the new order of tungs

if the margins have been almost destroyed through the ubiquity of virtualized desire, would there not be some who – through imaginative subterfuges and acts barely deemable as acts, from a necessity of disappearing absence – attempt to create margins of their lives and in these created spaces forage for words?

mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic.

nanny just told people what to do, counselors also tell them what to think and feel. the nanny state was punitive, austere, and authoritarian, the therapeutic state is touchy-feely, supportive—and even more authoritarian. the therapeutic state swallows up everything human on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the perfectly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of god and religion.

i am a polyglot but of functional not substantive tungs. i call the latter swedish, basque, waray-waray, uzbek, tamil, newar, alemannic, upper sorbian, gan, tok pisin, ewe, afar. i call the former journalish, techish (many dialects), academish, transactionish, lovish (many dialects), commonish, drunkish, powerish, managementish, ideologish (many dialects), crowdish, madish, factish, spiritish, opinionish, heartish, professionish, jargonish, sportish, fuckish, transitish, …

i have spoken many of these, some very well, but none of them felt native to me. there was a tung i knew was my tung but it was lost though not extinct, hidden though not inaccessible. through decades of seeking, through deserts of confusion and fens of madness, it emerged. it is artish. artish is not a tung about art (that is journalish or academish or commonish or fuckish or something else); art can be spoken about in many tungs.

but artish itself – and there are many who call themselves artists who cannot speak artish or cannot speak it well but instead speak transactionish or moneyish or crowdish or ideologish – is its own tung and those who speak it recognize each other by giving one another clues in other tungs (these other tungs they are forced to speak to eat) and then testing out each other’s fluency in artish and, if there is reasonable compatibility, speaking in it in private (for in public it can be perceived by the undiscerning and crass as an eloquent or deviant dialect of drunkish or madish) and perhaps becoming friends and working on projects together. i dream of a world – at least a land – in which my tung is the official tung and those who speak it many, and the land’s culture a culture inseparable from its tung and its people inseparable from their culture.

artish is the coded visionary aestheticization of sensation.

the old nation was one of biological ethnicity and associated language; the new nation is of psychic ethnicity and associated language. english shifts to artish, and i hold a passport to an invisible land.

from land tung to spirit tung – the new glossolalia. the new drunkenness of an alt pentecost.