Structured Visions Jodie Clark

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

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!

When was the last time you lost language? And… how do you feel? The one time it feels like I’m losing language is when I let myself feel what I really feel. (We’re talking about weeping, wailing, keening—the dripping-nose ugly cry.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and language because I’ve just made a new course available, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths. It’s a love letter to my young writing self, who had no idea how to put ‘show don’t tell’ into my writing practice.
In designing the course, I discovered the ways that writers grammatically shape their characters’ emotions. I look specifically at fear, envy, grief, love at first sight, sensuality and rage.
In this episode we explore sorrow as a felt experience with a grammatical shape. (Ugly crying entirely optional.)
The story I read in Episode 92 is ‘Death of a grammarian’.
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Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!