Despina E. Durand

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Monstrous Empathy (To Not Getting Burnt)

Monsters do not seek the shriveled empathy grown in the moral philosopher’s over-weeded garden. Monsters ask to be met in the space where we are most human: where we hope against hope to be loved.

It has become increasingly apparent to me – or rather, I have been repeatedly and rigorously reminded, recently – that there are many people out there who never recognize themselves in the monsters which abound in our literature. They do not ache with the helpless, anchor-less rage of stepping into a world with no place for you. They cannot see that the monsters have been struggling, terribly, to find voices with which to speak and yet can find no words but those which bleed and terrify as they are screamed into the night.

These people believe that the monsters do not merely hide in shadow, but are made of the formless dark. They do not recognize that it is the light which creates the shadow, and that what is wrapped in darkness was there long before the match was struck. These men (for so have they all been) are well-intentioned, sometimes pious, and completely bereft of the compassion the monster has so long sought.

Most alarming, perhaps, is their willingness to lay blame and simultaneously deny compassion. I find them most often discussing Victor Frankenstein and his Creature. They condemn the doctor for his crimes against nature, and then his creation for the temerity of his anguish in the face of an unbearable accident of birth. There is no space for grief at being utterly alone in one’s existence. The desolation of seeing one’s self reflected only in the mirror is utterly foreign to them.

This clear relegation of the “monstrous” or “unnatural” to an indisputable Other – an uncompromising distinction between “human” and “not” – is a repetition of the greatest sin of Enlightenment. This error has wrought unutterable destruction on a vast proportion of humankind.

Those who have been categorized outside the bounds of humanity are innumerable. They are of every race, gender, form, social position, and intellect. They have been exhibited, enslaved, tortured, executed, lynched, murdered, incarcerated, institutionalized, abandoned, aborted, and cast out.

Worse still are those who think that the monsters were defeated, only now to return. In their ignorant terror, they delude themselves, repeating the myth that the horrors we are bearing witness to are of monstrous origin. But these horrors are born of those long used to holding the light which casts the shadows.

It is only now that we are seeing the monsters on their own terms, carefully exercising voices unused declaration, leaving behind the territory of howling to speak for themselves. The person who declares the monster categorically inhuman is waving a torch into the dark, hoping to burn something he has never truly seen.

Most importantly, monsters do not ask for the condescension of high-minded morality; they do not seek the shriveled empathy grown in the moral philosopher’s over-weeded garden. Monsters ask to be met in the space where we are most human: where we hope against hope to be loved despite the exquisite agony of existence. This is the empathy said to be felt by mothers for their children, and between those comrades, compatriots, and brothers who have loved such as to know their lives are meaningless without the bonds which hold them together.

Unlike men, monsters have known the cold of going without the assurances that such love is possible. They have stood perfectly still in the darkness and known what it is to feel truly, utterly alone.

When a flame belonging to another is held to our face, we are rendered unrecognizable even to ourselves.

It should not need to be said: it is time for man to step into the shadow and hold tight to the fear which blooms when we feel ourselves dissolve into that darkness, to recall the way it feels to be alone, and to remember the relief in finding a hand to hold onto in the dark.

This is all prose for the sake of poetry. I don’t usually let myself run free, all extended metaphors and florid prose, due to an undoubtedly misplaced dedication to the minutiae of rational argumentation. (For rational argumentation please see the following post.)

Yes, you have to use the same rules for everyone (Monsters vs Modernism)

Seriously, I’m both saddened and genuinely perturbed by people who feel capable and justified in casting out monsters, most especially Adam AKA Frankenstein’s Creature. While the Creature’s actions may be contemptible, his plea to be recognized as worthy of human compassion is so convincingly stated.

We must register, here, the contradiction at the heart of all debate on this issue: if we believe literature to be meaningful, we must recognize the power of language and both emotive and rational argumentation. Simultaneously, there are those who would deny the right of any intelligent entity to justify its own existence or advocate for its recognition as human. After all, it could all be a ploy. Each person must decide which of the two arguments they believe and then, one hopes, follow that logic through to its conclusion. Either words are powerful vectors of meaning and can convey an otherwise imperceptible truth regarding the inner qualities of a given entity’s experience of itself, OR any thing which advocates for itself must be treated with suspicion as a result of the possibility that it could be lying (people included).

I can tell you which option I prefer, but ultimately, nothing I say is likely to convince you, so I’ll leave it at that.

In the case of Adam, I am inclined to point to his reprehensible behavior as evidence of his humanity. He ultimately chooses to express himself in the manner with which he has been made most familiar by those around him; a destructive rage which seeks to balance the scales of justice which he sees as having been so cruelly stacked against him.

This particular rhetorical turn leads us to another point of insoluble contention.

Those who register a fundamental difference between Victor and his Creature are prone to the following logical proofs^[1]:

Victor = Man
Man ≠ God
∴ Victor ≠ God

Creature = Unnatural
Unnatural = Monstrous
∴ Creature = Monstrous

Simultaneously, they believe that these are static, immutable categories. Victor is not God, so he cannot create life absent of the usual process of human conception and gestation. The fact that he brought the Creature to life (loosely speaking) does not transform him into a god. Ergo, regardless of any action he takes, he remains a man.

Meanwhile, the Creature is burdened with its own immutable, non-human nature. There is nothing the Creature can do or say to alter its status as “monstrous”.

Given my personal thesis of the Creature’s fundamental right to compassion, I can choose to approach these arguments in a few different ways. First of all, this presupposes two very important ideas. It assumes that “Human” and “Monstrous” are mutually exclusive categories, yet it fails to follow one potential outcome of that very supposition. Namely:

Victor = Man
Man ≠ God
∴ Victor ≠ God

BUT if God is the only self-contained creative force, AND Victor created life w/o help, THEN – perhaps –
Victor ≠ Natural
Natural is oppositional to Unnatural
∴ Victor = Monstrous

Creature = Unnatural
Unnatural = Monstrous
∴ Creature = Monstrous

This particular line of reasoning can result in the possibility of being both Monstrous and Man without requiring that the terms being interchangeable.

We hit the end of the road when we realize that the question has become ‘What is the definition of “Man”?’

As we can see, it also requires us to deny the possibility that action has any transformative or generative capacity. By relying on the assumption that Victor is a priori excluded from the creation of life without a partner, then anything Victor creates which walks and talks and may show all the usual symptoms of “life” must not actually be alive. Hence the Adam’s designation as “unnatural” and his classification as “monstrous”.

The possible counter-arguments bifurcate once more.

On the one hand, I could produce historical evidence which shows that, prior to the Renaissance/Enlightenment and the development of modern human anatomy, the monstrous was inherently both natural and human. Forces beyond the traditional scope of man were clearly involved, resulting in “monstrous” births being viewed as auguries, portending good or ill. Nevertheless, they were born of human mothers, were seen as relating to human affairs and therefore their position as part of the human world is undeniable.

But an argument from authority, relying on history, is nevertheless an attempt to revise the fundamental assumptions of this argument, in a somewhat underhanded manner.

The other line of argument cuts right to the chase:

By this logic, our behavior is a direct result of our fundamental nature. Because our natures cannot change, our actions are confined to the limits of what our nature allows. If this is the case, then our nature and therefore our actions are the result of having been born one way or another, as this or as that.

If so, Adam is blameless in his monstrosity. His position outside humanity is beyond his control; yet he is supposed to submit to violence and denigration for an accident of birth.

We return to the question of original sin, innate evil, inherent and intrinsic qualities. This is the question which haunts moral philosophy, psychology, religion, and the judicial process:

Are we responsible for our own actions?
How must we live pursuant to or in the absence of that answer?

[1] Who wants to yell at me for using symbology cribbed from the two things I remember from high school freshman geometry? This is the rhetorical equivalent of an economist inserting a so-called “illustrative” graph which merely visually represents their argument without any meaningful relationship to actual observed phenomena. DON’T LET PEOPLE LIE TO YOU. (Especially not me.)

Magical Thinking:

Despite what my place of employment might inspire in the popular imagination,

I’m a Gemini therefore I am an Air sign. This means that my suit, in the tarot, is Swords. It is the suit of the intellect, logic, empirical exploration. Just as I regard my ruling planet — Mercury, the planet of communication– I feel warmly about being associated with the suit of Swords.

One of my favorite things about that suit in the Tarot is the way the numbered cards increase steadily into calamity. The Ace of Swords is associated with clarity and insight. But as the cards progress, it becomes increasingly clear that the blade of the sword cuts both ways, the intellect and the mind are powerful, and just as likely to ruin the one who wields them as they are to allow that person to succeed.

The X of Swords traditionally features a person lying facedown, nine swords sticking out of their back, and one stuck in the ground. Upright, the card is associated with failure and defeat. The wisdom of the tarot dictates that a purely intellectual path results in a destitution and destruction of the spirit.

Of all four suits, it is the only one whose progression ends in tragedy.

As both a strict materialist, a sometimes-Pessimist (philosophically speaking), and a contrarian, I am inclined to point out that it would behoove the arbitors of the Tarot to dissuade a purely intellectual, empiric approach to life, as that woud swiftly put psychics, fortune-tellers, magicians, occultists, and faith leaders of all sorts out of business.

Equally true, however, is the fact that human beings, regardless of their personal philosophies, must believe in something if they are to continue to get up out of bed every morning.

No detours, a review of Cemetery Beach

Rating: ★★★★★

Maybe Warren Ellis is in my head, or maybe what he and Jason Howard achieved with Cemetery Beach is just genius, wrapped in subtlety (a shocking claim, given the number of explosions it contains) wreathed and garlanded in weirdness.

If you want to know what’s going on, if you need answers, if you enjoy carefully laid out intricacies, then Cemetery Beach is not for you.

By a certain measure, the 7-issue story (now collected into a single volume) is nothing more than a series of provocations. I see that more as a feature than a bug. It is entirely possible that a year and change of being subscribed to Ellis’ newsletter – Orbital Operations – has rotted my brain, like the chemical inhaled by the gas mask wearing denizens of the outer ring on the planet where Cemetery Beach takes place.

Cemetery Beach provides a vicious, demented contrast to eutopic visions of a post-scarcity world (such as Corey Doctorow’s Walkaway – more on that soon). The unidentified (though by no means unnamed – protagonist, scout, and Earthling Mike Blackburn provides a number of expletive laden possibilities) planet on which the majority of the story takes place is literally made up of the material necessities for life: a substance, a mix of protein, sugar, etc. oozes out of cracks in the mantle; the planet is ripe with refined nuclear material, providing functionally unlimited energy; and a mysterious pool provides the means of extending the human lifespan – the exact process is (perhaps mercifully) vague, but seems to involve fungal infection and cancerous cell growth in addition to longevity.

Whether the found of this – in their words – Utopia are Nazis or not is never entirely clear. The early-20th century military aesthetic of the ruling class automatically produces the comparison, and knowing that the colony was a result of a secret program in the 1930s does little to disabuse the idea. However, they could just as easily be British or American, handily collapsing the distance between the various strains of fanatical social engineering which sprouted up as we moved from the Victorian into the Modern era.

The lack of clarity regarding the exact quasi-historical origins of the hideous situation Mike stumbles upon, as part of his reconnaissance mission from Earth to this recently uncovered project, is a refreshing break from the unwieldy exposition we have come to expect (and accept) from dystopic and/or apocalyptic fiction. While it might be a stretch to say that its absence lends the narrative anything like ‘realism,’ it, at least, does not demand the attenuated suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience, while the native guide explains to the non-native (and the audience) how all this came to be… While they get shot at.

Instead both Mike and the audience are left to speculate and extrapolate as to the processes which resulted in the colorful and horrifying tableaus Mike and dissident Grace Moody (imprisoned for “murderous shit”) make their way from the prison in the capitol (inner ring) out to Cemetery Beach (last outpost before the wastes) where Mike’s transport home awaits. All the visitors from “Oldhome” must make up their own minds about this alien, if not totally foreign, world.

This is the point where I say something like: ‘the guiding principle of an extractive “economy” – one encompassing the physical, biological, environmental, etc. – which guides all life on Utopia can be seen as a caricature of neoliberal, late-stage capitalism. A ruling class – whose sole interest is their own self-perpetuation and maintenance of power, an avarice so fervent they operate without care, or seeming awareness, that the end result of their project will be their “utopia” sitting atop a blasted, toxic wasteland – can be said to reflect the probable outcome of willful inaction on the part of the ruling classes on our Earth to protect any kind of “greater good.”’

But Cemetery Beach can just as easily eschew any kind of overtly political analytic hack job and instead stand as an oasis, a space apart from the dystopic/apocalyptic mainstream.

Sometime after the half-way point, Mike says, “You know, at some point along the way, this stopped being fun.” They have just breached the outer ring, mercilessly slicing their way through the denizens of this perverse, human “cold storage” – the icy waste that Grace Moody called ‘home.’ She checks over the bodies littering the snow, looking for survivors. The moment, a reprieve in the otherwise non-stop, nuclear-powered, at times literally face melting pace of the narrative-action, provides the opportunity to reflect on the real stakes within the story.

Amazingly, it turns out that a simple demand for empathy might be an effective way to solicit it.

Cemetery Beach stands up to do the job which the previous decade’s cinematic revisitations of 90s graphic novels (an era known for its addiction to unremorseful violence, brutality, and sex) has failed to do. The 2008 adaptation of Wanted fell back on the unimaginative horror of having been duped by a shadowy international conspiracy – and having the hot girl you were lusting after die to save the world, and your ass. Then there’s the cognitive dissonance of Colin Firth in the Kingsmen movies – although by 2014, the shadowy international cabal at least had a veneer of political vitality, following the bank bailouts and the increased willingness of the super rich to outright state their plans to retreat to enclosed havens while the rest of the world burns (I’m looking at you, Peter Thiel). We could include the SyFy channel adaptation of 2014’s Deadly Class (also from Image Comics), with its relitigation of the Reagan-Thatcher era cuts to public services. Secret organizations – especially the kind that assassinate people – proliferate.

Warren Ellis is smart enough to know that the people who are most deserving of our compassion, and the people we are all most likely to become are the incidental casualties. Those with the power are likely to throw themselves into the line of fire to protect whatever travesty sustains their way of life. The rest of us will mourn or die as those who never had the chance to decide whether or not we want a revolution.

This isn’t to say that Ellis doesn’t make room for the political gallows humor which fueled the likes of Transmetropolitan (the work which converted me to an Ellis fan). Mike’s loved ones have all met with tragic ends, comprising a laundry list of social ills resulting from willful political inaction spanning the last three decades. The tragedy has left Mike with suicidal tendencies (a quest for “the good death” according to Grace) and a martyrous inclination to self-sacrifice. These traditional affectations of the male ego are nonetheless more palatable than the sexual assault and provocative political misbehavior which negatively impacts so much of the contemporary work produced by his generational cohort (yes, I mean Alan Moore).

It might be that fridging his protagonist’s entire family and social circle enables Ellis to avoid the sexist under-/overtones of allowing his hero to off-load his survivor’s guilt onto the nearest only sort-of vulnerable female acquaintance. Instead, it takes on a more holistic character, for a Freudian psychological substitution, with Mike seeking absolution for the failure to save one world, by saving another from the ravages of institutionalized madness.

Given that Ellis and Howard had scarcely more than 150 pages to work with, ‘Everyone I love is dead, at least let me save one person,’ is a succinct and digestible motivation. (The motivational Occam’s Razor, if you will.)

Cemetery Beach is a wild, 7-issue ride, and will leave you inquisitive and energized; two things we’ll need to face the coming future. After all, it’s already here. (You’ve been trained for this, hold on tight.*

*: to quote from my favorite part of Mr. Ellis’ newsletter

Trials of Communication and Triumphs of Empathy, a review of Avi Silver’s Two Dark Moons

DISCLAIMER: I do have a personal connection with Avi Silver, the author of this work. We met in freshman year of college and roomed together the following year. It is up to the reader to decide if that kind of intimacy and co-habitation makes a critic more or less likely to extend unreasonable courtesy towards a given author. I was graciously sent an electronic advanced reader’s copy of the book, and the review that follows is as honest and thoughtful as I am able to render a personal opinion.

The world of Ateng is one rife with ritual and auspice.

Ama and Cheheng, the two moons in the night sky over Ateng, govern most aspects of life in the hmun. In Ateng, the heavens do more than assign purported characteristics of personality, as the zodiac is said to do in our world. The moons one is born under determine most aspects of one’s life in the hmun; they govern gender assignation — male, female, or both; they inform what marriages would be considered beneficial; what positions one may hold in the community (leadership, responsibilities, etc); and more, in addition to the more familiar behavior and personality traits.

The struggle of being out of joint, an interruption in the flow of life and tradition has been a part of Sohmeng’s life ever since her birth. But a catastrophe which resulted in a total collapse (literally) of the traditional migration of the hmun between its two mountain top territories, also ultimately stole the lives of her parents and stalled any chance of Sohmeng and her generational cohort of completing the ritual known as tengmunji which would usher them into adulthood.

The trappings of childhood grate at Sohmeng Par (the second name supposedly denotes the aspect of the moons in the sky on the night of her birth), and her impetuous, “speak first, ask for forgiveness later” character has gotten her into trouble again. The beginning of the novel finds her arguing with her brother as she goes to plead her case to the council of hmun elders.

The narrative of Two Dark Moons is the deceptively simple outer garment of a complex mystery. It follows in the tradition of “Young Adult Fantasy” or “coming of age” novels in that it includes a home, a fall, an adventure beyond the boundaries of what is known, and the journey to return, during which it becomes clear that the person who left the village at the beginning is a stranger to the one who now attempts to return.

Instead, I believe that the beating heart of Two Dark Moons are the questions of language and communication – epistemology and belonging – which it engages so effortlessly. These questions are so intrinsic to the characters and the story that they are almost rendered invisible.

Every world, every community, every person has a story, a mythology, a structure which defines them and their place in creation. One of the great myths of humankind, passed down from the Ancient Egyptians to the Greeks, that encompass the Torah, the Talmud, the Bible, the Quran, ties language to divinity. We need not invoke the fall of Babel and the fracturing of mankind into disparate groups unable to communicate. Prometheus may have given humankind fire but Thoth taught Pharaohs and their priests to write and in so doing changed the fate of humanity forever.

The utilitarian definition of language sees it as a means of conveying information, words become signs which point to objects or abstract concepts thereby allowing individuals to articulate information about the world. It is also the framework within which any group or community makes sense of the world around them, and of their place within it.

Without sliding into linguistic determinism, Silver’s novel carefully lays out how language reflects and perpetuates the knowledge and structures of a given community. It is no surprise to those familiar with the convention of the “coming-of-age novel” that the limitations of culture and community, and the impositions they place upon the conception of the self, are tested by the experience of travelling outside and beyond them.

Constructed languages (or “ConLangs” ^[1]) are a misunderstood though increasingly prevalent aspect of science-/speculative-/fantasy-fiction. In Two Dark Moons, Silver does more than apply the anti-censorship obfuscation tactic of TV (“She’s a fracking Cylon!”) or the use of “foreign” language as a way of making the Other more remote and unknown (“Cthulhu fhtagn” or “the practice of Kelno’reem”). Language is a vital component of life in and structure of communication in the book form an important dimension of the story from the very beginning.

Language is a constant battle in Two Dark Moons. Sohmeng, the hot-headed protagonist, struggles to communicate, her “speak first, apologize later” attitude has landed her in hot water (the ‘again’ is implicit) at the beginning of the novel.

As she makes her case before the council of elders, 24 total, representing each of the lunar phases, with the exception of Minhal – the darkest night, the “bad sign” of the new moons, when the Gods’ eyes are turned away from the hmun.

As she prepares and makes her case to the council of elders, it becomes clear that Sohmeng is no stranger to the difficulties of communication. The complexities of clarity and diplomacy are rendered vividly.

The struggle to remain both truthful and diplomatic (the first of which, for Sohmeng, is fundamentally compromised by the circumstances of her birth), to balance being understood and to convince others to give you what you want, is put front and center.

At home, among the hmun, Sohmeng has already lost the battle and tipped the scales more toward brutal clarity, and suffers the subsequent social isolation familiar to anyone with an undisciplined tongue. Sohmeng is the victim of another trait of those who find themselves too close to the edge: she sees with great clarity the threads of responsibility and choice that bind her community together. She has the consigned/committed pariah’s certainty that if people would just take her seriously, life might be easier for everyone.

Somheng’s parents were traders and as such, she speaks the trader pidgin used to conduct transactions between different hmun^[2], putting her a full step closer to bilingualism than anyone else in her community. The cognitive and intellectual flexibility introduced with any form of bilingualism (a trait the novel engenders through the use of the incorporation of hmunpa into the narrative), a subtle alienation from a unified or totalizing description of the world which can sometimes develop as a result of monolingualism, primes Sohmeng (and encourages the reader) to successfully re-evaluate the world around her and her position within it.

Two Dark Moons does not limit itself to exploring language as an instrument of epistemology. It also commits itself to the complex project of understanding sentience and communication in both non-human and non-linguistic terms. In our world, the efforts of conservationists, naturalists, and cognitive scientists have done their part to show that the rest of the animal kingdom has as much claim to sensibility and complex cognition as does humankind and, moreover, that the distance between “human” and “animal” is insignificant.

The forests in the valley from which the five fingers of Ateng emerge shelter a reptilian apex predator, the Sãoni. Even from the safety of the hmun they are all too real to be dismissed as some kind of boogeyman. Like the stories European explorers brought back of panthers and leopards – natives ceding territory to the uncontested regents of the jungle – the Sãoni are a death sentence to those exiled or separated from the community.

Where Silver’s world building and empathic sensitivity shine, setting the shared world of Eiji and Ateng apart, is their refusal to recognize the traditional barriers of intelligence and love. Anthropomorphized animal narrators are a staple of fantasy fiction, as is the reversal of the seemingly “animal” into an intelligent Other. Silver chooses to remind us that speech is not the be-all, end-all of communication.

Even as our own scientific exploration now shows that elephants, whales, and dolphins possess a greater capacity for complex thought than previously afforded to them by humanity, the colony of Sãoni she joins show Somheng that viewing language-based communication as the pinnacle of intelligent evolution is an affectation of humanity.

Ultimately, the demand for complex empathy across species is a lesson which prepares Sohmeng (and the audience) for the much more complicated business of empathizing with those human strangers who look and speak in unfamiliar ways.

It is easy to focus on the tradition of social commentary which has defined speculative fiction from early eu-/utopias through the tradition of feminist and queer SF/F, a tradition of which Two Dark Moons is undeniably a part. Indeed, the novel works diligently to challenge the audience’s assumptions regarding the “natural” organization of human beings and expands the possibilities of gender assignations, linguistic conventions, and reproductive configurations, in addition to more common topics in mainstream SF/F such as styles of governance and environmental systems.

Silver is also able to impart a wisdom so often lacking from the ever-rising tide of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction which threatens to overwhelm every imaginable media outlet. They recognize that a community and a culture, even in the midst of crisis, is often able to carry on with a semblance of normalcy which can conceal impending catastrophe. As an author, Silver is willing to confront the re-traumatization inherent in history and discovery. There are questions which lurk in the caves and hollows which will never yield answers and the grief of them is something Sohmeng, and ultimately her hmun, must learn to live with, without hope or promise of closure.

There is a transcendental impulse in Two Dark Moons, best recognized and understood by looking out at the world and knowing enough of life and death to be able to name what is before and around us, that great cycle of which we are a part, as “One.” The decision not to hold one’s self apart from the complexity and intricacies of “everything” reminds us that we are governed as much by the salt of the earth as we are by the movement of the heavens.

Perhaps my only complaint, and it’s merely a matter of form and personal preference, is that the story ends not quite on a cliffhanger (that comes at the start of the novel, actually) but with an unrepentant promise of a sequel. There is much still to learn of Ateng, Eiji, the hmun and the travails that await them, but in a world gone mad for sequels, prequels, series, et. al. it can be exhausting to add another to the list. That having been said, I would not trade my experience traveling through Eiji for anything.

Two Dark Moons is now available at Amazon. Grab a copy! (Not an affiliate link)

1. “Constructed Languages” can refer to a variety of different types of languages which are intentionally developed by individuals. There are conlangs which are nominally dedicated to facilitating global communication or even communication with extraterrestrials, such as Esperanto and AI. However, the kind currently proliferating are those often referred to as “Art Languages” or “ArtLangs” which are languages developed as part of a wider artistic endeavor or for personal use and/or entertainment. The most well-known artlang is undoubtedly Tolkien’s Elvish, though Dothraki (developed for television by David Peterson) and Klingon are not unfamiliar. Both art- and conlangs are held to fairly stringent linguistic standards, and to be a fully developed “language” must meet the same requirements as any organic or naturally occurring language. For example, they require grammars and vocabularies which exceed a specific quantity. Therefore, most conlangs are developed over years and decades and are the result of an astounding quantity of work and thought. For more information about Constructed Languages and the people who love them, check out the Language Construction Society. (They have a really great convention, I went to it once, it changed my life.) ↵

2. I think it is a collective noun, it could follow the plural prefix format and be bahmun as a plural, but that might be a human/animal plural instead. Without a full grammar for the language, this will have to remain speculation. I hope that we do get a chance to dig into the linguistic world of Ateng in the future. ↵