After a long stretch of drafting and revision, I’m glad to say that The Left Hand — a feature screenplay adapted from my memoir Soulfully Gay, along with a full treatment — is finished. One hundred thirteen pages. Nine sequences. A year in the life of one man in Seattle. I want to say something … Read more
Re-reading The Worldview Artist, 2018–2022 Forty-seven posts. Seventy-some thousand words. Thirty-five of them arrived between April and September of 2018, which is what happens when a man who has been thinking in private for years is finally handed a door and told to open it. Then quiet, broken by seven posts around the 2020 election, … Read more
Here is a question that is easy to ask and, as far as I can tell, has never actually been asked: does the content of Enneagram Type One look anything like the content of the Taixuanjing‘s first quarter? Type Six like the sixth? And so on down the line. You have to lift both sets … Read more
August 2026 — Joe Perez Two nine-fold schemes for the human interior, separated by two thousand years and every conceivable difference of method and intent, agree far more often than they have any business agreeing. And the place where you would most expect them to part company — the one objection that ought to end … Read more
By Joe Perez i The cat is breath. The bird is voice.𝌕 opens with nothing in it.𝌐 is voiced before it is anything. That is the whole of the quarrel,and it was settled in the throat,before the garden, before the grass was green. ii 𝌕⚎𝒒 — no. Look again. 𝌕⚎𝌒.𝌕⚎𝌞. Two glyphs the same and … Read more
An experimental transcription — working note, not part of the whitepaper The passage below is the standard specimen text of the International Phonetic Association, chosen because it is the most widely transcribed paragraph in phonetics and so invites comparison with existing IPA renderings. Method and conventions Every glyph here was generated arithmetically from the tables … Read more
Lingua-U is still young. It is not yet a full-fledged constructed language. It does not have the vocabulary and grammar of Esperanto, Lojban, or Klingon. It is not a mature philosophical system, and it certainly does not arrive with the centuries of practice, commentary, and community that surround established spiritual traditions. What Lingua-U does offer … Read more
Try this before you read any further. Take a breath, and on the way out, let your jaw fall open and sound a long ah. Not loud. Just enough that you can feel it. Let it run the length of the exhalation and then stop. Now do it again with ee. Tongue up, forward, the … Read more
Sacred words are usually inherited. Someone hands you the syllable, tells you where it comes from, explains what it means, and lets you know what generations of practitioners have found in it. You arrive late to something already furnished. There is nothing wrong with that. It is how most living traditions work, and the furniture … Read more
What might a sacred language of sound look like if we were designing one today? Many spiritual traditions have treated speech as more than a vehicle for ordinary meaning. Mantra, sacred names, mystical alphabets, prayer, chant, and other forms of vocal practice all begin from the intuition that sound can participate in spiritual life—not merely … Read more