Episode 83 Language goes viral

Image by Marjan Blan

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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Episode 80 Is nothing sacred?

Photo by Sander Sammy

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  

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Episode 70 The meanings of life

Photo by Daniel Páscoa

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

Episode 69 Our relationship with our world

Photo by Louis Maniquet

‘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.

Episode 68 Life, language and other mysteries

Photo by Patrick Hendry

In this episode we’re going to address three questions. What’s a word? What 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 or wherever you like to listen.

Episode 64 The intimacy embedded in language

Photo by Anne Nygård

In this episode we explore the idea that intimacy is embedded in the structure of language, and that this same intimacy is embedded in the structure of life.

We challenge the idea that languages are made of words, as does a character in my short story, ‘The words of your language’, which was published in issue 13 of After Happy Hour Review.

We play the ‘think of a word’ game, which shows up on pages 7-8 of my screenplay, Grammar for Dreamers.

We learn from Ed Yong’s article in The Atlantic about the role of membranes in the origin of life.

And we hear how Coyote tricked human beings into believing that language started with them, and that they’re the only ones who possess it in my fable called ‘Coyote’s trick’.

We ask this question, which comes from Grammar for Dreamers (p. 36):

‘What if language was not the endpoint of the earth’s evolution, but rather, its starting point? What if language was what the earth has always been doing?’

And finally, we explore the flipside of intimacy: hierarchy, domination, colonisation.

Are you enjoying these episodes? Would you like to hear more? Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. For additional content, follow me on Instagram, where I regularly post videos sharing bits of linguistic geekery that delight me: @grammarfordreamers

Listen to Episode 64: The Intimacy Embedded in Language.