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EnergyLanguage.Org
1/26/02 final draft
3661 words
by Meir Rinde
mtr2002@hotmail.com
917-716-4026
Matt Lorenz's dreams of creating a new language were inspired by a counterintelligence exercise he helped design when he served as an army interrogator for three years in the early 1990s. As part of a "scripting cell," a group that designs war games and other training exercises, he and his colleagues in army intelligence would make up, for example, a fictional South American town that would be constructed in a forest at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and several other soldiers would live there for weeks or months at a time. It was part of a role-playing game to test their abilities to blend into a new environment, but Lorenz was more fascinated by the process of creating the town. For his own entertainment he later made a private game of cutting up maps and using them to construct imaginary Dungeons and Dragons-style terrains full of booby traps and fantastical intelligence-gathering devices, with foreign populations speaking unknown tongues. During his army tenure Lorenz's duties also included interviewing people who were trying to upgrade their security clearances from "secret" to "top secret," and while stationed in Seattle, following fellow intelligence agents around, evaluating their skill at blending in. He eventually concluded that he was being followed in turn. "I could have become a counterintelligence operative," Lorenz said recently in New York, where he moved this summer. "I had some friends who went that route, but I didn't. I wanted out."
Lorenz could be said to have a military bearing. He is 30, stands at a gangly six four, and has a fair Irish face with slightly sunken brown eyes and a prominent chin and cheekbones. But it's hard to imagine him as a soldier. His wardrobe consists of a small number of well-worn items such as a dark green sweater with a safety pin that keeps the collar on, a woolly Cossack hat, a bracelet made of hollow metal balls on a wire, and a pair of bright red shoes he found on the curb in front of his apartment in Brooklyn. "People have been commenting on the shoes, but I think it's because I have one pair of pants, one jacket, three shirts, like, three pairs of underwear, three socks and one pair of shoes, so any deviation from that is pretty striking," he said in early November, soon after we first met. "They're real comfy, though." We were standing on Broadway, in front of a building at New York University, where Lorenz is a graduate student in an applied computing program called interactive telecommunications. In one class he was learning how to build simple machines by soldering light sensors and motors to circuit boards, and in another he'd recently been part of a well-received class presentation on statistics in which he paraphrased Plato's Allegory of the Cave. His semester project was a motorized xylophone that made loud ringing noises at three different pitches when he activated its sensors.
Lorenz was munching on cashews and drinking a black cherry soda. Because the night was unseasonably warm, perhaps, he wasn't wearing the red shoes, but a pair of ancient blue thong sandals over a pair of white socks. The rubber strips between the toes were held in place by bits of blue string. "These actually initially ripped when I was traveling through Europe two summers ago. First one, and then another, and instead of tossing them, which was the recommended solution, I took a 25 peseta piece, which conveniently has a hole right in the middle, and rigged up a set of auxiliary thongs." He took off one thong and turned it over to show the coin. He was, obviously, fond of the sandals.
Frederick Mathias Lorenz was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Rhode Island, Minnesota, Southern California, Washington, Virginia, Okinawa and Japan. His father was a lawyer for the Marines. His mother was [tk]. Lorenz's solo travels began after he left the army, and grew more extensive after he subsequently graduated from the University of San Diego with a major in philosophy and a minor in theatre. His wanderings took him to Spain, where he found himself aimless and independent for the first time in his life, living with friends, speaking only Spanish. He spent hours walking around Madrid, ruining his footwear, playing with maps and making plans for a language he hoped to create for the citizens of an imaginary civilization. He soon ran into the kind of practical questions aspiring language inventors generally face: "Is it going to be character based, is it going to be grammatically simple, is it going to have slang?" he recalls asking himself. "Is it enough just to assign new words for things, or should there be a different dynamic for this language?" He noticed that his personality seemed different when he spoke in his stunted Spanish, and wondered how using a different language affected the way his mind worked. By that time the army had taught him not only Spanish but also Farsi, and some Arabic; he'd studied German in high school and Japanese in college. With so many languages on the planet, he wondered, why invent yet another? Why labor over the arcana of sentence structure and phonetics just to describe the world in essentially the same way that had already been done? Couldn't a new kind of language create a new kind of perception?
The map game faded and Lorenz became increasingly obsessed with the invention of a language for the real world. He'd heard of constructed or artificial languages, like Esperanto and American Sign Language. There are hundreds, invented by internationalists, hobbyists, science-fiction writers and armchair linguists, but as the designer of fantastic worlds he wanted a language with "more direct, more efficient access to our world," as he put it, that allowed "a different understanding of how that world works." "My goal was to enter a new threshold of consciousness," he recalled, with perhaps a characteristic touch of irony. Like a cybernerd Saint Theresa, he spent many hours alone and had visions of diagrams and flowcharts. "There were no drugs involved, other than just basically spending too much time awake and staring at the wall. But it was kind of nuts."
What is the best philosophical basis for a language? On what culture or other system should it be based? If the language is to "transcend" the conventional, merely human perspective, what will determine its shape? Some other aspect of the physical world? All channeled, presumably, through the mad inventor's vision, the weird images and notions that appear to dwell in Lorenz's brain.
As we talked, the early winter night fell and Lorenz went on a search for a cheap dinner. We walked past NYU's towering red stone library and Washington Square Park to a tiny Middle Eastern restaurant called Mamoun's, where we ate falafel with plastic forks and he talked nearly non-stop about himself and his project. (A woman who met him at a party compared a conversation with Lorenz to a lottery machine with an endless number of balls randomly popping up. "There were connections there, but they were so fast and fleeting I couldn't keep up," she said.) At Mamoun's he explained how he found the answer to his questions about language. It happened in Madrid, he said, and it happened suddenly. "It dawned on me that energy, which is an overarching concept, would be perfect to build a framework for a new language," he said that afternoon, finishing his plate and moving onto my leftovers. "I was trying to imagine just one transaction that doesn't involve energy in a direct form, and I couldn't. Walking around Madrid, I started jotting down different ideas, and I thought if we started using a language that revolved around energy, it could reveal some pretty amazing things about what language is and what thought is."
Shortly after his revelation, Lorenz returned to the United States to visit his parents, who were living near Washington, D.C., and research his project at the Library of Congress. Since then he has lived in a tree house in San Diego, where he worked out first principles; escaped again to Europe, where he taught English and studied Polish and Russian; constructed colorful, mandala-like drawings describing the sounds and value system of his own "energy language"; and moved to New York to learn how to design a computer program that would create it for him. He has been working on the project for five years. As yet the language does not exist. Sometimes, if you press him hard enough on the subject, he'll say, "It very possibly never will."
* * *
The best known artificial or auxiliary language was created by a Polish eye doctor named Ludwig L. Zamenhof in the late 19th century. It blended elements of Latin, Greek, and the Romance and Germanic languages. As a Jew who had survived the indignities of growing up in Russian-controlled Bialystok, Zamenhof had decided to vote his life to the goal of promoting understanding among the peoples of the world. When he published a guide to the new language in 1887, Zamenhof called himself Doktoro Esperanto, meaning "one who hopes," and the name stuck. Esperanto is perfectly regular and phonetic, unlike English, whose numerous quirks in grammar and pronunciation make it notoriously difficult to learn for non-native speakers. Proponents of Esperanto claim it is four times easier to learn than other languages and that it is spoken in 83 countries by at least 100,000 people; one study estimates the number of serious Esperantists at two million, with the number of native speakers - children raised speaking Esperanto - pegged at one or two thousand.
Interlinguists, as internationalist language researchers called themselves, flourished, along with the League of Nations and other noble ventures, until World War II, spawning artificial languages with names like Novial, Volapük (Esperanto's predecessor), Unial, Occidental, Interlingua, Solresol (which uses musical notation), Cosmoglossia, and Universalglot, along with simplified versions of Latin, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, and even of Esperanto itself, the only such language to achieve any measure of lasting acceptance. (As many as 100,000 people studied Volapük - until 1889, when a schism broke broke out during the first Volapük congress actually conducted in Volapük rather than German.) Since the ideological motivations behind interlinguism faded, the field has been dominated by hundreds of "artlangs" inspired by J.R.R. Tolkein's elvish languages in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and other works; so-called logical languages such as Loglan, which has a calculus-based, supposedly ambiguity-free grammar; and personal languages concocted for the hell of it. One notable success has been Klingon, which was created for a race of bumpy headed aliens in the Star Trek television shows and movies, and is now nurtured by the Klingon Language Institute, a nonprofit 501(c)3 corporation whose web page includes the powerful insult "Hab SoSlI' Quch!," Your mother has a smooth head, pronounced "khab shooshloot, khooch," with a lot of growling and spitting.
Quite a few of the roughly 300 languages listed on the Internet are designed, like Tolkein's, along with an imaginary world; the denizens may be fish, or only speak in classical references. Many of the languages use experimental grammars, where, for example, words are categorized by emotional valence rather than part of speech. A few languages are designated philosophical, such as Láadan, an invention of the feminist science-fiction novelist Suzette Haden Elgin. It purports to express emotions usually conveyed by female body language, and includes words for particularly female experiences and certain complicated feelings. "Doroledim" means to overeat because it is the one part of your life over which you have control; "wohosheni" means to feel part of something without reservations or barriers (it is the opposite of alienation). Elgin invented Láadan in part to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which posits that it is language that structures perceptions and thoughts, and thus the patterns of culture. "If women had a language adequate to express their perceptions, it might reflect a quite different reality than that perceived by men," a summary of Elgin's effort suggests. Theoretically a new language could create a new culture, although critics of the hypothesis evoke the chicken-and-egg problem and ask whether culture could have come first.
Matt Lorenz, then, is not mad - or at any rate, no madder than he illustrious predecessors. According to some of his descriptions of the anticipated energy language, Lorenz accepts a Sapir-Whorf compromise in which a person's language and world view mold each other, and he proposes to shoehorn humanity into a more sophisticated existence. "If we're speaking crudely of all the languages that only evolved conventionally and passively since Day One, from their very gestural and guttural origins," he asked over falafel one afternoon, "how can we expect to adjust to types of problems in a world that's totally different from the way it was thousands of years ago - with the same types of minds that produced those problems? It's possible our minds and languages have reached a threshold of complexity past which they're really not capable of evolving." He paused. "But I don't think so. We haven't exerted the same manipulations that we have exerted on everything else in our world. Somehow, language and thought have escaped that. I want to know why."
Lorenz's style and sensibility are in large part products of his San Diego periods: his dredlocks-and-skateboard teenage years, and the indie rock scene he was part of when he attended the University of San Diego and during subsequent stays. When we first met, he told me he was trying to create a more stable and somewhat more conventional life, but in many ways he remains a skater punk, with a do-it-yourself rebel attitude and what he calls a "fruity anarchist" contempt for acquisitiveness and capitalism. Is not difficult to picture him among the youth carrying giant banners or throwing Molotov cocktails during world trade meetings in Genoa or Seattle. He has just chosen a different weapon.
"I would rather like to build the language kind of like a folk psychology of how the world works," he said. "Like, if you play pool and you hit the ball on this side it will go there - you know, people have a kind of understanding of how that works, whether it's putting gas in a car or getting hungry and needing to eat food. People understand the basic principles of energy, yet as a species we haven't developed a very sophisticated understanding of those energetic properties, as far as our reliance on non-renewable resources, or knowing ways to destroy huge numbers of people through nuclear attacks and so forth. I mean, we've learned how to manipulate all these different little chemical and energetic forms, but we haven't really upgraded our minds to be able to understand what that means."
***
Lorenz readily admits he does not have a clear notion of the language that would represent this pseudo-scientific mishmash of physics, sociology and leftist utopianism. "You might ask, ok, what would be a word for hello, or what would be a word for whatever," he recently said to a small audience of fellow students during a talk at NYU. He was wearing a white jumpsuit - his typical costume during various kinds of presentations, or "scenarios," as he calls them - and stood in front of a projection screen that showed an image from his web site, energylanguage.org. "There are no words for the language yet. It's definitely in a meta-language process. I haven't even started making words for it yet. In order for this to actually work, I have to wait until the communications theory is completely done before I start making words."
The web site consists in part of incredibly lofty notions. What is the energy language? "A project that aims to explore human consciousness, language systems, epistemology, evolution of living systems, and processes of self-reflection. At the core of this project is a spirit of intellectual upheaval, as well as a system of informational empowerment." There are jokes: the language is "An effective anti-boredom device." The web site is an apologia: "many of the ideas contained herein are difficult to comprehend only because our minds have very little experience thinking about them, not because they are so complex. Curiosity is the only credential, coupled with an inquisitive desire to examine ourselves and the universe around us." It contains a glossary of phrases like "Adaptive Mind Democracy (activism towards the goal of directing one's thoughts according to a future mental liberation)" and "Energetimotopaization (semantic morphology whereby a word is named by what it does in an energetic context)."
The web site also has a number of diagrams, circles overlaid with four-pointed curlicue shapes and scatterings of runic-looking but actually conventional phonetic symbols. The "full sweep schematic" diagram assigns groups of related letters and sound-symbols at twelve points around the edge of the circle, like a clock; in his talk at NYU, Lorenz described a system in which sounds between twelve o'clock and one o'clock would be associated with birth and beginnings; sounds at six o'clock, with middleness; at sounds at eleven o'clock with death and ending. He said that when he taught English to Japanese students, they had found the diagram unexpectedly useful for learning pronunciation. He also admitted that the arrangement was basically random, that "k" and "g" sounds have no more intrinsic relationship to the idea of birth than any others, and acknowledged that the system could not generate an idea like "chair" or "lectern."
For that, and for a great deal more, Lorenz proposes to build a virtual machine - a computer program and web site - that would allow people to make suggestions about the structure of the language and to interact with the diagrams. That's what he suggests sometimes. At other times, he describes putting an object or idea into a sphere, a three-dimensional version of the diagram (whether virtual or real is unclear) which, as part of its interactions, would create the right word to describe the object. The object's "energetic properties" would manifest in speech or text, creating a language with a perfect, consistent correspondence to physical reality. Only a billion questions remain: How do you put an idea into a sphere? How do you analyze a chair, either virtual or real? In what way does an understanding of the kinetic properties of a dollop of hummus lead to a rationalization of South Asian nuclear policy?
It requires, perhaps, yet another language with another perspective to understand the deliberate murkiness at the core of the Lorenzian proto-revolution: the familiar language of alienation and restlessness that follows the path of a military parent, according to Lorenz's sister Marie, a [TK: 26]-year-old artist and graduate student at Yale. "We were always kind of outcasts," Marie said in January, speaking on the phone from her campus studio. "Whenever we moved somewhere, we'd be out of style. In California, when we were teenagers, we kind of gravitated toward other outcasts. That was a kind of style or something. When Matt was 16, my dad left to go to Okinawa for the summer, so Matt had sort of unlimited freedom. That's when we started dressing weird and listening to weird music, and he grew dredlocks, and stopped bathing, and after a while my mother just kind of gave up. My brother could stay out as late as he wanted and that kind of stuff."
"When we moved to Okinawa, it kind of sealed it because everybody just thought we were the biggest freaks. A lot of our sensibility became like a belief system," she said. "What it meant for Matt was that all his friends in San Diego were becoming professional skateboarders, and he got knocked off what he felt was a good trajectory. Okinawa was really significant for a lot of reasons. He hated it the whole time. He would complain, just bitch about it viciously. Matt first started drinking - it wasn't a problem, but it was part of the break with my parents."
"I still think there's something about him that likes to be in a situation he hates. He hated Okinawa and then he went into the army and hated that for three years. That surprised me, and I think it surprised my dad too. He didn't express any disappointment in that decision, but he never encouraged either of us to join the military. Basically it was the only way that my brother could see getting far enough away from home and not having to go into debt for my parents."
Marie, who is also a polyglot, and often wears torn, paint-stained clothing, said she is Matt's biggest fan, and has visited him in New York a number of times since he moved there. "I've always looked up to him a lot, and I think what I'm like as an adult has a lot to do with what I admire about him. I know that a lot of things that I say, and the way I talk, are really ripped off from Matt Lorenzisms. I hear other people do it. I tell stories about him a lot, and everybody I know knows he's sort of a major character."
She has been hearing about the energy language project for years, from the time it was her brother's intellectual obsession of the moment through his application to NYU, in which his portfolio essentially consisted of the address for his web site. Marie said she has lately begun to better understand the project. "He always says, I don't know if I'm crazy, or if no one has thought of this before. The truth is probably somewhere in between. My dad will keep saying, 'What's the application for it? How will it make money? How do you use it?' Matt has found a field of inquiry that has no application. The language wouldn't, as I understand it, be for people to speak, but a model for people to understand his philosophy."
"His ideal would be to study something that nobody has studied before," she said.
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