Song of the day: An Englishman in New York / Sting
Word of the day: 'Eclat / 1, Radiance, dazzling effect; brilliant display. 2, Ostentation, publicity, public exposure, scandal, a sensation. 3, Social distinction; celebrity, renown. 4, Conspicuous success; universal acclamation.

I now officially have the font for IS on my computer, and can write in IS on either of my Macs now. For those of you new to the saga, I've been constructing a language -Is- for some time now, and it is written in its own unique alphabet. Up until now, I have only been able to work on it by writing on paper, in books, etc, by hand. Writing by hand died out for good reason; It sucks. My arms are already plenty taxed by playing guitar and holding my daughter all the time (you'd be surprised how much holding a child fucks up your tendons and muscles, unless you're a mother, and then you would definitely not be surprised), adding a secret life as a scribe to that was not sustainable. So, my wonderful friends in Iowa got me Fontographer for x-mas a while back, and then my hero and friend Kayla went to work with her brilliant design skills and used the program to design an IS font that works killer on my Macs. Now I'm full steam ahead, working on the language with a keyboard. It's going to take me a while to get used to typing in the alphabet, it's got a few quirks that are counter-intuitive, but I know I'll be liquid fingers with it in a week or so. It also happens to look really beautiful. I would love to show you some examples of the new font, but my understanding is it would be pointless to try, because it wouldn't work on this site / format. But let me try: rujdrub. Yep, just as I thought, it doesn't work at all. Is alphabet doesn't look anything like English, but when I try to cut and paste it into this text it just converts back to English. Eventually we will have a special section on the site for it, I'm guessing. The plan for Is in the foreseeable future is to continue working out grammar and systems within it with the help of linguist pals while I learn it myself and teach it to my daughter (who's just beginning to speak). Really the whole point of language came from a combination of my love for languages and a bigger love for my daughter.

Last night in an Art Concall with some Integral peeps, the issue of conditioning came up, and my creating Is, and passion for language very much involves an ongoing, life-long effort to avoid conditioning. Human beings seem to have a singular talent for contradictory impulses. On the one hand, no creature we know of demonstrates such an unbelievable, irrepressable drive to transform and evolve its own species. Self-reflexive maniacs, we are. We are development-maniacs, whether it's personally, collectively, whether it's technology and infrastructure or our psyche, soul, emotions, or culture. We push the envelope all the time in all the quadrants. But to balance this admirable agency, we are also some lazy ass, phlegmatic, stubborn mother fuckers who never met a bed we didn't want to stay in. We just love stasis. Once we acquire a world view, master a skill, acclimate to using a particular set of inner or outer lenses to interpret and experience "reality" through, we will kick the shit out of anyone who tries to change our world, more precisely our world view. There are a million billion trillion (it's fun to say that, makes me feel like I'm nine again) kinds of conditioning, an endless array of anasthesias to cement our feet in, and obstinantly defend as "me". I'm a scientist, I'm a father, I'm a millionair, I'm a victim, I'm a Buddhist, I'm a woman, I'm a yadda yadda yadda. As with all things in the subject / object square dance, the temptation to have a manageable, digestable "reality" means collapsing "Reality" into bits that will behave. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We HAVE to have anchors, we have to have stable, secure foundations of identity, without some referent no compass will work, and we have no way to develop or function. But like humans do, we get comfy there, and then we want that part to be the most important part, we want a certain world view to be the only one. We do something like discover the odd behavior of matter's quantum constituents, and it is so fucking COOL, and weird, and in our zeal for the new apprehension, we grow fixated and interpret everything through this one lens, which is very effective for examining quarks, and not so much for the gospel of "Q", or the quadraplex of our other qualities. Then you have a quandary. Anyway, conditioning.

There are so many ways we are conditioned, some are external forces, but many are our own inventions, self-medicating morphine drips to dull the edge of what it feels like to be an exposed, vulnerable human. Habits, habits, habits. LANGUAGE is one of those habits. Our native language -and don't get me wrong, I LOVE English, and all languages are sacred- comes with a full complimenet of assumptions and blind spots, they influence what we think is "real" and how we fit into that reality. When I am able for even a moment to deeply consider my relationship to English, and the way it operates in my experience -especially my interpretation of experience- I'm stunned at how it informs my "life". Starting with my assumptions about subject / object relations (here "I" am, writing to "you") which sit deeply in my sense of identity, and what I think of as "other" (anything that's not "me", well what the fuck is "me"? not what I think it is, it turns out...), and going right through the very sequence of parts of speech (Subject-Verb-Object), and perhaps most importantly the endless invisible implications in definitions that go unnoticed and taken fore-granted by speakers through out life. When we are born into a langauge, we are born into a World-view, we inherit millions of assumptions. That's not a bad thing at all, as long as one of our assumptions is to question assumptions, and we are programmed to question programming. I realize in constructing a language, I'm generating a new set of assumption, a new set of lenses to interpret life and the world through, and it will have all the liabilities of any language. It's just an experiment to see if a language can be engineered in a way that assumptions are more transparent, exposed, where a slighly more inclusive, multi-dimensional mode of communication and expression can be created to facilitate the field of pure potentiality that is awareness -our divine identity. I have always wondered how grammar, syntax, and the general engineering of language might more fully include and express the four-quadrant Koan that is human existence. IS is just a lifelong experiment in that question. Thanks to Kayla supplying the new wonderful font, I can get back on task begin conditioning my daughter to question conditioning in the human condition. It's not as though when you speak in IS your mind will be magically transformed into pure Delta waves, but it will change the filters in some interesting ways, and I've already noticed that at least in me, it more fully lights up left and right brain, masculine and femine, and has a way of winking at multiple levels or domains of reality at once that is useful. If nothing else my daughter and I will have a secret langauge to write poems and songs to each other in...