Episode 79 Possession, duality and other grammatical mysteries

In this episode I share what I believe are my most radical ideas, which normally I try to hide so that people don’t think I’m crazy:

Human beings are the only living things that experience separation from the rest of the world. What separates us is human language. The experience of separation created by human language is a stage in the Earth’s evolution, the Earth’s next great experiment. And there are mysteries in the structure of language that can help us understand how the separation is shaped.

We’ll talk about some of those mysteries, specifically the grammatical principle of possession.

To get a flavour of what’s in store, hold up one of your hands in front of you so that you can see it. Ask yourself the question: ‘Is this my hand?’

Did you entertain the possibility that your hand might be possessed? As we’ll discover, it is possessed. The possessive determiner my tells us so.

Possession gives us a mechanism for creating two things where before there was only unity or wholeness. It allows us to divide absolutely anything up. And it allows us to redraw the boundaries around our experience.

With language—not just possessive forms in language, but with language in general—you have the capacity to shape a self... and to make decisions about what belongs to that self.

Language constructs selfhood, which gives us the experience of separation from the world. But what we learn by studying the intricacies of language is how malleable this selfhood is. The dynamic of selfhood can change literally with every utterance. And I believe that close attention to language can show us new ways of shaping the self, and thus, of shaping our communities and our world.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Possessed’, available on grammarfordreamers.com.

Take my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail: bit.ly/lensoflanguage

Come to my free live online workshop on October 21st! It’s called ‘The creative logic of language’, and it’s offered by Off the Shelf Festival of Words and Sheffield Hallam University.

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

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