Ok. Immediately I know someone is thinking of a weirder Toki Pona word. Bear with me.
I am trying to find a better way to talk about humor in Toki Pona1. Things that are funny, comedic, silly, frivolous. My default, the one I know will be understood by most, is “ijo pi musi taso”—things that are just musi.
But I am an artist, and a relationship anarchist at least in theory, so saying something is “musi taso” feels like saying, about someone I deeply trust and care for, “we’re just friends.”
That word, that semantic space, doesn’t belong in either of these two sentences.
“musi” is more frequently used for “entertainment” than “art,” according to the Toki Pona Dictionary, but the only other singular word cited as meaning “art” is “sitelen”—image, picture, text. Yes, also representation and symbol, but not all art is those things, either, and even art that is—tone poems and narrative folk songs, for example—isn’t always called sitelen.
In the Toki Pona Dictionary, sitelen musi remains more “comic” and “meme” than “poetry” or “painting,” and “musi sitelen” is only marginally listed as “puzzle.” On the other hand, angry, depressing, unentertaining, dead serious songs are, as far as I know, still kalama musi.
I know, I know, the Toki Pona Dictionary is a snapshot in time of a particularly disembodied context. I recently heard someone functionally use the word “telo” to mean “drop”2 and you’ll never see that listed as a meaning of that word. I reference these definitions only as a concrete thing to point to in order to get at the crux of my thoughts here. “musi” remains the best singular word for “art” in the core vocabulary of this language, and I like it as such, but is a documentary about the Holocaust musi? It’s already such a drag to ask whether something is or isn’t art. But it’s strange to me to think that “art,” my notion of it, is not the core of the word “musi,” but a resultant meaning, an offshoot of something more like “fun” or *shudders* “entertainment.” What do you mean art is just a kind of entertainment? Art is my life.
Still. I am also trying to better relate to things that are funny, comedic, silly, and frivolous. A few months ago, I made Plunderscores, a plunderphonic underscores-centric parody mashup album inspired by Neil Cicierega’s Mouth series. This idea tore through me over the course of a week; it was the most motivated I’d been to make musi(c) in a long time, and I felt embarrassed to tell my parents it’s what I was working on. They know, it’s known by those who know me, that I’m trying to build a… if not a musical career, then a musical something. Where does Plunderscores fit in that something? How do I market it? How does it demonstrate my creative and technical skill? How does it help others see me as a real, serious artist?
It doesn’t—it hasn’t so far. What it did do is make for a fun and buzzy week, make my friends and I laugh, and also teach me far more about album arrangement and pacing than any musical work I’d done prior.
Yeah. That’s right. You know the bit. What’s the difference between a good joke and a bad joketiming. Humor relies so heavily on it that the act of composing specifically to be funny brought out in me a particular sensitivity to time, a demand to be sensitive to time. Time. So fundamental and numinous a feature of reality as fucking time and humor was the door behind which it was hiding. What a, what a joke! It burned, having to take the ridiculous seriously—sure, I didn’t have to, but I did, you understand—but the burn was also great fun, and it made me a better artist.
Nonsensical to someone trained to be “for real,” but tautological to a tokiponist—doing musi made me better at musi.
There’s this concept in role-playing game design called the fruitful void, the thing a game gets to be about precisely because it lacks mechanics for it.
I think languages have these too. It’s a new thought, sure—Korean is clearly a language “about formality and hierarchy”[citation needed, what does it mean for a natlang to be “about” something], but do English-language pragmatics do something else or even more with hierarchy by virtue of not codifying it? Open question, come back to—but I can immediately think of a fruitful void I love in Toki Pona: Emotions.
In Toki Pona, there are words for good and bad. There are, marginally, words for fear and shame. And then there’s the word for feeling. That’s it.
As much as I use “monsuta” for the sake of lyricism or convenience, and because it’s cute, I disagree with those3 who think we need to add more robust emotional vocabulary to Toki Pona4, or who look from the outside in and assume that it has too few ways to express emotions.
Far from the truth. Precisely because there is no core set of emotion words, anything that comes after pilin is an emotion word.
There is no Toki Pona word for anger, but that doesn’t mean anger is simply lumped into pilin ike (bad feeling). Anger is also divided into pilin seli (fiery feeling) and pilin kiwen (hard, solid, immovable feeling) and pilin pakala (fucked-up broken feeling) and pilin tan pali ike jan (feeling caused by the bad deeds of others) and pilin pi wile utala (feeling the desire to fight) and and and and. These are not, in fact, the same emotion. Sometimes they overlap with each other (or other English words), sometimes they don’t. They also aren’t even necessarily pilin ike, which rules! because it’s so true; the desire to fight might be a “negative valence emotion,” but if you’ve felt it, you know it can feel (and, independently, be) fucking good. Toki Pona has no core vocabulary for the “5 basic emotions” and yet—and therefore—can express them very precisely, can nearly force you to.
Sure, art is my life, but so what? There’s no one Toki Pona word for “life,” either.
As long as we’re on the topic of fruitful voids in languages, by the way, it’s the same in Korean, which has 삶 (the state of being alive), 생명 (the vital force of life that living things share in common), 목숨 (a more poetic term for the act of being a living, breathing thing), 인생 (the time in which a human person is alive and the experiences that occur therein), 평생 (the specific interval of time between a person’s birth and death), 생활 and 일상 (slightly different words for one’s day-to-day routine or lifestyle or how one makes a living), etc.5 and no one word that covers all of them. Some of these are wawa, some are tenpo, some are nasin, some are kon, some are pali, some are a mix.
Let’s say Toki Pona has no word for art. It does, but let me try to make this void a little more fruitful. Hypothetically, that means art is lumped into musi (fun, entertainment, play), but also capable of being subdivided into finer meanings. sitelen (image, text, representation, symbol) is a Toki Pona word for art, which we already knew. ken (ability, possibility, skill) is a Toki Pona word for art, which those who know the etymology of “art” also already knew. nasin (path, method, order) is a Toki Pona word for art, insofar as it connotes beauty or technique. wawa (force, power, energy) could be a Toki Pona word for art, insofar as art without wawa feels less like art. pali (action, work, development) is a Toki Pona word for art, obviously, and especially if you’ve read Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, you know that mama (creation, caretaking) is too. If you’re the type for whom artmaking is less human invention and more divine reception, tuning into and following the directions of the daimon or muse, then alasa (hunting, searching, pursuit) and lukin/kute (looking/listening, obeying) are Toki Pona words for art. If you’re into your metaphorical expansions of material words, like I am6, kili (fruit, product) is one too. tawa (movement, motion) may not be a Toki Pona word for art, but if you think about it with the definition-expanding mind of a performance theorist, what art isn’t tawa?
If this feels a bit weak, try making full phrases with these and other non-musi words, as I did in the anger example. kili pali. kute sewi. sitelen wawa. nasin pi pona ijo. mi alasa e ken mama. ona li sijelo e kon. Art!!!
And this is all assuming we’re only describing the process or product of art. To me, the question of musi and its role in art has more to do with art’s ends. Art gets made for all kinds of reasons, with all kinds of intents, that we can clarify in our words and phrases for art if we want to: kama pali pona (gaining skill), or pana sona (sharing information), or pona lawa (therapy), or pona pi nasin jan (bettering people’s morals), or esun mani (commerce and profit).
And then, of course, you have that art which is musi taso. For artmaking. For play. For being enticing and interesting. For its own sake.
That’s what I’ve come around to. Of course the Toki Pona word for fun and entertainment and play, for those impractical things that only have themselves as their justification, is also the word for art. Artworks can do and have done many things that aren’t musi, but they feel more and more musi taso—whether that means “ridiculous” or “purely artful”—the closer they get to an absence of ulterior motive. That drive to just let there be the thing needn’t be ~*pure*~ in art for the art to be good (I’m of like mind with D.H. Lawrence here—“Don’t be too clean. It impoverishes the blood”), but a critical mass of that drive will produce immensely silly, crazed, awe-inspiring, radiant art. That’s the tarot’s Fool, and I sure as hell don’t mind sharing the room with him.
Is this how everyone’s understood the core essence of art forever? Of course not. But it’s an attitude I prefer, and if I had to give one reason for my preference, I’d say it’s because it mirrors what I consider a good attitude to hold towards people. I know I can depend on those close to me, but I don’t keep close to them to extract that help, or to accrue social status, or cool gifts, or whatever else. We’re just friends.
And is this musi taso? In the back of my head as I write there’s a bit of a vision of building a Substack following, of proving to myself that I can do the Real Artist thing on an online platform, of coming across as cool and respectable, all so I can make more art and make something of it.
…and why do I want to do that, exactly?
..
Why not?
"o telo ala e ilo,” said to someone taking video of something in the water below.
And in fairness, I don’t know who these “those” are, so I may be making them up a bit.
Far be it from me to stop you if you want to.
Actually, I think that might be it.
Start using “pan” to mean “basics/staples” outside of food contexts, you have nothing to lose but your chains—