Structured Visions

If you listened to last month's episode, you'll know that I've taken a short break from podcasting to finish off the book I'm writing. I'm thrilled to tell you that the book is now finished, and I'm very happy with it. I can't wait to tell you more. (In fact, if you sign up to my newsletter at jodieclark.com/newsletter you'll hear more sooner!)

I'm so excited to get back to podcasting monthly, which I'll do again at the end of January 2025. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode from the Structured Visions archives. Episode 24, The Gift, originally aired on Christmas Day, 2015.

I hope you're enjoying your holiday season, and I'll talk to you again in the New Year!

Shownotes for the original episode can be found here.

I'm taking a short break from podcasting as I finish off the book I'm writing, but I'll be back in the New Year. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode from the Structured Visions archives. Episode 60, How linguistics can save the world, originally aired on June 1, 2018.

This podcast has been an amazing way for me to develop some unusual ideas about language. Recently I was wondering when I first came up with the idea that the Earth has its own language of which human language is one small but significant part. Episode 60 is one of the early recordings of me fleshing out that idea. I hope you enjoy it!

Learn more about my ideas about the mysteries of language at jodieclark.com. Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here.

Do human beings have more or less consciousness than the rest of the living world? Is language an addiction? We'll explore both points by examining the relationship between language and time.

To participate in the world of human language, we have to reduce ourselves to little cutie pies known as 'selves,' who exist at a precise moment of time and who orient to their world in relation to their deictic centre.

What might it look like if we could see beyond the linearity of language and thus, the linearity of time?

The story I read in this episode is 'The end.'

Some time sensitive things to act on now:

Refreshing Grammar (jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse) will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access

Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don't Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT

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In this episode I'll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros imagery. My perspective is that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to the vast multidimensionality of consciousness. Language can't refer to anything beyond itself (or beyond the self).

The good news is, that when human language draws a circle that says 'this is you,' it creates a space that you can look inside. What you might find is not the you created by language, but instead the part of all the worlds that is uniquely designated by that self-circle. Transformation comes from truly inhabiting the space that language creates.

On the journey of this episode we'll be rambling through the realms of phrasal verbs, conceptual metaphor theory and the challenges of learning English as a second language. The blog post I mention in the episode is 'What's up?' by Elaine Hodgson.

The story I read is 'The Museum of Language.'

Lots of things going on…

Refreshing Grammar is open now (jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse), and will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access

Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don't Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT

Come join me on 11 October at Off the Shelf Festival of words for a free, interactive online writing workshop, The Impossibility of Words: A Linguist's Cure for Writer's Block.

Sign up for the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter

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.'

Connect with me on jodieclark.com. Refreshing Grammar begins on 16 September 2024. Sign up here: jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse

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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.

Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com

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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.'

Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com

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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'.

Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com

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