Painting Languages

[Chronomar]

So this is an idea I had today: painting a language. As in, making a painting, that represents / encapsulates a language. It is fairly self explanatory, and is perhaps a mundane idea.

However, once I got going on fleshing it out, it became more complicated and now I barely know where to begin.

To be clear, I am not undertaking this project to just do an impressionistic sort of rendition of the language in paint, I'd like to find ways to convey aspects of the language's architecture (grammar, etc.), history/origins, influences, sound when spoken, greatest moments (some might say, Shakespeare for English), and so on.

I would convey this through color, texture, patterns...perhaps subject matter, though I was thinking of painting them all as half abstract, half paintings of buildings cut partly open revealing their structure, because I often think of architecture when thinking of language.

Oil paint is the current medium, on Masonite, and the languages I am going to paint (each with their own painting) are those that I know to varying degrees.



And so now I'm just bringing it up here to see what other people think of the idea. I consider you all intelligent, creative and all that jazz.

Feel free to throw out suggestions for any language that strikes you, though I'll be personally only painting those languages that I know at least some of / about.

For example, would the color palette or style be different for British English versus American English? Or should they be painted as one big "English Language" painting?

What kind structure should "Spanish - Mexican" possess?

What kind of texture is Latin?

What about your language?

- if anyone wants to do their own drawings or paintings, go right ahead. I certainly claim no form ownership of this idea, doubt I'm the first to have thought of it -

 

[nanook]

hm, faszinating .... visualizing language, structure, the origin, how a particular sentence is embedded into an evolution of images or how it's words are derived from other words, different levels of one analogue sentence pattern, evolution of psychologically relevant sentences ("i am" or such) from stone age to today ... that's the direction my mind goes to.

at the moment, little to no concept occurs to me, of how whole languages relate to other whole languages (implying, how they are unique), so it seems i can't jump on your exact train of thought (if i understand your goal correctly)

 

[Chronomar]

That describes my goal (in as much as I have a goal), so I think you've got it.

And yeah! I started out thinking "oh, this will be easy, I think about languages a lot, and think of things visually a lot, so let's go do it" and now I'm bogged down in the idea(s), grasping around for a place to start. I've got the painting work-space all set up, but I think I need to think more.

The psychological-implications side of language is a great addition! Thanks!

...

also, what you said, questioning how to even think of any particular language is "unique" led me to another idea for the project...making all the individual language paintings echo each other and fit together as would befit their natural connections and overall "oneness"

Of course, this is even more complicated than my first vision, but now I cannot un-think it.

 

[nanook]

creative blocks when staring at paper are the rule for me, with exceptions occurring once every three years or so ...

today i have been meditating on how "to want" is an illusion of language, in the psyche its not an existing verb (meaning action) as it is supposedly in language, because what happens in our psychological comprehension of objects (such as love, sex, food) is that we project attraction or repulsion into them (love is good, hate is bad), so they have a gravitation or repulsion and when we experience that, language claims that we "want" (want love), but it's just descriptive, there is actually only "wanting", as a noun, like "the pulling attraction" (love wanting me, sex wanting me, anger wanting me).


and the degree of the wanting, the weight of attraction or repulsion, the strength of gravity is the depth of a seeming/supposed duality.

but duality is another illusion of language:

language would make believe. that love and hate (for instance) are opposite directions on a single spectrum.

but they are originally independent objects, with technically independent degrees of attraction and polarisation (negative, positive, attracting, repulsing)

and it's apparently the believe in duality, that makes us load up the gravities of supposed opposite objects with equal load:


"i love to eat." object: food=high love=naturally high attraction.

"i love to be slim and lean"= associated object: "caloric restriction/asceticism" = calorie restriction is a newly invented abstract object with originally neutral value, but asceticism is associated with hunger, which has a negative attraction value (repulsion)



now my dualistic mind tries to load up the object "calorie restriction/being lean" with high positive attraction load

in the hope, that this will reduce or overpower the attraction load of the object "eating everything that's nourishing"

but now this has only doubled the tension or depth of duality:

i am now torn apart between two attractions, i can not make a consistent decision about the issue.

i intuit, i can solve the issue, by denying the duality. unrestricted love for food and unrestricted love for asceticism might go together, and form something new, something singular, something entirely positive, when the objects are comprehended properly as what they are: both are "healthy eating".

if i don't imprint a negative attraction value on "hating", because i do not assume that doing so would reduce the positive attraction value of the supposed opposite object named "love" (on which i insist, naturally) ... if i don't imprint that negative value, because i deny a duality of love and hate, then i can ALLOW both objects to have positive value. what will happen is that both values will become neutral, because if i give in to love, i won't increase the negative load of hate first (in order to arrive at love) so i won't bounce back to love the very next moment. i have reduced the depth (tension) of the duality of my mind. everything is on a flat screen, and i can move freely from anger to sympathy from moment to moment, without drowning in a whirl of focus and tension.

now, without dividing tension, anger reveals itself to be what it really is, something that is one with the love object, one modularity of it, both side by side, undived through the matrix/power-grid: anger is love for self (self-defense) and love is love for self (self acceptance in company of other, two selves both accepted and protected in their nature and in company).

so that is all highly visual. it was a flash of visualisation, that delivered the insight, that duality of language is an illusion. putting it into words is a pain in the ass, obviously.

so i will paint a matrix, that looks like einsteins grid, you know a planet making a dump into the grid, you have seen that, right?!

and i will embed objects (words) into that matrix. bunches of words maybe. put they penetrate the matrix coming from another direction. negative objects push to the left, positive objects push to the right and they are seemingly disconnected from each other, though this fish net matrix. the size of objects or words determines their depth. none of the objects are opposites, because everything in the matrix or grid is side by side.

i do that in my mind, because i am too lazy to get paper out and do all the work, it will look ugly anyway...

but i hope on inspiration on which words are most interesting.

 

[Chronomar]

That is an interesting turn of thought...I cannot say much more on the "want" discussion you provided, as I think it is already clearly laid out. Perhaps, from a different perspective, language has want right...as you described it: a pulling attraction as applied to various nouns or verbs, but then it is us, the humans, the users of the language that typically view "want" incorrectly, leading to some instances where it is incorrectly used or represented in the language.

I only offer this alternative view because it seems to me, in English at least, that want typically follows the grammatical pattern which befits something which serves to describe "the pulling attraction"

However, then then again, I guess that we never say "love wants me" except in odd flights of fancy or when we're trying to be poetic (same difference), does show how "want" is viewed incorrectly, and is represented incorrectly in language.

Your planet dumping into Einstein's grid is indeed something I have seen many a time before (as artistically or mentally rendered). I generally thought of it my own way though: think of a vast infinite vat of jello-like substance which is charged in a very peculiar way which is like being +/- charge but not exactly. Now think of all of the objects in it, which all have the same charge as the gel, and so have a repulsion effect on it. They are surrounded by the gel on all sides, but their size/mass warps the whole thing with far reaching consequences. Some of them move, constantly changing the state of the gel, and the state of the other "objects". Different "objects" have different rules with the gel, some of which I cannot even begin to describe as I really have no idea how to or if it makes sense.

That was probably a much more in-depth and complicated description than was needed...but to return to your topics, yes, I can see the kind of matrix of word-meaning I think you use. I visualize something similar for making decisions or understanding how things relate. Sometimes I turn them into buildings/structures, but that again is just my personal love affair with architecture and the whole "method of loci" thing I fell into when I was young and never really stopped doing.

I really relate to what you say about language ( I assume we're mostly talking about English and/or German here ) promoting duality, while we seem to think more pluralisticly. Or at least with a myriad of dualisms which compound and compete with each other about the same thing, thus creating a different kind of pluralism.

Earlier today I was trying to think of the "mutual opposite" of two words...in one particular case, the mutual opposite of "bored" and "engaged", and then in another case, the mutual opposite of "ennui" and "enthralled".

Many would say that bored/ennui and engaged/enthralled are just dualistic opposites, and all between is just scales between them, but I would disagree. There can be a third word, say, which is not between bored and engaged, nor between enthralled and ennui, but is rather just as opposite bored as it is opposite engaged, but opposite of both.

Eventually, I decided to call this particular state of being "desolation". After the idea of an abandoned ghost town, with a few lone residents, who are so scared and uncertain of their future, but so stuck, in a half-way place that doesn't properly exist anymore. And I would describe it thusly: that lucid awful state of panicked deliberate inaction.

Don't know if anyone's ever been to that "place" before, but for me it's what happens on a not horrible, but still bad, day.

Wow we are "off topic". But I'm perfectly alright with off-topic, and don't really see it as off-topic, so whaaaateeeever.

About the painting project again, I think I'm going to sleep, wake up tomorrow, and then just start on one of them. If I mess it up, or decide to change direction, I'll just let it dry, and then paint over it. This will eventually (after all the false starts), not only eat up my left over paint I've been meaning to use, but also (as it is oil paint and will layer in a way that shows the under-layers just slightly) will give it some kind of "deep mysterious nearly unknowable past" feel most languages give me.

 

[nanook]

i can see how wanting might be a true verb (action), if the verb is the activity of injecting/projecting a load into the object, making it attractive, thereby creating a movement of one self into it's direction. that would be super abstract, given that the mind thinks, that the named action is not a spiritual/unconscious injection of intention, but the result of it: the beginning of the movement, which can be seen as a fantasy (me, mowing the grass already, contracting some muscles). it's not "love wanting me" it's "intention moving me".

i guess all of this has a lot to do with how judgement and perception create/condition each other (typology)

loved the trip though the jello.

my thoughts on your states, using my previous model and my dissection of the words:

1) bored=wanting (but inability to do, thus not identified with doing, but divided into an observer)
2) engaged=wanting and doing (identified with/undivided/nondual)
3) desolated=blocked/paranoid retroflection (sort of repression) of doership ("but what about" [my projections of the] world's echo on my actions")

1) load being too positive (medium tension) (for an unidentified object)
2) load being neutral (no tension (no rubbing off), thus maximum energy, effortless flow, fully alive)
3) load being both negative and positive (high tension) (for an object, that is an undifferentiated fusion of two objects: the action and the result of the action)

let's put it into jello, because being three dimensional, jello is most likely superior to my flat screen/grid, which does enable transcendental witnessing, but no nonduality, except that when the grid disappears, there is just space, and everything would be part of that.

1) a jello with almost empty caves, that is: a contraction of jello into schizoid/phobic observation mode: it has negative load and no objects are born inside of such a negative womb, that is to say, it does not invite inspiration, it holds on to emptiness

2) jello penetrating object, bringing it to live

3) diffused object with double load is burning the jello, as it enters the object, or squeezing it out again

i didn't take into account any possible movement energy, or object-growth or relations of neighboring objects .... sorta goes over my head for now

hypothesis: i would intuit, the jello consist out of two liquids: eros and agape (i don't know yet, where this is going)

hope thats not too distracting from the painting project, it might as well lead to ideas, i can't know ...

 

[Chronomar]

I just got psycho-analyzed in jello. My life rules.

Okay, so you've got your own sort of jargon going on (don't we all...), but probably due to my limited amount of "read this science journal article" experience, I'm used to just going along and trying (sometimes succeeding!) on understanding that on the fly.

The only visualization for my weird emotion trips (normally consisting of various stages of non-emotion, just energy...but kind of like emotion? I don't even know) that I did not understand was your jello rendition of #2...I would tentatively re-word it to "object becomes one with the jello" (?)

In other news, Freud would be having a field day with all this object and jello stuff. Somehow it would end up with us all being attracted to our universal jello mother or something. I as of now believe in the universal jello mother. You did mention caves so that's another Freudian launchpad (just imagine Freud is a rocket...oh wait. There's another one)

With less levity, putting these kind of analyses (those of one's own emotions or thoughts) into a visualization schema does provide useful perspective.

Flowcharts on jello steroids.

I don't even eat jello.

But what the hell.

Don't worry about distracting me from my painting goal. I've already neatly put that off until tomorrow, after the sleep of tonight and work of tomorrow puts focus into my mind.

 

[nanook]

now it seems to me, your's is more of a feminie perspective on the scene in the town: stuck agape, which is tanatos.

todestrieb. death drive. tanatos.

the feminine agape is a preservation of communion or a holding-together of entities and when the current configuration comes to an end, and agape doesn't let go, is too contracted around them, then it becomes death itself, in morbid fixation, one with desolation. and the situation can't transform into a new configuration.

while i originally misinterpreted your town scene from a maskulin perspective, as stuck eros, which would be "phobos".

the maskulin eros let's go of and transfers situations into new situations, it's the love of the next configuration.
but in stuck mode, phobos, it's so repulsed by the present situation, that it wouldn't even touch the scene, thus not making a difference either.

when eros, that is transformation, is absent, then agape (preservation) has little chance but to turn into morbid fixation (tanatos) of what is left, and die with it. when agape, that is getting in touch with the given, is absent, then eros (transformation/reconfiguration) has little power, but to watch decay from a distance (phobos). so, one without the other turns into stuck mode. and then it becomes a vicious circle, and you can't tell, which side is blocking which.

no jello this time.

i usually assume that guessing the meaning of my vocabulary from the context (i usually consciously define/explain a word via context) or just from the figurative notion of a word is sufficiently possible, but i take into account that some words have no correlating object in some wordviews, for instance transcendence is a word i learned only in 2003, after i had consciously experienced some transcendence but didn't know a word for it. at first i didn't know hot to visualize it, because visualisation (abstraction) and experience are two different things.

 

[Chronomar]

So what kind of psychology is it that you typically subscribe to? I see a lot of Greek, suggesting old-school, perhaps Freud influenced...but then this is the modern era, and from the link in your signature I would suppose that it is more "new age" or "modern" than all of that.

I have always liked the idea of a synthesizing universe, but I do have a more conservative "I am a scientist" side that just wants to say "I don't know that, we'll see, let's design some experiments based on a smaller leap of the imagination, though in that direction of the original vision, and work up from there".

I suppose the worst thing would be to be stuck in just one perspective, so despite my eternal skepticism (), such forms of psychology do have interesting concept framework that if broken down a bit could be tested and could possibly yield more "evidence".

 

[nanook]

80% of my jargon is ken wilber, who has read and synthesized western and eastern wisdom traditions, the goal being a worldview that includes ALL possible perspectives (designed to be upwards compatible), or has the capacity to take all of them in (like a map), that comes with a language, that allows to exactly specify/label perspectives, like you specify coordinates, by splitting our world into quadrants like subjective objective, singular, plural, static, process, inside, outside, depths of self-referential complexity, dimensions and so on .... just to avoid all the misunderstandings that occur when two schools look at the same phenomenon from different perspectives, acting like they are looking at different objects altogether ... so his work is exactly what you need, if you value perspectives. i have seen things ... and realized, that no school in the world makes sense out of all of it, every school is willfully partial, except his approach, he saved me from wasting myself to one of those dead paradigms. the other 20% of my jargon are carl jung i guess. i also make up shit on the way. the erosphobosagapetanatos and retroflection stuff is what i have learned from wilber.

 

[Chronomar]

So far this reminds me of Esperanto a bit. A goal I can completely support (including ALL possible perspectives, designing itself to be upwards compatible), but which I constantly fear will be done in such a way that, as most human created bodies of thought are wont to do, it will begin creating its own stuff and stop synthesizing "all possible perspectives" in favor of being yet another re-interpretation of what the "true" perspective could look like, under the guise of "all possible perspectives".

However! I remain hopeful for this endeavor's success in as much as I am also wary of its actual likelihood of achieving it!

Carl Jung ... I saw one his books of drawings once. It was imaginative. I also have to respect someone who made themselves insane and then brought themselves back, considering that's one of my life goals.

 

[Chronomar]

I will be reading about this Ken Wilber though ... haven't run into him before.

 

[EyeSeeCold]

Feel free to throw out suggestions for any language that strikes you, though I'll be personally only painting those languages that I know at least some of / about.

For example, would the color palette or style be different for British English versus American English? Or should they be painted as one big "English Language" painting?

What kind structure should "Spanish - Mexican" possess?

What kind of texture is Latin?

When I think of English I get impressions of complexity, sometimes purposeless, and sometimes purposeful. Maybe a maze with dead ends, or stairs going in all directions / dimensions.


Latin is ominous and bold to me, mysterious.

Spanish gives impressions of exaltedness, nobility or glory to me. I think it somehow has to do with the many multi-syllables.


Cool idea.

 

[Chronomar]

Thank you !

I especially like your input on English. It's a tricky one to be sure. I'll owe a debt to Escher, but I've always owed that.