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Dream Journal

Light Work & Play at Family Home (After Defending from Invasion)

High atop a stadium overlooking a valley, like a 3d model in tones of grey. This is a neighborhood I’ve come to that feels foreign, but where I could imagine living one day. Maybe I’m newly moved there.

Preparing to defend a house in a Jewish neighborhood, laid out on a long curved suburban street. Suddenly the ongoing warnings are quiet and it’s the eerie sounds of just nature and emptiness. The tanks of the invaders are easily defeated before they arrive at the house, self-destructed or -dismantled, then fired on by various unlikely things (like a wolf that can hold a gun). One defender who made a ten foot knife for the battle is walking down a regular street with this giant knife in the aftermath, a sight that might cause me to advise him against it.

My cousin is 18 and fixing a computer in the open hallway of the central living room of his childhood home (this is different than the home they had in Eureka). I tell him “if I had an 18-year-old, I’d want to put him to work fixing the computer” to which he smiles and shushes me.

In the same communal family space, a girl from elementary school, Amy Naud, and my hostel friend Dave V., are the best performing two people at growing up. They complete a series of tasks that mature you along the way and they do it fastest. This hallway has long been a gathering spot — I look at pictures from years past, parties with banners, random family albums.

After carrying unwieldy stuff down a set of stairs, I miss my subway car because a clueless younger guy (supposedly on my team/group/side) doesn’t think to hold the doors for me. Of course the large raised red button outside the doors doesn’t work either.

Playing a game with different shaped cards in a single deck, like a highly-adapted Magic the Gathering. One of the older kids on my team is Amy Naud, from before, who needs to draw a certain oval card. I offer to shuffle the cards in a big pile behind my back, since then she would be able to fairly draw the card. I’m on her team and the expectation is that I might subtly help her with this. She doesn’t expect my true motive, which is to do a bit of mischief by placing all the oval cards which *aren’t* the one she needs closer to the top.

While trying to hand over D batteries to someone, I have to lean far over while doing the handoff, holding onto smaller AA batteries in my other hand to maintain balance. This leads to awkwardness as it confuses the person I’m handing them to, as they don’t understand I’m handing over each D battery separately. They try to get the AA’s and I frustratedly fall to explain my intent, as I manage to finally swap my primary hand back to give the other D.

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Blog

Make Actiloquy a Thing: the Case for Fixing Linguistic Philosophy’s Worst Name

There are moments when the act of saying something is the thing that makes it happen. There are some serious heavy hitters to consider:

  • a judge saying, “I sentence you to life”
  • the officiant saying, “I now pronounce you married”
  • sorcerers saying “abracadabra!” (or the possible Aramaic original אברא כדברא, Abra K’davra — “I create as I speak”)

On these occasions, speech isn’t just hot air or describing the weather. This speech is a pressed launch button; an proclaimed formal decree; an act of actual power. When such words are spoken aloud it is reality itself that echoes. So… what’s the right word for those words?

Well obviously I went digging. Just get itchy like that sometimes, I do. Somewhere in our shared meta-lingual hyperfield a.k.a. chatbots & web searches, I sought whatever noun-lemma-thing that definitively, English-language-ly, captures the idea of “Word as Deed” …though I could’ve sworn we already had one. But I found something else: a steaming disaster of ill-fated scholarly branding that has probably confused people for 70+ years. Even worse is that it probably is the term I remembered — I just didn’t remember it being this terrible.

So, the Old Guard Said So

Right, so: J.L. Austin. Illustrious midcentury philosopher of language (beautiful title btw). Best known for developing the theory of “speech acts” (yes, exactly this, yes). Left us the well-known posthumous opus “How to Do Things with Words” (that’s what I’m talking about). Dude was a linguistic pragmatist, was big talkin’ up O.L.P. which means Ordinary Language Philosophy btw, and finally formalized the objectively-correct opinion that not all speech is merely for describing or communicating — some speech does things (YES, THANK YOU). Great start!

Man couldn’t stick the friggin’ landing though. His chosen term for this world-altering, nigh-magical power of speech? “Performative Utterance.” Wow ok.  Bit underwhelming. Distinct lack of whelm there.

It’s clunky. It’s overly academic and uninspired. It’s two mul-ti-syl-lab-ic words when one should do. Also, it’s downright confusing, isn’t it? Admittedly no one could predict that “performative” would increase in usage by over 100 times since 1960 (the year Austin died), and mutate into what is essentially an insult. “Performative” now suggests empty virtue signaling or faking something for online likes. It’s more like “fake it till you make it”, when it should be the real deal… make it.

But wait! It gets worse maybe? Austin later refined his limited initial ‘performative utterances’ idea and framed it as the middle of three levels, an analysis now called Speech Act Theory:

  • Locutionary Act: the noises one makes from one’s face-hole
  • Illocutionary Force: the actual intent and purpose (informing, ordering, promising, spellcasting, etc).
  • Perlocutionary Effect: the impact had on listeners

“Illocutionary?” Sorry, at least it’s a unique word, and I should be grateful, yet instead I must say oof. Oof, I say. The thing smacks of academic jargogling at its worst — high-on-its-own-supply terminology that gatekeeps a concept which everyone understands intuitively. It needs the whole system to even make sense. Somehow it’s more forgettable, too. A word like that was never going to see wide adoption. Respect to J.L. Austin, but for a language guy I expected you would’ve appreciated words more…

Uh oh. Maybe you had hoped to. You were a meticulous perfectionist who died unexpectedly before you could finish your greatest work. That rough draft made its way into the groundwater, and is still somehow quite highly-regarded. Kind of wish I hadn’t so deeply dunked on your aesthetics there, bud.

How bout I illocutionarily concede I only did it to make a particular point. (Reader, you may perlocutionarily decide if the point is made.)

Then There Was the Word

Right, so: we probably don’t need three confusing stuffy overly-similar tongue-twisters to describe the power of words. We need one useful word that clearly indicates what it is. We need a word that might gain traction outside specialized analytical contexts and find broad appeal. Maybe even a word that’s kinda cool? We need:

“Actiloquy”

Derived from the Latin Actus (action/deed) and Loqui (to speak), it is exactly what it hopefully sounds like: Action-Speech. The Spoken Deed. Say + Do.

The beauty of “actiloquy” is that it feels native to English speakers before they even open a dictionary. It shares a rhythmic and etymological DNA with “soliloquy,” a word common enough you might’ve been quizzed on it in high school. While a soliloquy is a speech of isolation, turning inward to the self, an actiloquy is a speech of projection, turning outward to the world.

You may have heard of  “somniloquy”, for talking in one’s sleep, or “colloquy” for a formal conversation, and of course honorable mentions “eloquent”, “loquacious”, and even “grandiloquent.” Mm, good stuff. Meanwhile we also have active, acting, actress, actuator, actionable, activity, transaction, interaction, activation, actuary, and actual, which are pretty solid words in English as well.

This intuitiveness can bridge the mental gap between the sacred and the bureaucratic. It forms a linguistic umbrella that covers the “so mote it be” of a pagan ceremony, the “presto change-o” of a kid’s magic show, or the “I accept the offer” of an employment contract. When a CEO says “you’re fired,” the employment contract is severed; the social reality has been altered instantaneously via actiloquy. This conceptual framing acknowledges that these are all the same mechanic: a switch flipped by human voice. It is closer the original and unrefined performative utterance.

Austin’s illocutionary act tries to get at this, but feels far too cerebral, too focused on the speaker’s internal intention. Actiloquy shifts the focus outward. It suggests a kinetic weight and importance, that action is inherent to the word’s definition… as befitting its intending meaning. It is no longer mired in Austin’s locational metaphors of within versus beyond the speech, however analytically useful they might be.

Yet a word isn’t better merely because it’s more intuitive, or familiar-ish, nor because it’s less worse than the alternatives. Actiloquy is more than that — though you might not guess why. The particular subject of the word touches on phenomena which mystics and legal scholars have had to contend for millennia: the effect of spoken language isn’t just in the meaning of the words, but in the physical, enacted, momentary event of their release.

There is the Japanese concept of Kotodama, the “soul of language”, where words aren’t just labels slapped onto objects but an influence on the object itself. This aligns strangely well with the Neoplatonist Iamblichus and his defense of magical “barbarous names” for ritual use — that an incantation’s power didn’t lie in understanding the words, but instead in the sound itself. In the modern era we could connect these ideas to the famed Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and linguistic relativity, where a language’s structures directly affect a speaker’s perceptions. It is said that a specific acoustic key unlocks a specific meaningful door. Well, why wouldn’t it?

Actiloquy sounds good. It just does. Try it out; maybe you’ll like it. When a priest consecrates the host it is actiloquy. An officer gives an order, and that is actiloquy. When mom tells you “it’s bedtime now”, you better believe that is actiloquy. An ancient and sophisticated linguistic device, a sonic weapon, the power of The Word: actiloquy.

Not the Final Word

Language is supposed to evolve to serve the people who use it, not the other way around. We aren’t all meant to be burdened with “Illocutionary Force” just because a guy at Oxford in 1955 hadn’t come up with something catchier yet. People need a word that acknowledges speech that’s a force of change. You need it.

Whether you are swearing an oath, casting a spell, or borrowing a few bucks from a friend, you aren’t merely talking. You are very much engaging in actiloquy… that is, unless you come up with a better word for it.

Let’s ask one last question, then. What is needed to make such a word real? Using it. Understanding it. Telling people that it is real and treating it the same, certainly. But there is a also a more direct, more relevant, more obvious way…

Hereby, “actiloquy” is now a thing. I have spoken. Thanks 🙂

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Dream Journal

Stolen Cyberpunk Timelines of Plarvolia

I come across Plarvolia who is sitting in a clear box for her art project. I can see her getting mildly harassed by children tapping on the glass among other things. Though I feel moved to intervene, I understand that I shouldn’t be the one to try. After her shift inside is up, I inspect café baked goods where she had been stationed. She was promoting/selling a new line of rainbow spectrum lights from General Electric — one of which, interestingly, is a strong bright black. Also notable is that I now know she actually does make money from her art (at least sometimes).

There is a unique cyberpunk setting that feels somehow European, old world. Inside a building are haphazard beds in a place seemingly used as a squat. I break through multiple walls of the interior in what feels like a sequence puzzle. Beyond, a darkened (but daytime) town square is buzzing with various activities.

I steal an invisible scooter-skateboard from a man riding it in the square. It’s broken in the process and gluing it back together proves problematic. Not only is this invisible kind a special color, the connections are finicky. It’s a specific brand that others feel is reputable called “Eaver” or “Matric” or something. I later go with someone who encourages me to try to buy one. The store has the feel of a cyber-renovated luxury 19th-century “Robber Baron” era place — dark wood columns and sophisticated electronic monitoring. I find a new board for $35 up on a shelf inside a bag, but decide it’s too expensive and I don’t want to try stealing it.

At the checkout area for this town square zone, I encounter my Homepie friends Juicy and Coco lounging having drinks. They’ve already paid for theirs, and when I look to pay they’ve already paid for mine too — though confusingly I don’t see them on the check. Perhaps they were omitted, which is all the same. Juicy notices he has to have a charge corrected before he goes, as the pipe he picked out was supposed to be on sale. He went to that same Robber Baron store as I did earlier.

There is a complex sorting-out of the timeline of interactions with Plarvolia. Time travel seems at play, nonlinearity, acausality. I put on a colorful fur-trimmed vest before I talk to her. I’m preparing for her timeline which is about to finish, and finally her timeline happens to line up with my own.

I revisit these narratives of Plarvolia for two hours. Retelling the story out of order; I can’t play out the events. I perceive parts where I saw perfectly from her perspective. But when did we talk? Wasn’t there more scenes with her? At some point I was explicitly instructed (or conclude?) that I need to write this one down. But now it hardly seems profound or important. But this dream feels different than other Plarvolia ones… I admit I even have a hard time thinking of her as Plarvolia, but instead think of her as her real self, as something outside her relation to me and what happened. I think of her with her real name and her real life.

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Dream Journal

Roof Cable

A cable penetrates the roof of the world, melting either side of its path and leaving an indentation. Has the feel of a whispered legend.

Interrupted by alarm.

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Dream Journal

Events Rewritten before they’re Written

My wife has an older sister and she’s going out of her way to try to make out with me. I think she’s doing it to annoy my wife but I’m not actually sure it would, little does she know. It feels like I’m being dragged along with the whole thing so I don’t have much of a choice either way. Suppose there are worse things to dream.

There’s a boxy white drumline practice space above a workshop. They do machining or carpentry maybe, and I’m only one who’s worked there before. It was a temp job years ago but I can still vividly imagine my day there working in a line of men. After the workers have gone home, we members of the drumline enter the space. It’s not an invasion or a break-in, but something else still dangerous. I’m with my female partner who I care for a lot, in a basement office decorated with plants. It turns out none of us noticed a single stormtrooper who stayed behind in the bathroom. He endangers us all.

The next sequence is unusual, as I get the strong sense that this is a *second* run through of the dream and I’m forcibly modifying it. I get revenge and rewrite the events, absolutely destroying the trooper and protecting my lady companion. An intense sequence but confusing too.

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Dream Journal

A Night of Clear Dreams

James T Kirk’s house in remote Wyoming log cabin. A hot tub out back with a grand wide view of mountains and nature. I’ve been better before, but I don’t remember from last time the new tenements where the front yard used to be, now facing a more busy road. Maybe this locale will be more of a town now, I could thrift at a little store here. I’m trying to work through how to do laundry there, moving the washer and dryer setup from my dad’s old Kemper Court home. Finally I work out there’s a room on the far side of the Wyoming cabin that already has a washer/dryer.

Trying to drive out of Palm Springs to a place my homeslice Lauren booked called Ibiza Hotel. The map insists we might not be able to get there with the route we’d planned, there’s so much red traffic. It says to turn around and go back the way we came, but there is a road called 982nd Way that cuts down through the rural Coachella Valley that I’ve not seen before. It’s red with traffic too but me and the homepie have to take one route or another.

A little 3-year-old who could talk is with a group of us adults, almost a mini adult. Reminds me of two kids in my life, but also Baby Yoda or Yosemite Sam. It gives me a strong recollection of what I got to experience talking with adults at age 4 (which I evaluate as the minimum age to have explicit memories). I imagine myself again being that small, entertaining adults who I realize now were specifically 1980s adults. There won’t be another time like that.

Being taken to my childhood home in Eureka — though I realize now it was actually completely different from my waking life. I experience powerful waves of nostalgia when I recognize the rain-aged backyard table and seating, the back fence to the neighbors where raccoons played, the trough of a muddy ditch near a creek where I would found animals. Leaning into the ditch, I pull out what looks like my velociraptor puppet, a real childhood artifact I haven’t remembered in many years. Peering from the plant-heavy backyard, there’s an angle of trees I see framing the path to the road which sparks overwhelming recognition, even from other dreams, without me knowing if this is the original location or not.

Proceeding through a long multi-room store, it ends with a collection of vintage sewing machines all in stylish colors, some I’ve never seen before like army green. At some point in the night’s dreams, I find a little vintage fridge on its side flooded with water. I empty it and set upright. It still works but is loud while running. It seems to be from the same era as the sewing machines, and I find myself having affection for it.

I don’t think I lost many dreams writing them down today. But I don’t know how I could express the particular feeling of having visited the places I did… as though this was both overdue, necessary prep work, and indulgent distractions. Such clarity of vision I usually don’t have outside of lucid dreams, either. I don’t have a good guess as to what triggered them.

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Dream Journal

Spaces of Hong Kong

Never been to Hong Kong before but it’s everything I imagined. I finally came here after years of thinking about it. I’m having a leisurely time, reflecting on the foreignness and how it feels.

The colors of everything man-made is distinct from what I’m familiar with. As I stare up at local palm trees in a courtyard I reflect how the manufactured goods here are all from different factories. So it’s not merely that designs might vary; the actual available supply of something as simple as pigment is slightly different.

I am residing in some big formerly abandoned space that’s mine to play around with. I spend time in various rooms, imagining what I might do in them. I explain to my companions that I’ve determined the largest blank wall space, an arch shape above a long built-in table. I detail a possible technique of using single printed sheets of larger AI-assisted picture, something like the tiled printing mosaic my former roommate used to have. I continue talking to them while hanging over the edge of a doorframe, leaning into the room they’re sitting in. I’m trying to close out the conversation and get drawn into describing the finicky techniques of getting a good photo.

Outside, I see sunset — or something like a sunset without the valence of being the end of a day. It looks like three overlapping gears or prisms, radiating over a curved landscape. I find it difficult to photograph, much less describe. It’s quite a powerful image, but I waited too long in the day to write it down properly… though I still hope not to forget it entirely.

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Dream Journal

Pick Up and Drop Off

I watch letters change on paper, morphing/fading from “will” to “was”. This seems a parallel to the Wikipedia phenomenon of people altering a person’s page to past tense when they die. I can’t be sure how, but this has to do with a boyfriend of Dara V.

Along the back fence of my childhood home I walk along the top of the narrow brick wall. There didn’t used to be buildings there when I was growing up, but now some neighbors have put their chairs on the balcony as close as they can to our yard, so they directly see everything. I find myself not only annoyed, but feeling this is unjust somehow.

Near the corner of the back fence I stand with a goth girl waiting for her ride. A car speeds past us at the stop and swerves head-on into a tree. It’s shocking to see this happen in person. I actually wonder now if I somehow slept through a traffic accident outside my window and integrated that into the narrative…

Later I’m dropping off a women at a grand yet modern palace, many stories tall with underground car access. This place exists in many timelines, yet it’s a good place in any timeline to be a woman. It’s agreed that her name here will be “Christina”. On the map this place is marked as… I can’t recall; it seems this detail was overwritten. But it’s something to do with deadly subterfuge or sabotage. Not that she herself will do any killing, but she may be the cause of their death.

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Dream Journal

Building Inspection Plarvolia Friendliness

Visiting London. Picking random stop, to check out how average people live. Walking around the block wearing a bright blue poncho, which happens to be the exact uniform of a school nearby. Someone mistakes me for one of the schoolkids and I have to point out the logo on the side of my hood. London is in a much steeper valley than I expected, with parts that had to be leveled flat and interstitial slopes left unbuilt — this gives a terraced appearance.

Inside a neglected industrial building, I inspect the many floors one by one. While in the dim former stairwell or elevator, I encounter Plarvolia by chance, not really realizing it’s her at first. While carefully examining the dappled moldy walls, newly decorated with art, she mentions working on something to help with a virus. I immediately but subtly pick up on it, responding by mentioning the exact name (which could’ve been Epstein-Barr or Tay-Sachs) — as it’s something I’ve been working on too.

Soon, we are in shared company in an open communal lounge on one of the floors. The furniture looks scavenged, cozy, the room layout open and welcoming. We don’t talk directly but seem to mix together pointedly in conversation. While I’m sitting low at a coffee table, I remember one question topic involving proper form of a word combining “themselves” and “threesome”, which someone poses as possibly “threeselfs”, but which I jump in to say should grammatically be “threeselves”.

It is difficult to describe what happens next. Plarvolia and I are scattered amongst the group as it devolves into affectionate touching and partner play. I lean against a couch with my leg stretched out. She is moving around under a blanket with her companion, possibly a boyfriend or something equivalent. My foot comes in contact with her hand while she sits on the floor in front of him. It isn’t rejected. She seems to touch it purposefully over some time, perhaps even absent-mindedly. It’s not clear she knows it’s mine, but I can see where she is and know it’s her touching it. It is pleasant to be here in this room, with this camaraderie.

Eventually she moves my foot under her butt. This is an escalation, and well-considered. I know it’s intentional. I know she wants it there; this isn’t merely the mere absence of rejection. I can tell now she knows it’s me. Her butt is smooth and warm. I am here, with her, having made up, enjoying having bodies together — with no words or even eye contact exchanged.

I wake up peacefully 15 minutes before my alarm, reminiscing. I get most of the dreams down… minus the last paragraph. That takes me about 3 hours of stalling on my phone late at night. Even though the dream felt good, felt meaningful, it’s still challenging to feel so vulnerable about her. I’ve often wondered if she reads these, or what she would think if she did. Rationally I doubt it, but I don’t know how to feel about it anymore. I’ve lost sleep over it.

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Dream Journal

SoCal and Canada, Onto Remote Paths

It’s been a few months since I moved back to my hometown. I’m travelling by night around the square grid of streets, chasing a car somewhere in the sprawl of hotels and country clubs. I unintentionally drop some utensils out the car window a few blocks before I take a hard left turn trying to catch the fleeing car of my middle school friend Stephen Colson.

Outside a fancy apartment building where I’m staying, or perhaps considering renting, I watch a billboard collapse. From the outdoor wraparound communal balcony I watch the face of Will Smith fall into pieces, the billboard’s gimmicky mechanical baubles scattering across the Los Angeles street below.

At a location across from Disneyland is a store which I remember I’ve been before. It’s austere on the outside, the humbleness of the shopkeeper’s simple living a contrast to it’s famous neighbor. The only thing I can remember of it’s features are that the building had an address, and a little black girl sometimes stood outside.

I notice next door is a new store with no external indicators of what it sells. It’s even narrower and plainer, almost liminal in the sense that I don’t know if I’m supposed to be in there. Inside, the merchandise is sparse and I proceed down the hallway-like space. Instead of a back room, it leads into a hippie-bohemian styled space with a glass frontage to an indoor mall. There’s a piece in the front window that I inspect. The place smells of good leather.

I’m marching across a creek in what feels like the Canadian wilderness. Attractive female strangers pass by, having just crossed the creek as well, as I wait for my female companion to catch up. I lean one-legged with my walking stick and reflect on promiscuity. Chattering on to my companion (my wife probably) it feels as though I’m deliberately ignoring the cute girls, which almost seems rude. We proceed down the hiking trail. I keep unusually good notes along the way. We pass by a series of lakes, getting more and more remote. I put on several circle stickers in sequence on my foam shoe, their handwritten messages spelling out a story. When it seems finished I take a photo.