Structured Visions

Have you ever felt like you don’t belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. We explore the grammatical shape belonging takes in everyday conversations about fitting in. We discuss how selves can grammatically ‘detach’ from bodies, and the transformative possibility of embodied selves. Join me in a hopeful dream where humans belong on planet Earth. We’ll explore how human language, which seems to divide us from wider consciousness, might be re-envisioned as an invitation to co-creation with the Earth itself.

The story I read is ‘The last stage of the Earth’s evolution.’ I also mentioned my story ‘Summers with Mad Gran.’

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What’s the difference between me and you? And what’s so bad about big egos, anyway? In this episode we explore the relationship between ego and language. We move from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to D.T. Suzuki’s explanation of the Zen Buddhist perspective. We explore Suzuki’s analysis of two poems about encounters with flowers, one by Basho and one by Tennyson.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Ego angels.’

The essay by D.T. Suzuki I discuss is:

Suzuki, D. T. (1960). Lectures on Zen Buddhism. In E. Fromm, D. T. Suzuki and R. DeMartino (Eds.) Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis (pp. 1-76). Grove Press.

It’s available on Internet Archive.

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What are your top three wishes? Are they selfish?

As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self-effacing. If you participate, on whatever level, in a society in which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than who they are, then you may be wishing for things that obliterate your own unique selfhood.

In this episode we explore the linguistics of wishing—with a close look at realis and irrealis expressions—and discover what grammatical structures can reveal about a desire for a transformative society. We explore the possibility of a social structure in which individual selfhood is protected and sustained by a mutually supporting community.

The book I refer to in this episode is Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds, and you can learn more about the analysis I did there in Episode 58, ‘Communities of Sara Mills’.

The stories I read in this episode are ‘Beyond desire’ and ‘Ala’s lamp.’

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What new language would you most like to know? Is astrology on your list?

Does astrology count as a language?

Maybe the language of the stars could be classified as a pidgin, a language without native speakers.

But if, as discussed in Episode 96, ‘The Earth’s language’, languages are ways of organising information, then it might be more accurate to describe astrology as one of the Earth’s languages.

If the Earth has a language, it’s using it to tell us:

•           You don’t just exist as an ego, as a first-person pronoun, or a proper name
•           You don’t just exist in relation to all the things that people have said about you...or that you say about yourself
•           You also exist as a being who took their first breath at a precise moment in the Earth’s movement through the cosmos.

Get your birth chart on astro.com.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Pidgin.’

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Counting… that’s maths, right? Actually, it’s language. And as we’ll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, ‘count everything you can see’), you can’t count anything until you know what ‘counts as’ a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does so.

In this episode we celebrate the rich lineage of linguists and language philosophers who offer detailed, rational arguments against an objectivist paradigm of language. Language does not refer to things in the world, they explain. Language is not, as Wallis Reid (1991, p. 54) explains, a ‘mirror of nature.’

My own perspective on the objectivist paradigm resonates with these, but it’s less rational, more mystical and speculative. What if we experience the world in many dimensions, and language is the most restrictive of these dimensions, as I discussed in Episode 95, ‘Your name without language?’ What if language restricts us from fully accessing the other dimensions?

Here are my radical, irrational views in a nutshell: Language is a way of structuring information. Human language structures information according to a particular organising principle—the self. Human language presumes, constructs, projects a self. And we can see the process by which this happens by looking closely at the structures of grammar.

The structure of grammar we’re looking at in this episode is grammatical number. We’ll discover that different languages have different grammatical number systems. Many have singular and plural. Some have singular, dual and plural. Some have singular, dual, trial and plural. Some have singular, dual, paucal and plural.

One thing all these languages have in common is ‘singular’. Understanding how language structures the ‘singular’ can help us understand the structure of our own selves, and the beauty that might be found there.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Fairest.’

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Work cited: Reid, W. (1991). Verb and noun number in English. Longman.

What’s the weirdest thing about human language? We explore linguistic polarity and all its bizarre implications. Embedded in every human grammar is a way of turning a positive clause (I’m listening) into a negative clause (I’m not listening). Grammatical negation is one of the ways we can do denial. (‘I’m not scared of that dog,’ said the three-year-old whose body was telling an entirely different story.)

What would a language without negation look like? My story ‘Negative space’ refers to an (imaginary?) alien language where everything is expressed in the affirmative. Closer to home, we could speculate about the Earth’s own language.

If languages are ways of structuring information, then human languages are uniquely structured around selfhood. Negative polarity works to structure the relationship between self and other, which sometimes means denying the other, sometimes affirming them. Either way it’s a route to intimacy. If human language draws a boundary or a membrane around the distinct self, then the intimacy of negation can be a way of acknowledging and celebrating those boundaries.

The other story I mention in this episode is ‘Lessons in Latin’.

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We start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions:

1.       What are the differences between spoken/signed language and written/printed/digital language?

2.       Where are you?

There’s an answer to Question 2 that will be true for anyone who says it. ‘I am here.’ But if you write it on a piece of paper, and then leave the room, it stops being true.

Does that make spoken language more genuine?

Or is written language more reliable because it’s more durable, less ephemeral? (‘Put it in writing.’)

We explore questions around spoken/written language in relation to what French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’. And also in relation to a quite touching France Télécom advert from the ’90s.

The discussion leads to a conversation about non-human language, specifically, the language of the Earth itself. Both human language and the Earth’s language are systems for structuring information. Human language is structured around the principle of selfhood, which leads us to the whimsical fancy that the separate, distinct self exists prior to the grammar that created it.

The story I read in Episode 96 is ‘The loneliness of the literate species’.

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What would your name be without language?

In this episode we explore the problem of names in truth conditional semantics, with a look at Gottlob Frege’s explanation of sense and reference, Bertrand Russell’s claims about the definite descriptors and Saul Kripke’s term for proper names, which is ‘rigid designators’.

What would it be like if you weren’t so rigidly designated?

Truth conditional semantics is concerned with making true or false statements about the world. But what if the world and language are on two different planes of existence? What if language is a one-dimensional phenomenon attempting to delineate multidimensional experience?

The most fascinating aspects of language (to me) is that it presumes and thereby constructs a self. But a one-dimensional language, it would seem, would produce very limited, superficial selves. Does inhabiting language keep us from experiencing the vastness of other dimensions? (If this question sounds familiar, you might be remembering playing with it in Episode 94, Language and the Afterlife.)

It turns out that the linearity of language offers possibilities not available in other dimensions. Language, being one-dimensional, can (and does) shape itself in constantly changing ways to create new selves. The selves form spaces from which new ideas can emerge.

The story I read in Episode 95 is ‘The brutal linearity of language’.

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What happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don’t have faith in stories about the afterlife and you’ve never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this episode I’ll guide you through a language-based exercise that might help you with your theory building about worlds beyond everyday experience.

The task is to ‘experience your world’, first through the filter of language and then without the filter of language.

The intention is to open up the possibility that there are at least two different (simultaneous) worlds, layered on top of each other—at least two different dimensions of experience.

If we accept that, why might there not be at least one more? Or even many, many more?

The other thing that we might notice is how the filter of language presumes and produces a distinction between self and other, which disappears when we remove this filter. Because the linguistic dimension restricts us to the experience of selfhood, it might be the most constraining of all dimensions. And we can speculate about the existence of a soul that survives death and lives simultaneously in many (or all) dimensions.

But before we get swept away in our excitement about this transcendent soul, we might allow ourselves to enjoy a certain fascination with living within a restrictive, linguistic existence and the creativity that might emerge from this level of constraint.

The story I read in Episode 94 is ‘Moving language’.

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Is there a distinction between you and the rest of the world?

Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?

What’s the meaning of the word ‘now’?

The gift of language is that it shapes and reshapes the experience of separateness. It’s a gift because it’s fluid. It’s more a membrane than a wall—with every utterance, there’s a new configuration of separateness.

The gift of separateness is that it invites mystery. The word Carl Jung uses for this is numinous, which comes from the word numen, meaning divinity, god or spirit.

Language gives you access to divinity.

But it requires first that you disown the divine aspects of the self, so that you can experience the joy of reunion.

The story I read in Episode 93 is ‘Salesman to the gods’. The other story I mention in ‘Ghosts’.

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