Cute drawings!

by mariejasmin

When I was six and learning to make words out of the 26 letters of the alphabet, which I barely mastered, I had a brilliant idea to improve society:

— Mom, rather than writing “house” like this, why don’t all people just draw a house, like this. Everyone would understand, and, there would be no more spelling mistakes! Life would be a thousand times easier!

— Well, you can draw shapes and animals, Marie, but how would you go about writing invisible words like “love”?

I was so impressed with my mom’s ability to ponder invisible things (I hadn’t thought of that!), that I considered her a great philosopher from then and there; and never again did I question the foundation of our language.

Destiny and her evil smirk, however, decided that 20 years later, my face would be rubbed in pictograms. On a sunny morning, I landed in Japan and was to live there for four years. As it turned out, life was not a thousand times easier.

But there were a few things to be gleaned from this cruel bath of undecipherable characters: for one, I found out the answer to what I had thought of as an aporia.

"nengajou' par Sumi-e Kazu Shimura

To solve the riddle, one must first learn to draw. If one were quite talented, and had access to other drawing tools than stone on turtle shell, they could very well have written “tiger” like above; however, the style guide that the Chinese of the 14th century before Christ unanimously adopted is rather well encapsulated by the term stick figure. They wrote “tiger” like this:

The ultimate stick figure is one that retains all the essence of the character it so plainly represents. For instance, what we evidently notice in babies is their big head, wriggly arms, and the silver of regurgitated milk on them. To avoid any superfluous lines the scribes dropped the part about half-digested milk, and wrote baby, or child, this way:

If the stick man kneels and is cradling an invisible child in it’s arms, then the stick man is a woman. The signing of lullabies to babies in your crossed arms is apparently quite contrary to manhood, in old China that is. But, to write mother, then? Well, just like the contemporary man, the ancient Chinese couldn’t help but notice her very large breasts, which they simply added to stick woman:

Now let us take these drawings and make them cross a sea and also 3500 years of human laziness. The results obtained:

What?! You’ll exclaim. Of the girl nothing is left but a top view of her crossed arms, and the tiger… oh dear! Illegible gibberish! Yes, well, do you see a person bursting in merry laughter when you see LOL? Let’s thank the Lord almighty that the generations preceding ours weren’t as irreparably lazy as we are. At the rate we abbreviate, in fifty years all emails will be a dot from which the reader must infer meaning.

But I digress here: we were wondering how to make a graphical representation of an abstract word such as love. Firstly, let’s choose our battle: there are two words for love in Japanese: one which involves naked people in a bed, the other one being just plain simple love. I’ll go for the second type, since we’re in the presence of me when I was six.

A good way to create an ideogram is to make recipes with the pictographic ingredients you already have, mixing and morphing them to extract their very essence. To create love, all one has to do is place the woman next to her child, like this:

Before I knew anything of maternity, when I lived in Japan, I thought this was really cute.

Now I think it’s true.