s Republicans see the symbol of the elephant as representing strength and dignity.

When it comes to the red and blue state diagrams that we see each election, this did not start to emerge mainstream until its use in 2000. It really became standard use in the 2004 election. The red states represent states that are mainly Republican and the blue states represent the Democratic Party.

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Ban on Asian symbols: A Westside story of bias?

From IBN Live:

Does the wearing a burkha, nose rings or a mangalsutra undermine a modern secular society?

In England, a woman who worked at a catering services firm at Heathrow airport, was sacked for wearing a nose ring. London's Mayor Ken Livingstone says this is an attack on her right to express her religion.

Other western countries have gone a step further. France has banned the wearing of headscarves and turbans in school whereas in England a teacher was sacked for wearing a veil.

So, does the West overreact to Asian cultural symbols?

Head of Communications, London CNN News, William Higham, Senior Lawyer of Supreme Court K T S Tulsi and Fashion Designer Rina Dhaka debated the topic on Face the Nation.

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Islamic Caligraphy

After an interesting conversation with Alex this afternoon I thought I might convey some of the actual words of God.

Art of Arabic Calligraphy

Wikipedia

Art of Arabic Calligraphy 2

A Visual Evolution of the Latin/English Alphabet

Click here to see a visual evolution of the Latin/English alphabet, courtesy of www.popamericana.org.

World's most semiotic nation?

Sadly, the Turks in 2007 are almost always right in 'detecting the enemy' through semiotics like in the 1970s

Burak BEKDİL

The other day's top story in the Turkish Daily News was headlined "World's most virile nation" and naturally was referring to the Turks who, according to a study, have the highest average of partners in the world. The findings of the survey may or may not be true. But there is convincing empirical evidence that the Turks are probably the world's most "semiotic" nation.

It began with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic that is today sadly fading away according to some, and, to others, is just restoring itself. Atatürk was probably the only great leader of his time with a genuine obsession about the semiotics of headwear; so passionate of an obsession that its traces live on almost a century later.

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