Structured Visions

How often have you prepared for a job interview by articulating your weaknesses? Apparently describing yourself as an empathic sponge who absorbs all the moods and emotions of the classroom is not the best self-promotional strategy when applying for an academic job.

In this episode we explore interviews as discursive practices that require us, as Michel Foucault might say, to become subjects.

I prefer the word ‘self’ to ‘subject’, and I like to think of language as forming the membrane that constitutes the self. An oppressive society requires a rigid membrane. A welcoming society respects the membrane, and honours the opportunities for intimacy inherent in the language-created notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’.

The natural world provides illustrative examples of the types of symbiotic relationships that membranes offer. We even have, I was surprised to discover, a symbiotic relationship with viruses. Eight percent of the human genome has its origin in DNA from viruses. Our relationship and understanding of viruses can give us ideas about how to integrate those aspects of self and world that we’d prefer to keep distant.

The book I mention in this episode is Frank Ryan’s Virolution.

The story I read in this episode is ‘To meet you’, and it’s available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect  

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A question for the writers among us (writers of anything—novels, memoirs, short stories, theses, academic articles, monographs): What’s your relationship with words?

Are you ringing in the New Year with a commitment to a daily, achievable word count target to ensure you achieve your writing goals by the end of 2023?

If so (and I hate to break this to you), you may be treating language like currency. And language will always resist that type of treatment. Despite your best intentions, one day soon the words may simply dry up, leaving you to face the blinking cursor of doom.

Rather than understanding language as divisible into quantifiable chunks (words), I think of language as fluid, a membrane in constant flux, forming and reforming around different imaginings of the self, the other, the world. When writers are in a flow state, I believe it’s because they’re allowing language to work its magic of shaping and reshaping selves.

Join me to discuss writer’s block, life purpose and (why not?) The Sound of Music.

I mention two of my stories in this episode, ‘The words of your language,’ and ‘Coming true’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Connect with me (and sign up to my newsletter) here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect  

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

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‘What are your pronouns?’

How often do you get asked that question? How does it make you feel to be asked? When did the question first start making sense to you?

This episode explores the ways that pronoun usage has shifted over time to reflect new ways of thinking about the relationship between self and society. We’ll draw upon Brown and Gilman’s seminal essay, ‘The pronouns of power and solidarity’. And we’ll go back to Girl Scout camp in the early eighties, which is where my real education in pronouns began.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Of prophets and pronouns’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Take my free course, sign up for my newsletter, get my screenplay—do all the things, here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect  

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

Is nothing sacred?

What images or memories does this question conjure for you?

Also, what are your aims? (Don’t answer that. This is not a self-help podcast.)

When I ask my undergraduate students to articulate the aims for their entrepreneurial projects, I hope and pray they won’t ask me mine. Not because I don’t have one. Here it is (don’t tell anyone): To honour the sacred spaces where new ideas emerge.

The word ‘sacred’ sounds a little hokey or New Agey to my ears, but I can’t think of a better word.

Episode 80 explores the sociological phenomenon of sacredness. We discuss the importance of the sacred and profane dichotomy in Durkheim’s theory of religion. We draw upon Goffman to posit that uttering profanities might be part of a sacred ritual of drawing boundaries around self and other. And we explore the mysterious ways that language creates sacred spaces where new ideas emerge.

The story I read in this episode is ‘The Determiners’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Take my free course, sign up for my newsletter, get my screenplay—do all the things, here: grammarfordreamers.com/connect  

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

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In this episode I share what I believe are my most radical ideas, which normally I try to hide so that people don’t think I’m crazy:

We’ll talk about some of those mysteries, specifically the grammatical principle of possession.

To get a flavour of what’s in store, hold up one of your hands in front of you so that you can see it. Ask yourself the question: ‘Is this my hand?’

Did you entertain the possibility that your hand might be possessed? As we’ll discover, it is possessed. The possessive determiner my tells us so.

Possession gives us a mechanism for creating two things where before there was only unity or wholeness. It allows us to divide absolutely anything up. And it allows us to redraw the boundaries around our experience.

With language—not just possessive forms in language, but with language in general—you have the capacity to shape a self… and to make decisions about what belongs to that self.

Language constructs selfhood, which gives us the experience of separation from the world. But what we learn by studying the intricacies of language is how malleable this selfhood is. The dynamic of selfhood can change literally with every utterance. And I believe that close attention to language can show us new ways of shaping the self, and thus, of shaping our communities and our world.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Possessed’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

Come to my free live online workshop on October 21st! It’s called ‘The creative logic of language’, and it’s offered by Off the Shelf Festival of Words and Sheffield Hallam University.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

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Have you ever been in love? And if you could send a message to outer space, what message would it be? We’ll use these questions to guide us through an exploration of the evolution of language, music, intimacy and transformation.

The book I discuss in this episode is Steven Mithen’s The singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind and body.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Messages’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

What propels you, what drives you, what directs you in your life? Is it inner guidance? Or is it some external power or sense of exterior obligation?

And, on a more light-hearted note, what’s your favourite syllable?

In this episode we’re exploring selves, bodies, phonology and phonetics, and Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘The erotic as power’.

We’re playing with these ideas:

The story I mention, ‘Syllables’, is available on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

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Where do you get your ideas? The question presumes instrumentality and exchange, as if you could take a trip to your favourite high street shop and come home with the best ideas you can afford.

That same sort of instrumentality comes into play when we think of language as a tool, a means by which we communicate information or express our needs and desires.

In this episode we explore a new way of thinking about language and ideas:

Are these selves conscious?

Better to say that the whole space is conscious, the space is consciousness itself.

When language shapes space to create selves, it bequeaths them with a strange gift: the capacity not to know. The capacity to be unconscious. The capacity to be separated from the vast space of consciousness we’re swimming in.

Complex stuff! We may need some help from quantum physics (and a bit of liminal space) to open ourselves to these ideas.

The books I mention in this episode are Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and Amit Goswami’s The Self-Aware Universe.

The stories I mention are ‘YES/YES’ and ‘The woodcarver’.

Take my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

What’s your relationship to religion?

This could be a tricky question, for lots of reasons. People may not understand your faith. People may not understand how your faith is connected to your culture. People may not understand why you aren’t part of a religion. Maybe your experiences of religion have been traumatic in some way.

To make this topic a little more light-hearted, it might be best to start with a different question.

What’s your most embarrassing religious moment?

Here’s mine: I accidentally became a born-again Christian at the age of 12.

In this episode we explore my hapless conversion in more detail. We gain some perspective from a book called The elementary forms of religious life, written by French sociologist Emile Durkheim.

In Durkheim’s analysis of what’s at the root of all religions, he draws these conclusions:

These conclusions are a little hard to swallow, particularly because we live in a moment where we’re right to be critical of society and the roles it establishes for us. Especially as these roles are carved out of endemic structural injustices.

But why do human beings need to actively connect with something bigger than themselves? It seems to me we’re already connected to something bigger than us—the natural world.

When I imagine the natural world as a conscious entity—and it’s one of the themes I love to explore in my fiction—it makes me feel like I am already part of a bigger picture.

This is true for me even though I feel separate from the natural world, even though I feel my experience is limited by the constraints of my language and my society.

The idea I most like to play with in my fiction is that the human experience of separation from the natural world is not a flaw, but a design principle.

I explore this notion in most recent story, ‘First words’, which is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. I intended the ‘Seer’ character to be an agent of the natural world, creating language to produce the experience of separation, the concept of the self.

The idea is that those of us who believe we inhabit selves (e.g. human beings!) are the routes by which the Earth itself experiences new ideas.

Intrigued? Would you like some more ideas about on how to tap into these insights on language and the self? Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling

Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!

Is there anyone in your life who truly ‘gets’ you? What’s your favourite fairy tale? Have you ever received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of yourself?

Believe it or not, there is a connection between all these questions.

The first question came into the foreground for me when I first moved to Britain to do my PhD and was regularly doling out guidance to my student housemates. One of them was convinced that I ‘got’ her in a way her boyfriend didn’t.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I don’t think anyone ever truly ‘gets’ anyone else.

Clearly ‘getting’ someone means to ‘understand’ them, but in the same way that you ‘get’ the punchline of a joke. To get a joke means that you have access to all the assumptions on which the joke is based. (In linguistics these are called implicatures.)

But jokes are simple, and people are vast and complex.

And you are not a joke. You are nothing less than a wild, mad-cap, unsolvable mystery. By definition, ungettable.

But that doesn’t stop us from longing to be seen, understood, to feel held, to resonate with someone. To experience that beautiful sense of freedom that comes from not having to explain yourself.

I believe that this longing, this loneliness, is part of the human condition, and I believe that what causes it is language. To illustrate this point, I’ve rewritten my favourite fairy tale, Rapunzel, in a story called ‘Longing’ (which is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com).

According to my version of the story, the Earth once had a longing that only the Sorceress, Language, could fulfil.

What could the Earth possibly long for? The natural world is governed by interconnection and symbiosis. How could it possibly be lonely?

What if the Earth longs for longing itself? What if the Earth longs to experience the separateness that can only be experienced by a distinct, isolated self?

In my version of the Rapunzel story, I have the Earth abandon one of its beloved creatures (human beings) to the one magical being that could provide that (language).

Language creates the self.

What the self creates is, precisely, nothing.

If we see the self as a membrane (another of my favourite images), and when we look courageously at what’s inside that membrane, we see… nothing

Nothing we can grasp, nothing we can ‘get’, nothing fathomable.

Just a miraculously fertile void from which new ideas can emerge.

And when those new ideas emerge, we are in the privileged position of seeing them as other.

Like a magical doll in a fairy tale, or a wiser, more compassionate version of ourselves.

The Self and the Other allow us to experience mystery.

And through us, the Earth can experience mystery as well.

Check out my free course, Writing through the Lens of Language, designed especially for you.

Follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers, Facebook www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/ or Twitter @jodieclarkling Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!