Laure has spent more time in the “garden utopia” than most people. I asked him to write me anything he wanted about it. He sent the following letter:
YOU ASKED ABOUT THE LANGUAGE. You’ve described the problem well, I think. It might help to think of it this way:
We talk snake. A snake can go any direction but only one direction at one time, following its head.
They talk starfish. A starfish doesn’t go anywhere much. It has no head. It keeps more choices handy, even if it doesn’t use them.
I imagine that starfish don’t think about alternatives, like left or right, forward or back; they’d think in terms of five kinds of lefts and rights, five kinds of backs and forths. Or twenty kinds of lefts and rights, twenty kinds of backs and forths. The only either/or for a starfish would be up and down. The other dimensions or directions or choices would be either/or/or/or/or…
Well, that describes one aspect of their language. When you say something in Nna Mmoy, there is a center to what you say, but the statement goes in more than one direction from the center—or to the center.
In Japanese, I’m told, a slight modification in one word or reference changes a sentence entirely, so that—I don’t know Japanese, I’m making this up—if a syllable changes in one word, then “the crickets are singing in chorus in the starlight” becomes “the taxicabs are in gridlock at the intersection.” I gather that Japanese poetry uses these almost-double meanings deliberately. A line of poetry can be translucent, as it were, to another meaning it could have if it were in a different context. The surface significance allows a possible alternate significance to register at the same time.
Well, everything you say in Nna Mmoy is like that. Every statement is transparent to other possible statements because the meaning of every word is contingent on the meanings of the words around it. Which is why you probably can’t call them words.
A word in our languages is a real thing, a sound with a fixed form to it. Take cat. In a sentence or standing by itself, it has a meaning: a certain kind of animal; in talking it’s the same three phonemes, and in writing the same three letters c, a, t, plus maybe s, and there it is, cat. As distinct as a pebble. Or as a cat. Cat is a noun. Verbs are a little shiftier. What does it mean if you say the word had? All by itself? Not much. Had isn’t like cat, it needs context, a subject, an object.
No word in Nna Mmoy is like cat. Every word in Nna Mmoy is like had, only more so, much more so.
Take the syllable dde. It doesn’t have a meaning yet. A no dde mil as, that means more or less “Let’s go into the woods”; in that context dde is “woods.” But if you say Dim a dde mil as, that means, more or less, “The tree stands beside the road”: dde is “tree” and a is “road” instead of “go,” and as is “beside” instead of “into.” But then if that connotation group occurred inside other groups, it would change again—Hse vuy uno a dde mu as med as hro se se: “The travelers came through the desert where nothing grows.” Now dde is “desert land,” not “trees.” And in o be k’a dde k’a, the syllable dde means “generous, giving freely”—nothing to do with trees at all, unless maybe metaphorically. The phrase means, more or less, “Thank you.”
The range of meanings of a syllable isn’t infinite, of course, but I don’t think you could make a list of the possible or potential meanings. Not even a long list, like the entry for a syllable in Chinese dictionaries. A spoken Chinese syllable, hsing or lung, may have dozens of meanings; but it’s still a word, even though its meaning depends to some extent on context, and even if it takes fifty different written characters to express the different meanings. Each different meaning of the syllable is in fact a different word, an entity, a pebble in the great riverbed of the language.
A Nna Mmoy syllable only has one written character. But it’s not a pebble. It’s a drop in the river.
Learning Nna Mmoy is like learning to weave water. I believe it’s just as difficult for them to learn their language as it is for us. But then, they have enough time, so it doesn’t matter. Their lives don’t start here and run to there, like ours, like horses on a racecourse. They live in the middle of time, like a starfish in its own center. Like the sun in its light.
What little I know of the language—and I’m not really certain of any of it, despite my learned disquisition on dde—I learned mostly from children. Their children’s words are more like our words, you can expect them to mean the same thing in different sentences. But the children keep learning; and when they begin learning to read and write, at ten or so, they begin to talk more like the adults; and by the time they’re adolescents I couldn’t understand much of what they said—unless they talked baby talk to me. Which they often did. Learning to read and write is a lifelong occupation. I suspect it involves not only learning the characters but inventing new ones, and new combinations of them—beautiful new patterns of meaning.
They’re gardeners. Things there pretty much grow on their own—no weeding, no weeds, no spraying, no pests. Still, you know how it is, in a garden there’s always something to be done. In the village where I stayed there was always somebody working away in the gardens and among the trees. Nobody ever wore themselves out doing it. Then they’d gather, along in the afternoon, under the trees, and they’d talk and laugh, having one of their long, long conversations.
The talking often ended up with people reciting, or getting out a paper or a book and reading from it. Some of them would already be off reading by themselves, or writing. A lot of people wrote every day, very slowly, of course, on flimsy bits of the paper they make out of cotton plant. They might bring that piece of writing to the group in the afternoon and pass it around, and people would read from it aloud. Or some people would be at the village workshop working on a piece of jewelry, the circlets and brooches and complicated necklaces they make out of gold wire and opals and amethysts and such. When those were finished they’d get shown around too, and given away, and worn first by one person then another; nobody kept those pieces. They passed around. There was some of the shell money in the village, and sometimes, if somebody won a heap of it playing ten-tiles, they’d offer the owner of a fine piece of jewelry a shell or two for it, usually with a good deal of laughter and what seemed to be ritual insults. Some of the pieces of jewelry were wonderful things, delicate armpieces like endless filigree, or great massive necklaces shaped like starbursts and interlocking spirals. Several times I was given one. That’s when I learned to say o be k’a dde k’a. I’d wear it for a while, and pass it on. Much as I would have liked to keep it.
I finally realised that some of the pieces of jewelry were sentences, or lines of poems. Maybe they all were.
There was a village school under a nut tree. The climate is very mild and dull, it never varies, so you can live outdoors. It seemed to be all right with everybody if I sat in at school and listened. Children would gather under that tree daily and play, until one or another of the villagers showed up and taught them one thing or another. Most of it seemed to be language practice, by way of storytelling. The teacher would start a story and then a child would carry it on a way, and then another would pick it up, and so on, everybody listening very intently, alert, ready to take over. The subjects were just village doings, as far as I could tell, pretty dull stuff, but there were twists and jokes, and an unexpected or inventive usage or connection caused a lot of pleasure and praise—”A jewel!” they’d all say. Now and then a regular teacher would wander by, doing a round of the villages, and have a session for a day or two or three, teaching writing and reading. Adolescents and some adults would come to hear the teacher, along with the children. That’s how I learned to read a few characters in certain texts.