Structured Visions

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:

• Ideas emerge from empty space.
• Language organises that space to form selves.
• Selves are the spaces from which new ideas emerge.

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, 'YES/YES' and 'The woodcarver', are 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

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:

• When people worship, they're connecting with something bigger than themselves
• This 'bigger thing' is society
• Without society people would not experience themselves as people; they'd have no sense of who they were in the world

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!

How is language like water? Both are all around us. Both are within us. Both have fascinating structuring mechanisms that we may not know much about.

Think about the structure of a water molecule. Its single oxygen atom has a slightly negative charge, and the two hydrogen atoms have a slightly positive charge. The opposite charges attract water molecules to each other (the positive side of one molecule is drawn to the negative side of another). These weak attractive forces are called 'hydrogen bonds', and they make it possible for water to remain a liquid at room temperature, which in turn allows life to exist on Earth.

In this episode we explore the possibility that human language has a structuring quality, like the structuring mechanisms in the natural world. If the qualities of water are shaped by hydrogen bonds, what shapes the structure of human language?

I believe that the structuring principle of human language is selfhood.

We're getting better at recognising the oppressive structures of our society, like structural racism, patriarchal systems, colonialism, cisheteronormativity, neurotypicality and ableism (to name a few).

But we might also take some time to acknowledge a more dynamic structuring principle: the self. Formed and re-formed by language, it dissolves and is produced anew in each moment. The self shapes itself like a membrane around spaces from which new experiences can emerge.

The challenge is to recognise the power of the dynamic structure of the self formed by language. The mission is to honour it, in ourselves and each other.

Curious about how linguists can find out what pre-verbal babies know about linguistic structure? Watch this great video on The Ling Space.

The story I discuss in this episode, 'No and the ark' is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog: grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com

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!

Have you ever entertained an apocalypse fantasy? The one I invented relieves humanity of its language.

Language produces selves, which is not a bad thing. It's a beautiful thing. It's the window to intimacy.

But what happens when the amount of language we use increases to the extent that we've seen in recent years?

The production of selves increases to potentially catastrophic proportions.

Here's the link to Dr Debbie Reese's excellent critique of Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins: https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-critical-look-at-odells-island-of.html

The book that inspired my fascination with mycelium is Paul Stamets's Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save the World.

The stories I discuss in this episode, 'Finite' and 'A remarkable outcome' are both available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog: grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com

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!

Ferdinand de Saussure likened language to a collective treasure that every member of the linguistic community can draw from without its stores diminishing. This idea is quite heartening – almost magical – but it's also ruthlessly oppressive. What do you want first: the good news or the bad news?

The story I discuss in this episode is 'A day at the lake'.

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!

Happy New Year! The end of the year is a great time for reflection. Why not reflect upon the meaning of life?

Or, even better, why not reflect on why we would think there is a meaning to life, and what type of meaning we expect to find (meaning itself has lots of meanings, as linguist John Lyons points out), and what we're assuming about life when we ask what it means.

Are we asking about the meaning of human life only? If so, are we thinking of human life in terms of a narrative, so the 'meaning of life' becomes something like the 'moral of the story'?

What if we thought about meaning of life from a biological perspective?

David Deamer, a biologist who explores the origin of life, gives this definition:

'Life is an evolving system of polymers synthesized by chemical reactions (metabolism) that take place in membrane-bounded compartments called cells' (2011, p. 3).

The image we have here is not one life, with one story and one meaning. Instead it's a proliferation of discrete compartments – cells, surrounded by membranes, each containing its own unique strand of genetic information – in other words, strands of communicable meanings.

If you've been listening to this podcast, you know I'm fascinated by the idea that the information contained in these membrane-bound compartments... indeed, that the membranes themselves, are a form of language.

This perspective would present human language as nothing more or less than a means for the Earth to produce new forms of membrane-bound compartments, with new forms of information within.

Human language creates the self, which serves as a membrane, that requires us to feel separate, divided, broken.

But it also offers us the experience uniqueness, individuality and the rare pleasure of co-creating something new, something meaningful, something that reconnects us to everything we once felt separate from.

Here's a New Year's resolution: rather than spending time trying to find out the meaning of life, let's celebrate how we each individually contribute to life's multitude of meanings.

The story I discuss in this episode is 'The Mosaic Makers'.

Works cited:

Deamer, D. (2011) First life: discovering the connections between stars, cells, and how life began. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lessing, D. (1979). Shikasta. New York: Knopf.

Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thanks to the curious, intelligent, creative community who listen to this podcast. I have exciting new things in store for you. Stay tuned to future episodes to find out more.

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

Or connect with me in one or more of the following ways:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

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

'It's easy to forget,' said Sir David Attenborough in his address to COP26, 'that ultimately the emergency climate comes down to a single number — the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere.' That one number, he goes on to say, 'defines our relationship with our world.'

According to Attenborough's framing, the story is a mathematical problem, with a mathematical solution. But how often, in your experience, are relationship problems genuinely reducible to mathematical equations? How often are they genuinely 'solved' by a number?

I've often said that my creative and academic work are inspired by 'the intimacy embedded in the structure of language.' Intimacy requires selves, and selves are generated by language, by the stories we tell. Stories about the environmental crisis usually construct two distinct selves: us and the Earth.

In this episode we recognise that the relationship between us and the Earth would benefit from some couples therapy. In therapy it might be revealed that the thing that separates us from the Earth is language – the capacity to create and inhabit other worlds – fantasy, parallel existences – that keep us from putting any attention to our partner, the Earth. Language is a boundary that keeps the human species detached from the Earth.

But the thing that separates us does not have to be a boundary. It could be a membrane. Language may be unique to humans, but membranes are universal to all forms of life. Let's explore the possibility that language is Earth's newest form of membrane, one that creates spaces from which new ideas can emerge.

The story I discuss in this episode is 'The Great Reversal.'

Many thanks to Dr Samantha Kies-Ryan for her work on storytelling and water management in the Solomon Islands.

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

In this episode we're going to address three questions. What's a word? What was did it feel like when life first emerged on the Earth? When's the first (or the last) time you made a real decision? And I'm going to try to convince you that these questions all have something to do with each other.

I believe that thinking about words will give us a bit of insight about what it was like when life first emerged on the Earth. These two things – life and language – for me share two qualities: that they're both incredibly commonplace, and they're both overwhelmingly mysterious.

Also, both require boundary making, whether that takes the form of a cell membrane (life) or a self membrane (language). These boundaries cultivate a space in which new ideas can land.

For more about membranes and the origins of life, read Pier Luigi Luisi's The emergence of life or David Deamer's First life.

Read my story 'Wordfall' on my Grammar for Dreamers blog.

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.

When did you learn that the earth travels round the sun and not the other way round? And when you talk to yourself, which one of the dialoguing characters is you? Language generates multiple selves, and each self comes with its own built in worldview. Is it superstitious to think of selves that are wiser than us, that are protective, that wish to bless us? Perhaps it's reckless not to.

The story I discuss in this episode is called 'Go'. It's just been published in the Running Wild Anthology of Stories, vol 5.

I learned about imperatives in Omotic languages from reading work by Alexandra Aikhenvald. (See reference list below.)

And the discussion of postmodernism is based on the following quote from Madan Sarup's book, Identity, culture and the postmodern world:

'Copernicus, Darwin, Marx and Freud have all, in their different ways, decentred the human subject. By "decentering", I mean that individual consciousness can no longer be seen as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action.' (Sarup, 1996, p. 46)

References

Aikhenvald, A. (2010). Imperatives and commands. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sarup, M. (1996). Identity, culture and the postmodern world. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

For additional content:

Subscribe to the monthly Grammar for Dreamers newsletter (and get a copy of the Grammar for Dreamers screenplay).

To watch my regularly posted videos of linguistic geekery, follow me on Instagram @grammarfordreamers or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/Grammarfordreamers/

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.