He Speaks the Language of Change : Dennis Horn of Garden Grove wants to save the English tongue and the planet along with it. It will take an EarthLing to do the job, he says.
From his first-floor apartment, Dennis Horn plots to pull the foundation stones out of the English language, precipitating a metamorphosis in humankind that may just save the planet. Then he’ll go to Mimi’s Cafe for breakfast.
“I spend a lot of time at Mimi’s, and I’m sort of expecting that one of these days--five, 10, 20 years from now--everyone’s just going to stop and look around at each other and know that everything has changed,” Horn said.
Barefoot and simply attired, Horn spoke in the rich baritone of a born lecturer, as befits the head of the Heronstone Institute, the American Language Institute and Earthnet (the United People of the Earth), the creator of Gendo and EarthLing, and the self-installed Grand Exalted BlahBlahBlah of the Enlightened Order of the Rulan Greedo.
All of this is quartered in Horn’s semi-Spartan apartment--Apple computer and Kurzweil keyboard, not much furniture--or, more specifically, inside his Meat Organ Control Unit, a term he likes to use for the brain. “I find that’s a good way to get people’s attention,” he explained.
Though he leavens it with some New Age-speak and an absurd, self-deflating humor, Horn is quite earnest about his work of the past 15 years, which he encapsulates thusly:
“What I’ve been working on is a kind of linguistic anti-stupid virus, for the lack of a better term. The idea is that there are whole sets of unconscious assumptions built into the language of English, which is the language taking over the planet.
“Literally, we think in language, and English is a poorly designed one. Any time computer guys develop a new language, they spend a lot of time debugging it, making sure there are no endless loops it can get caught in or places where the whole program comes to a halt. English was OK for hunter/gatherers, but it’s lagging dangerously behind in a world with nuclear weapons and the ability to pollute ourselves out of existence. I would say we’re at a turning point of evolution on this planet, a fundamental change in the nature of humanity, and changes in the language structure, the way we think, need to evolve at a much quicker pace than physical structures.”
To that end, Horn has devised a “debugged subset” of English dubbed EarthLing (a term he has trademarked). He also has come up with his own system of phonetics with an alphabet that looks like something you’d expect to see inscribed on a Martian pyramid. His first line of attack, though, is Gendo, “a way of thinking,” which he offers to teach in a two-hour “red belt” course.
Horn said, “Gendo specifically is an analogy to the martial arts. There are a lot of karate studios within 10 miles of here, where people pay every week to learn to defend themselves from physical attack. I haven’t been physically attacked since high school, but we are under attack in the linguistic environment all the time: TV, advertisers, husbands, wives, bosses, co-workers are all trying to manipulate people consciously or unconsciously.
“Gendo is about self-defense in the domain of language, but not so much about me defending myself against your manipulations as by me defending myself against my own ‘language machine,’ which is generating opinions 24 hours a day.”
Horn proceeded to tell an illustrative story:
“A man and his son were driving down the street in a car and they’re involved in an accident. The father is killed. The son was taken to an emergency operating room. The surgeon walked in, took one look at the kid and said, ‘I can’t operate on him. That’s my son.’
“A contradiction, right? But it’s only an apparent one based on an assumption that English has imposed on your nervous system. People have two parents, one male, one female--male dead, therefore the mother is the surgeon. I haven’t told the story to any female surgeons, but I have told it to hundreds of people, a lot of them females, and nobody ever gets it. The reason is there’s an unconscious assumption, and those are deadly .
“I would say that for most of the problems people have, the solution is found by looking inside to the unconscious assumptions they bring to a situation and examining them and seeing if they in fact match the situation,” Horn said.
In his course, Horn says, he reveals “the single most dangerous word in English, one word that occurs probably at least 2,000 times a day in most normal speaker’s languaging. In my estimation it’s wrong at least 90% of the time, closing the door on analysis, acting like we have the answer when the truth is we don’t know a lot. We live in a much more tenuous universe than this word will admit.”
Horn was reluctant to share this demon word, fearing that without the context of his Gendo seminar, it might act more as a vaccine than a virus. But here goes, so beware: The word is the .
“Try saying ‘ The History of California.’ Now say ‘ A History of California.’ Now how do you feel?” Horn asked. This writer did, and found “ The History” was stiff and rigid, while “ A History” felt softer, fluffier, and free from static cling.
Horn continued, “No self-respecting historian these days would call a book “The History of California” because people know now there are numerous perspectives on history. There’s a feeling that goes with the of exclusivity and totality, and if you feel there’s the answer to a question you may stop at the first one you may never explore the 20 others that might be there.”
Assumptions of finality built into the are so engrained, Horn feels, that it takes an intensive, near Pavlovian conditioning arrived at through his Gendo course to properly recognize and confront those assumptions when they arise.
He doesn’t claim to have originated most of the ideas he professes, reveling in a fat bibliography of influences, including Alfred Korzybski, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ram Das and John Barth. Horn asserts: “I’m at a disadvantage trying to market Gendo in that almost everything I’m teaching is stuff people already know. The problem is they don’t know that they know it.”
Horn started figuring out what he didn’t know in 1967.
“I was 21 and living in Manhattan Beach while serving with the Air Force. I had never read a book in my life--I watched TV. It was summer and hot, and I was down at this liquor store and there was this beautiful girl in this very small bikini. There was a used-book rack in the store, and for a pretense to look at her, without even looking I grabbed a book off the rack and was following her around looking at her over the book. I wound up at the cash register, so I bought the book, which turned out to be Alan Watts’ ‘The Supreme Identity, an Essay on Oriental Metaphysics and the Christian Religion.’ It changed my life. I was acutely aware after reading it that I had no idea who I was, what I was doing here, what was important to me, or anything .”
Horn undertook a decade of philosophical study, meditation and other paths (while tuning pianos or running a janitorial service for a living. He now teaches English as a second language at a private school).
“Even though I became very good at talking about these things, even doing seminars, I finally realized that I wasn’t any closer to anything. But what I noticed was that almost all my activities had been in the domain of language--reading, talking, listening and writing--and I began to explore linguistics.”
For someone who has since spent 15 years studying and reformulating the language, Horn doesn’t speak much differently than the average Joe.
He responded, “What did change is my attitude: I don’t believe everything I hear my language machine say. That’s the fundamental distinction we have to make, between I and my language machine. When we talk, there’s no conscious thinking going on. It’s a habitual patterning, like driving a car, and the language machine is generating text all the time. If you believe everything it says, without recognizing all those built-in assumptions, you’re in no position to negotiate.”
Horn has a banner on one wall with a favorite quote from Korzybski: “The Map Is Not the Territory.”
To Horn, it’s a great problem that people mistake language, a mere map, for reality, ascribing a certainty to words that makes us err on the side of close-mindedness.
“In EarthLing--an altered form of English that’s designed for clear thinking and accurate communication--there is no verb ‘to be.’ You cannot say ‘My next door neighbor is a juvenile delinquent.’ You’d have to say ‘He stole a car. He beat up the neighbor,’ things like that,” Horn said with a laugh. “You have to say what people or things do, not what they are. Because when you know what something is you really don’t know anything except what people call it.”
Like conscious driving skills, as opposed to the automatic ones, Horn said EarthLing only needs to be used when clear, analytical thinking is necessary.
Horn said: “EarthLing would be lousy for poetry or bowling. English is good for some things. It just isn’t good for serious analysis. That and more openness are what the world needs now, and that’s what I want to infect people with. Language is like a big physical structure that rests on a few foundation stones that carry the weight of it all. If you weaken those, you can bring the whole building down, which is what I want to do in a sense. English could do to be more open to uncertainty and change.
“In some sense, the planet can be looked on as a living entity, a developing system that’s bordering on self-consciousness. The planet has a nervous system, and you and I and the computers are it . We are bordering--maybe in the next 20 years or so--on some transcendent experience where you and I will both wake up one day and know that ‘I am Earth.’ ”
He is only now beginning to market his ideas and realizes it’s a complex thing to sell. “From one end it looks like a religion; from over here it looks like a business; from over here it looks like a con game; from here like dungeons and dragons. I like them all.
“The grandeur of the vision makes me wonder about my own sanity. If what I’m saying is true, if we really are at a turning point in evolution and if one of the changes needed is a change in language, and if in fact I’ve got a handle on that with this linguistic virus, that’s awesome. I feel a certain fear of rejection at putting it out. But if this work really is inspired and could really make a difference, go through the whole population and help people loosen up, be less fixated in their opinions, more flexible and more willing to listen, then I’ve got to.”
