Episode 74 Create nothing

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’: bit.ly/lensoflanguage

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