Episode 97 The intimacy of denial

Photo by Drew Hays

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

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

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

Episode 96 The Earth’s language

Image by Elena Mozhvilo

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’.

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

Check out my course: The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths.

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

Episode 95 Your name without language

Image by Reid Zura

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’.

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

Check out my course: The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths.

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

Episode 93 Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi

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’.

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

Check out my new course: The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths.

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

Episode 91 The limits of language and selfhood

Photo by Shane Rounce

Linguistic interaction involves much more than simply sharing information. It requires shaping the information so that it will fit in to a pre-existing structure. This is where we might run into problems if we ever get the chance to chat with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings. To what extent can we communicate if there is no shared common ground? As it happens, we already live on a planet with intelligent non-human life, a world with its own language and even, as Paul Stamets points out, its own internet. If we were courageous enough to live at the limits of human selfhood and human language maybe we’d be able to communicate with that world.

The story I read in Episode 91 is ‘Nonna’s prophecy’.

Check out jodieclark.com for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter

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

Episode 90 Language, intimacy and narcissism

Photo by Niko Tsviliov

What’s the worst relationship you’ve ever been in?

What’s the difference between this and that?

There are at least three ways of understanding that second question, each of which reveals a different level of abstraction: metalinguistic, anaphoric and exophoric.

Our exploration of this and that (proximal and distal demonstratives, that is) reveals the gift, the risk and the challenge of human language.

The gift: Language creates selfhood, and with selfhood comes intimacy.

The risk: Language can also create an obsession with the self, disavowal of the other, narcissism.

The challenge: To recognise that our selfhood is a gift of our evolving human language, which is a gift of the evolving Earth. With language we’re offered the opportunity to recognise the limitations of the self, and to be open to the mystery of the other.

The translation of the quote from Buddhist sutras about the finger pointing at the moon is from:

Ho, Chien-Hsing (2008). The finger pointing toward the moon: a philosophical analysis of the Chinese Buddhist thought of reference. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35 (1):159-177. https://philpapers.org/rec/CHITFP-2

Check out jodieclark.com for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter

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

Episode 89 Grammar as a gateway to mystery

Photo by Brooke Lark

‘Dreams, it turns out, are like clauses. They can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. They are quanta of information about what could be transformed in the world, whether it’s your own world or a bigger social world, or both.’ (from my new book, Refreshing Grammar, p. 127)

Can something be both practical and dreamy?

Mysteries involve holding two seemingly incompatible our irreconcilable truths. The thrill of a genuine mystery is when it cracks you open to something new. Can grammar be a gateway to mystery?

We explore this question by thinking about out of body experiences. And what we’re having for breakfast tomorrow.

The mystery of being human is that we exist grammatically, which means we constantly shift our point of reference outside of our own body.

How can the self exist outside the body?

How can experience exist outside of the world?

This is the mystery: grammar is creative—and what it creates is space from which new ideas can emerge.

The story I read in this episode is ‘In plain sight’, and it’s available at grammarfordreamers.com.

Check out my new website, jodieclark.com, for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course.

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

Episode 87 What if you’re an alien?

Image by Miriam Espacio

If you were told, definitively, that you were an alien, would it relieve a burden? Would it explain, or affirm, a few things? Would you look to the sky and long for home?

If you’ve ever felt like an alien, then the story I published recently on grammarfordreamers.com is dedicated to you. According to ‘Exiles’, it’s not you who’s the alien. It’s human language.

The story positions human language as distinct from ‘Earth’s own linguistic structures.’ The idea here is that human language is one set of structures, which is separate from the material world. The material world is another set of structures, physical, chemical, biological, etc. All these structures are forms of language.

The Earth is excited (or so the story goes) to welcome the new species. It’s curious about the new ideas that might emerge from the hermetically sealed selves that human language shapes.

In this episode I discuss these ideas in relation to my book, Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds: reimagining social change. We’re looking at Chapter 8, ‘Openings,’ which is about social transformation through language and embodied creativity. It’s also about fursuiting.

The transcript and table I refer to can be found here.

Connect with me, sign up to my newsletter and learn some exciting things about the Refreshing Grammar course 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!

Episode 86 Feelings are, like, inside things

Image by Jeff Sheldon

When you were a kid, was there something that inspired wonder in you?

Is there anything that has inspired wonder for you more recently?

For me as a child it was something I read in a picture book: ‘Colours are outside things. Feelings are inside things.’ As an adult it was the idea that language evolves to produce forms that are more subjective, more personal, more enveloping. The word ‘like’ is a great example of that.

The evolution of grammar is a move toward more personhood—which is a way of creating the experience of a self, with an inside and an outside.

Maybe the self is one expression of the Earth’s evolution, and language—specifically grammar—is the mechanism by which the self comes into being.

The story I read in this episode is ‘The multidimensional language learners’, and it’s 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

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

Episode 85 How spooky is language?

Image by Photo by Vienna

What makes Ouija boards spooky? Is it language? After all, it’s the letters of the alphabet that take up the most space on these devices, and they’re just waiting for something to be spelled out.

Who’s doing the spelling? And what kind of spells are they, after all?

In this episode we’ll be exploring the occult etymologies of words like ‘spell’ and ‘grammar’.

We also examine the spookiness of receiving messages that come without the coordinates of selfhood.

As Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou writes, ‘The point of a fish trap is the fish. The point of the word is the idea. Once you’ve got the idea, you can forget the word.’

What if language is a net that shapes itself around an idea to bring it into a different plane of existence?

In this episode I share my own spooky idea: that human language is the Earth’s way of creating nets of selfhood from which new ideas emerge.

The story I read is ‘My late grandmother’, and it’s 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

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