In the Land of Invented Languages

less important, just a slight reminder of the word it stood for. The English word “vegetable” does cover tomatoes. And for the children using it, was just a nonalphabetic way to get to that word.

The teachers did the best they could to accommodate Bliss’s criticisms. But his objectives were completely at odds with the practical problems they had to face. When the teachers encouraged the children to remember the symbol for “food,” by picturing it as a plate with a spoon under it, he was livid. It was crucial to his system that it be understood as the “mouth” above the “earth” because the true meaning (according to his “logical” system) was “all food which our mouth takes from Mother Earth.” When one of their newsletters showed a symbol sentence meaning “The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Pittsburgh Penguins,” he lamented, “All in spite of my condemnation of competitive sport in my book!” When they used the combination “food + out” to mean “picnic,” he proclaimed, “FALSE!” It did not mean “picnic”; it meant “food out at a restaurant.” When they wrote to him to request symbols for words they needed, he rarely responded. But he criticized without fail when they came up with something themselves.

He had created a “universal” language that nobody else could figure out how to use.

The staff’s plan to keep Bliss away from the administration didn’t last very long. He wrote to the principal, to the doctors, to the minister of health. He complained about the ways in which his symbols were being abused, and he started to demand some of the money he was convinced was pouring in from all sides.

He would come back to visit every spring, bearing gifts and kisses for everyone, and fervent apologies for those who had received some of his harsher letters. Then he would go back to Australia and start in again. Why hadn’t anyone acknowledged his gifts? Didn’t they realize how much he had spent on them? Didn’t they realize he barely earned enough to afford the canned peas, mincemeat, and small pinch of beetroot he subsisted on day by day? Did they ever think about that while they collected the fat salaries they earned off the sweat of his life’s work?

In fact, they were struggling to attract resources and support for their program. They needed to convince granting agencies and government officials of the value of this new and experimental teaching method. Shirley was on one side arguing against those who thought needs-based pictures (a toilet, a cup, a sandwich) were “good enough” and on the other side arguing against those who thought they should just start off by teaching the kids to spell. Meanwhile, Charles was traveling around Canada dismantling any progress they had made. He gave public lectures that were nothing more than point-by-point critiques of all their “mistakes.” He badgered government officials to convince the OCCC teachers to stop damaging the children by using his system incorrectly (at one point he ambushed the Ontario minister of education outside his home). In Bliss’s mind, he was helping the center to do a better job, and he expected them to be grateful.

So it was a surprise to him when, on his 1974 visit, the director of the OCCC called Bliss into his office and told him never to come back. They had had enough. In another room, on another floor, an Australian and Canadian film crew was setting up to record a scene for a documentary they were making about Bliss. Shirley went up to get him. He was shaken, coughing nervously, but he said nothing about what had just happened. He drank a glass of water and, in the time it took them to walk downstairs, transformed himself back into the jolly, hopping firecracker that he always seemed to be in front of an audience. He went ahead and performed for the camera and the children, grabbing a globe to demonstrate how far away Australia was. When I first watched the film, Mr. Symbol Man, I didn’t notice anything different about him in the scene. But after hearing the story from Shirley, I went back and watched it again. After he puts down the globe, he sits off to the side as Kari dictates a letter to her teacher through her symbol board. He seems uncharacteristically subdued, and a little confused. His face is drained of animation and painfully vulnerable. A few scenes later he is back in Australia, sitting at his desk, smiling and throwing his hands up in dramatic exasperation. “People don’t listen to me! They look right through me! What should I do? What should I do?” Then he turns away with a desperate, high-pitched laugh that’s almost too much to bear.

At one point, Bliss was invited to give a lecture at a hospital in Sydney. Afterward, he fumed that only nurses had shown up. “Not one doctor!” he complained. He threatened to cancel an upcoming lecture at another hospital unless the organizers could guarantee that full, high-ranking medical doctors would be there. Instead, they canceled on him. Despite the documentary, the lecture invitations, the reporters knocking on his door, he felt ignored, disrespected. He was getting the attention of nurses, social workers, and teachers, when he wanted doctors, professors, and heads of state.

He was lucky to be getting any attention at all. Blissymbolics was not the only pictorial symbol language to emerge after World War II. There was Karl Janson’s Picto (1957) and John Williams’s Pikto (1959) and Andreas Eckardt’s Safo (1962). No one was using those languages for anything.

Bliss had come to adulthood in interwar Austria, where a man was nothing without a title. He longed to inspire the same awed respect in others that he had felt when, as a poor, provincial nobody, he encountered the Herr Doktors, Herr Ingenieurs, and Herr Doktor Doktor Professors of Vienna. He thought people didn’t listen to him because he lacked the right titles, and so he never ceased trying to get those titles. He wrote to every university in Australia, asking to be granted a professorship, or at least a Ph.D., on the basis of his success with the Toronto program, but none responded. (He did finally purchase a mail-order Ph.D., shortly before his death.)

The titles wouldn’t have done him any good. While Bliss was traveling around giving interviews and lectures (“nurses'” lectures though they may have been), one Doktor Doktor Professor John Wolfgang Weilgart was unsuccessfully trying to get someone, anyone, to pay attention to his universal language.

Weilgart was a professor of psychology (at Luther College, in Iowa) with two Ph.D.'s when he first published his aUI: The Language of Space, in 1968. Weilgart was also from Austria, but had grown up in much more elevated circumstances than Bliss had. His grandfather was a Hungarian nobleman of some sort. His father, Hofrat Professor Doktor Doktor Arpad Weixlgartner, was the director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. His uncle Richard Neutra was a famous architect. They lived in Schoenburg Palace for a time. They socialized with Freud and other luminaries of turn-of-the-century Vienna.

As a boy, Weilgart had visions of winged beings who came from the stars to deliver a message of peace. When he told his parents about his visions, they took him to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed nothing more than a high IQ but warned him that he should speak about such visions only as “dreams” or “poems.” Since he seemed to be obsessed with words and sounds and meaning, his father encouraged him to get a degree in languages and philology, which he did, completing his dissertation a few months before the outbreak of World War II. He spent the war in the United States, teaching German, Spanish, Latin, and French at various schools and colleges in Oregon, California, and Louisiana. After the war, he returned to Europe and got another degree, in psychology.

He began teaching at Luther in 1964, where he completed his book on aUI. It begins with a poem about a boy who is visited by a kindly “Spaceman.” The Spaceman wants to transmit the wisdom of his beings to the people of Earth, but cannot do it through the languages of Earth, because “if we learnt your millions of words, we would be infected by your warped way of thinking.” So he teaches the boy the language of space.

In aUI, all concepts are derived from a set of thirty-three basic elements that have not only a motivated pictorial representation but a motivated sound representation.

 

 

The word aUI is formed by combining “space” (a), “mind” (U), and “sound” (I) and means “the language of space” because language is “when your mind sounds off.”

Weilgart’s aUI was supposed to serve as a neutral international language, and a cure for diseases of the mind caused by language. Weilgart claimed it was a language of cosmic truth that could bring about peace, dissolve selfishness, and align the conscious and subconscious mind. He developed a psychotherapy technique where he had patients translate words into aUI, in order to help them better understand the meaning of the concepts that troubled them. He worked for a time with drug addicts in the navy’s drug rehabilitation program, where, according to a recommendation letter from his boss, “meditations in these ‘Elements of Meaning’ superseded the desire for drug experience.”

Despite his credentials, Weilgart could not get anyone to listen to him. His self-published books were full of bizarre line drawings, poems, and mystic philosophizing. Weilgart’s bewildered colleagues at Luther tolerated him in their polite Lutheran way, while the administration pushed him to the margins as much as they could. He was asked not to peddle his books on campus, so some summers he left his family behind and toured across the country