Episode 67 Imperative blessings

Hello and welcome to episode 67 of Structure and Vision. Structure and Vision is a space for exploring new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Dirty Clark and I'm very grateful that you're listening today. You are very welcome here.

Okay, so we love a good thought experiment and today's thought experiment isn't language based, it's sky oriented so we'll link that up with language in a bit but here's a question for you. Think back to a time before you knew that the Earth travels around the Sun and not the other way around. So when did you, effectively, moment when you learned that the Earth traveled around the Sun and what was it like when you discovered that the Earth traveled around the Sun as opposed to the other way around? So this is a question that I used to ask my students in a module called Language Identity and Power and we used to do a session on post-modern identity and we were reflecting on a quote from Maden Sarab from his book Identity, Culture and the Post-Modern World.

So here's, I'll read the quote to you. He writes, Copernicus, Darwin, Marx and Freud have all in their different ways, desentered the human subject by desentering. He writes, I mean that individual consciousness can no longer be seen as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action. So we've got this post-modern perspective where we're no longer in this kind of Cartesian world where the kind of, I think, therefore I am world where we wander around and we have a self in the self thinks and that the self speaks and the self acts in the world and it's consistent and coherent.

Instead, we have a world in which the notion of the self isn't necessarily at the center. And so when you look at the people on the self's list, Copernicus, Darwin, Marx and Freud, I sort of take the students through each of those thinkers and we ask ourselves, okay, well, what is it about that particular thinker? What about their discovery or their philosophy? That would have contributed to this sense centuries later that we are in a moment of desentering.

And so we start with Copernicus and everyone knows who Copernicus is. Everybody in the class gets to know the Copernicus and they say, okay, yeah, well, he's the guy who said that, you know, the earth traveled around the sun rather than the other way around. But when I ask, when did you not know that? What was it like?

So your experiences, the sun rises in the east, it moves over the sky during the day and then it sets in the west. So your experience of that, your perspective on that, is that the sun is the thing that's moving, like we don't have any way of feeling the earth moving, but we can see the sun moving above us. So to be told that the earth travels around the sun should be a desentering moment because we're being told something that goes against our experience. But the students said the students echoed what was my own experience, which was none of us could remember a time when we didn't have that kind of science image of the solar system where you've got a big yellow ball in the middle and all the planets circling round the outside.

We couldn't actually imagine a time when we didn't have that image in our heads. And so I find that fascinating because again, it never, as a kid, I never, there's never any cognitive dissonance between my experience of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west and that image of the earth moving round the sun and all the other planets moving around the sun. So I never had that moment of desentering, which sort of tells you a lot about our relationship with the sun at the moment, which is that maybe on any given day, maybe I can't even point to which way is the east and which way is the west, whereas if I was in the 15th century, I probably would have been able to do that to quite a good degree of accuracy. So all this to say though, that we might be prepared to accept that Copernicus played a role in desentering the human subject by removing the earth from the center of the universe, or at least removing our world view, literal world view where the earth is in the center of the universe.

But for the kind of contemporary crowd, it doesn't have the effect of desentering me because I just simply can't, it's actually more desentering to try to imagine it the other way round. And that's the effect of a kind of consolidated world view. And we're talking here about a literal world view, the world being the earth and thinking about it in relationship to the solar system. Now, when we get a little bit further along in Sarb's list, when I start talking to the students about the other figures in his list, there was Darwin, Marx, and Freud.

They generally can sort of figure out what it is that Sarb is talking about. So with Darwin, the idea that we're not specially created by God, we've just evolved in a long line of other animals, or that Marx, that Marx's a notion of consciousness perhaps, that our consciousness is the product of economic relations like the material world and who owns the means of production. That is actually what produces my ideas about the world. So Marx with his notion of ideology, which we could talk about in a different podcast.

But the students in my experience tend to be pretty familiar with Darwin and Marx, and they feel pretty comfortable with those particular world views. When we get to Freud, that's when we get a sense of desentering in the classroom. Often times students haven't really studied Freud. But with the students who have, when they suddenly say, okay, well Freud said that most of our thoughts and behaviors were governed by our unconscious, and that our conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg, and that most of what we do and say and think and believe is all unconscious to us, that tends to be a bit desentering for students.

I think what's desentering, especially when you throw in stuff about the eatable complex and that type of thing, that if you're a man, you're going to fall in love with your mother, if you haven't already fallen in love with her, and if you're a woman, you might have sex with your father. All that can be a little desentering. But the thing that I think is most troublesome about it is this idea that we're not like the captain of our own ships. Like we don't necessarily control our own actions.

The thoughts that we think might not be our own, and by our own I mean the thinker, the sort of Descartes, I think therefore I am. The I who's thinking might be different from the I who is being, if you like, that there's something else potentially controlling me, then we start to move into something that feels a little bit like science fiction and is potentially troubling. And maybe that's troubling in the way that the 16th century notion that the Earth travels around the Sun rather than the other way around, maybe that might have been troubling. The idea I keep bringing up in these structured vision podcasts, the idea that language creates selves, that has the capacity of being potentially unsettling or desetering.

I mean, I hope you don't feel unsettled when you only listen to the podcast, but we can allow ourselves to be unsettled for the pleasure of it, if you like. And I'm unsettled by it, so I don't sort of walk around thinking about all the various selves that are sort of being produced by language and texts. Normally, when I'm just going about my everyday world, I'm thinking about, well, I'm not thinking about this, but I'm just kind of working from the assumption that I've got this body and this body is me. It's kind of like a house and inside that or a vehicle.

And then that inside that vehicle somewhere is myself and myself thinks things and myself wants things and myself thinks I need another cup of tea and myself wonders if I have enough dark chocolate in the cupboard and then when I need to get up to go to the cupboard to get the dark chocolate, my body moves and it takes myself with it, right? And there's this one to one ratio. I've got one body, one self, not the body and the self change over time. But there's still the same thing.

You know, I've got a name, I've got a history, I've got relationships with people. I'm one, I'm whole. And when I want to say something, right, when the self that lives inside my body wants to say something, it opens my body's mouth and my mouth starts moving around and my voice box starts to vibrate and out comes a string of language and that string of language corresponds to my thoughts. It's not just a bunch of random gobbledygook, it's not someone else speaking through me.

Those are, I'm speaking, you know, if I, you know, do we have any chocolate? It's a genuine question that's being asked by myself, you know, to someone who recognizes me as Jodi. So that's, you know, kind of the way I knew through my world, that's actually pretty accurate, especially on the chocolate thing, just so you know. But that's a lot easier for me to kind of digest them.

The self doesn't exist until language creates one for me. That's one's a little de-settling, unsettling, de-centering. Because if it's language that's creating the self, well, who's speaking the language, right? So who's actually doing this?

Somebody's got to speak it or write it or think it. So who's doing that if that's not me? That's, that's confusing. That's potentially de-centering.

If we, we could, we can puzzle through this though. If we, if we want to be, if we're prepared to be a little unsettled for the next couple of minutes, we could say, okay, um, let's think about, you know, so if you think there's a single self that's producing language and that language might be in the form of actual spoken words or it might be in the form of written words or it might be simply in the form of thoughts. I for one know that my thoughts feel like they always, if not, I was gonna say almost always, if not always, take the form of language. It feels like my, I have a very noisy head.

So I don't know if you have that as well. But the noise is language. So do you ever do what I do? Which is to talk to yourself.

And most of the time, again, my lips don't actually move when I'm talking to myself. Sometimes embarrassingly they do. Lockdown was a bit of a bonus for me because I didn't have to share an office with people during lockdown where I'm actually talking to myself, right? Because that is sometimes what we consider to be the definition of a crazy person is somebody who talks to himself.

And by that definition, I am certifiably crazy because I talk to myself all the time. There's a constant dialogue going on in my head. And the dialogue, you know, starts from the moment I wake up, it's time to get up just a few more minutes. You don't get up, no, you miss the bus.

It's really important for me to get sleep. It's also important for you to get the bus. If you miss this one, you'll be late for work, right? So there's this dialogue.

Before I've even opened up my eyes, there's this dialogue inside my head. And the question is, you know, who are the players in that little scene? There's clearly two of them, right? Because, first of all, I'm using, you know, I, the pronouns I and me, the first person and the second person pronoun you, you know, it's time for you to get up.

I don't want to get up that type of thing. And so the language that shows up in that little scene requires me dividing myself into two selves. Okay, just before I even open my eyes in the morning, there's a dialogue. The dialogue is between two people.

It's kind of an argument, right? Oh, my goodness. So how can that be that very clear idea that there's these two people battling it out inside my head, right? How can I reconcile that with this other like work a day notion that I have as I go through my day, that I've got one body oneself, one Jodi wandering through the world, taking myself with me wherever I go, probably lives in my brain somewhere.

You know, what actually is that? Like, how do I reconcile that? Can I imagine myself as like, there's one core me and I've invented this fictional other, you know, in the same way that I can play out different characters on a stage play. And so, so we've got like the person doesn't want to get up and the person wants me to get up.

And so, okay, so maybe I've invented a different character, but then which one am I? Like which actual character is the one Jodi? Is it the really conscientious one who's like, let's get to work on time. Let's not lose our job.

Or is it like the lazy one who's just like five more minutes? Which one is me? And sometimes, you know, as a practice or as an exerciser, just as an opportunity to try to quiet that mind or simply to observe it, I'll watch that dialogue happen. And when I ask myself, well, which one am I?

Well, then I brought in a third person, the person who's actually watching, that person's usually loud calmer. But that can be a little dizzying. That can be a little bit decentering, right? Because who am I?

If all these selves keep generating from the language of my thoughts, which one is me? So all of this stuff, okay, so postmodern worldview can have a decentering effect. And this, this is about language producing lots of selves. And that idea does derive from postmodern philosophy.

This is all, this is all, all of it is deriving from a postmodern worldview. A lot of people really hate post modern world views or postmodern philosophies. And there's a whole bunch of reason why people hate it. So I won't speak for them.

But one thing about it is that it can sometimes seem a little depressing that the note that sometimes that engagement with awareness, the self and text produces the self and there's no sense of a coherent person. There's no soul inside the body. That can feel like there is no meaning, or that meaning is relativistic. And if there isn't a single solitary self, there can't be a single solitary meaning.

And that language cannot consistently produce a consistent meaning. How can we ever agree? And when we get into that, also how can we actually take action? If I don't know who I am, then I don't know who I stand for.

And how do I actually take action in the world? And especially in this podcast where we're interested in social change. And we want to see ourselves as agents of social change. Well, if I don't exist as a coherent self, how can I actually affect social change in the world?

How can I take on a position? How can I be an activist? And so that postmodern perspective can be something that people want to move away from because there's a sense in which it's nihilistic. And we nihilism is particularly helpful for us.

There's another thing that people dislike about postmodernism. And this one I can appreciate, which is when you get into this postmodern territory, sometimes you can come across as a little bit ingenious, like pompously ingenious, you know, like a bunch of people sitting around trying to like out deep each other like, Oh man, hey, do you ever think about like, you know, you know, who you are, like there's no self like there's not oneself, but lots of selves. And you know, it's kind of like, do I even exist out of language? Like, do you exist?

You know what I mean? It's like, this isn't why we're doing it. It's certainly not why I'm doing it. You know, I'm not engaging with postmodern philosophy with notions of the self.

I'm not doing it to try to sound deep, which is probably just as well because I probably don't sound deep. And it's certainly not to put on sort of false pretentious, intellectual persona, right? Which I'm also probably failing on anyway. So, but just so everyone's clear.

You know, if you have a distaste of this kind of this kind of pretentious intellectual air, I appreciate that. For me, the reason, the only reason to engage in any form of philosophizing, any form of thinking, any form of changing worldviews, it is to imagine a more welcoming world. This is the whole point. This is why we do it.

If we're if we're not, you know, putting our attention to imagining a more welcoming world, it's better off to just go watch a couple of episodes of Friends or something, you know, because life is short. And you know, a more welcoming world for me is the point. So, if we instead recognize that in order to welcome a different world, in order to welcome social change, that we need to be engaged in the act of challenging our own worldviews or challenging the culture of worldviews or challenging any worldview that prevents a better world from coming into being, then we can start to realize, what is it that we mean by the word self? And whatever it is we mean by that, a self always comes with its own little built-in worldview, right?

Even even the level of the little dialogue, little argument of dialogue, if I open my eyes, it's time for you to go up, I just need five more minutes. There's two worldviews in those two characters, right? Even if you were to imagine two characters on a stage, two selves on a stage, they have two different perspectives. They're looking at the stage, they're looking at the audience from two different perspectives.

And even though we might have a couple of many different selves that live within our language, they have different perspectives, even if they're looking through our same eyes. So, each self comes with its own built-in worldview. And that one, it's time for you to get up, that, you know, self number one, the conscientious self. Okay, so that one has a worldview that revolves around an obedience to some outer structure that determines what I should be doing and what I shouldn't be doing.

And the one that says, I just need five more minutes, that self has a worldview that is obedient and revolves around this inner bodily need for more sleep. Two different worldviews, you know, in one conversation, two selves, two worldviews. So, if we're exploring selves, if we engage in a philosophy that allows us to see us generating multiple selves, then here's the bonus, we get to see us generating multiple worldviews, right? So, with every self that we can point to, that we can pop up at pops up in language, oh, there's another self, there's a you, there's a him, there's a her, there's a they, each of those different selves that pops up in our language has its own built in worldview.

And if we're looking at it from a linguistic perspective, which is what I like to do, we see languages, the thing that generates those multiple selves, then we get to explore that, like language is really beautiful, because you can freeze it in time, if you have a way of recording it, either on a recording device, or you write down your thoughts, or whatever it is, you can actually see the different selves popping up in the text that you've recorded, and you can see all these different worldviews. And once you've had access to all of them, that's when I start, that's when it's, it occurs to me that lots of different possibilities emerge. I think that gives our imagination more scope, more freedom. Okay, so I like to talk about my creative writing on this podcast.

I appreciate those of you for joining me on the ride and being prepared to listen to me talk about the stuff I've written. And I've recently had a story, the story is called Go, and it was published in an anthology, it's called The Running Wild, Anthology of Stories, Volume Five. I'll link to the book in the show notes, like I said, my story is called Go, and it's published by a great indie press called The Running Wild Press. And in this story, as you probably know, all of my creative writing explores some kind of linguistic feature.

So the story, Go, explores imperatives, right, commands. Okay, so the word the story title, Go, is itself an imperative, a command to go. But it's not really just about imperatives. It's also a way of exploring how worldview shifts emerge with this notion of shifting conceptions itself.

Okay, doesn't that sound like a great idea for a story? Okay, I'm gonna have to maybe a little bit more convincing. So I'll tell you a little bit about it. The main character in the story is called Anna, and she's looking back a couple of decades, you know, she's probably about it midlife, and she's looking back a couple of decades earlier when she was a student at her, she's studying English at American College.

And as the story progresses, we learned that when she was a college student, she had a particular worldview, and her worldview had to do with how to achieve, you know, how to achieve her best grades and how to advance her career and how to get a good student of English literature and how to get a good grade on her undergraduate thesis and all these types of things. But what we realize is that her worldview is not actually something that she jumped up on her own. Her worldview is simply mirroring the structure that she's existing within about how to achieve and what literature she should be studying and you know, how to do better than her peers. And all of it is, if you look carefully, it's all extremely oppressive because it's racist, it's patriarchal, you know, so therefore it's sexist, and she has effectively sort of swallowed the Kool-Aid.

And quite frankly, it can be very difficult to look outside of the worldview of the culture that you're in. This is why it is so important for us to be exploring systemic structural racism, for us to be exploring the ways in which the patriarchy makes its worldviews present and just our day-to-day ways of doing things. So for her, it's things like, you know, there's certain canonical works of literature she should be reading. But if she wants to do well and she wants to go on and get postgraduate work then, then she should probably do something a little edgier, which is maybe she should read somebody, you know, a person of color.

Not because she's interested in it, but because she's told that she needs to do that in order to be slightly different and have a leg up on her peers. You know what I mean? It's all this kind of twisted, we don't, we're not reading literature because it's interesting to us, we're reading it because we went to advance our career, this type of thing. And the lecturers who are the most popular are the white males, you know, who have this kind of guru status, and they're not challenged.

There's only one black professor, one black academic member of staff in this, in this fictional college. And Anna, the main character, decides she's going to do this edgy thing and she's going to study an Ethiopian writer, not because she's interested in the Ethiopian writer, she just thinks, oh, this will advance me in my career and hopefully get me into a grad school, right? And so she gets assigned as a senior thesis advisor, a professor called Dr. Enbina Amina, the only black academic on the entire campus who also happens to be dean of students, and it occurs to her that the only reason she's even been assigned to her is because that academic is originally Ethiopian.

And it turns out she's not even a literature specialist, she's a linguistic specialist. So Anna looks back on this period of her life and she's absolutely terrified of this academic, she doesn't fit in with her picture, her worldview of what it means to be studying English and American college. So she's also, so she, and her thesis advisor is called Dr. Amina, and she's, Anna is terrified of her.

And she feels victimized by her, she feels like she's always being put on the spot, she's never got the right answer, she doesn't know what she's supposed to say, she doesn't know how to get the right grade. But what actually is being victimized here is her worldview, right? So there's someone whose presence, her very being, is challenging this patriarchal racist structure that Anna has effectively swallowed. And so here's this individual who's challenging that.

And the way Anna, how you know, deals with that is in a very immature way. She feels victimized, she makes jokes with their fellow students, they sing horrible songs about this woman, they're like, oh, they only hired her because they wanted her to be conversated in that type of thing. So something needs to happen, this all happens before the story starts. Something needs to happen, a kind of inciting incident, right?

Every story needs to start with an inciting incident, somebody gets the ball rolling. And the inciting incident in this story is the thing that makes Anna look back at that period and explore a new worldview, okay? And if whenever we think about exploring a new worldview, sometimes our worldviews are so immersed, they're so entrenched in the way we move through our worlds that you do need an inciting incident to spark up a different worldview. This is one of the reasons why I like this postmodern thing where it's like, okay, let's explore lots of different selves.

You don't do it to sound smart, you do it as an inciting incident to explore worldviews. Okay, well the inciting incident for Anna in the story is grammatical, okay? It's an imperative. And it's the imperative that I've already mentioned is the story's title.

The imperative is go. So the word go in some form kind of shows up for Anna. I'll actually, I'll actually read you this little piece of incident so that you get a flavor of it. She first heard that very same imperative go as a clear instruction from who knows where, probably the same force that had propelled her bewildered steps toward the Franklin building in the last phase of this baffling adventure.

It had started with a half-hearted scroll through Facebook which had brought the unexpected news of Dr. Amina's death. A memorial service I've been organized in Washington at Howard University. Go.

How could she go? The event was in two days. It was an eight-hour drive round trip. She had work.

Go. She couldn't call it a voice. The message had not been spoken. A compulsion perhaps.

A propulsion. A vector. A magnetic pull. A circle on a map.

A wise hand on her back. Reassuring but unrelenting. Pushing her forward. Okay, so the imperative is the thing that's pushing her forward.

This one word go. That's the inciting incident, right? So she goes to Dr. Amina's funeral.

She wants to learn more about Dr. Amina's life. She learns that Dr. Amina did her PhD in England at the University of Birmingham, that she did a linguistics topic.

She learned that her PhD thesis was called Imperatives in Omodic Languages. She learns that Omodic is the name of a family of languages spoken of Ethiopia. She learns that Dr. Amina was born in Ethiopia and she lived there until the 70s when she was a teenager and then her parents fled to England's political refugees.

So suddenly, after this woman has died, this woman who she was terrorized by, she fell victimized by, you gave her a bad grade, you expected things from her that she wasn't used to being having expected from her, suddenly now she's compelled to learn all these things about her. And what's more, she's compelled to leave her husband behind, leave her job behind. She books a flight and she flies to England from Roaner, Virginia, where she lives. And she wants to find Dr.

Amina's PhD thesis. It's like she has to read this thesis. Go, go, go. She's just being propelled forward by this one word.

So she finds it. She's at the University of Birmingham. She's in a postgraduate student room and the book is on the shelf. She's been directed there.

And she meets a postgraduate there. She's got to sit in the room and read the books. So she meets a fellow postgraduate. He doesn't do linguistics.

His name is Adam. And once she's reading the thesis, they go out for drinks and then they go out for dinner. And she tells them everything that she's learned. So one of the things that she learns is that omodic languages and paratives and omodic languages are more complex than they are in English.

So I'll just, in English, I'll just give you a little flavor of this. In English, the imperative form of a verb is the root form. And by root, we mean if you were taking a verb and you were looking up in the dictionary, that dictionary form is usually your imperative. So like a word like go, if you were look up the word go in the dictionary, look up the word go.

You wouldn't look up going or went or goes. Same with dance. You wouldn't look up danced or dancing. You'd look up the word dance.

And dance is the imperative form. Dance. We normally think of imperatives as an exclamation point at the end of them. The other thing about imperatives in English is that they're always addressed to the second person.

Okay. So go means you go, you there, go, you there, dance, you there, sing. But the other languages and some of these Ethiopian languages are some of them, but lots of other languages allow for imperatives to be addressed, not just to the second person. So you can also have first person imperatives and third person imperatives.

So that requires potentially a world you shift. This is another reason why I like doing a little bit of cross linguistic stuff because of different languages we get to work world use potentially, if we really actually think about them. So, you know, when we think about language, we think about creating selves, actually imperatives gives a few things to think about. So the first thing I'd ask you to think about is if you can have a language where imperatives are addressed to the first person, right?

So the first person is me, like I mean myself and I, that's the first person, the person speaking or thinking or writing. How can you have, what would that actually look like to have an imperative addressed to the first person? Okay. Now, the one thing that might come to mind, we might think of me, myself and I, trying to get out of bed this morning, and we think about the things I'm telling myself.

So I'm like, get up, right? But the get up, even though I'm telling myself to get up, so it feels like that should be a first person imperative, it's actually a second person imperative. The get up there is addressed to you. Okay, it's, it's, you can tell this, last week, your last time I talked about the question tag, I broke.

If you check a question tag at the end of imperative, the pronoun that pops up is you. So, um, you know, I got up, didn't I, but get up, won't you? The you tells us that it's the second person, the you says a second person. Also, if you were to say, you don't say, get up, won't I?

You say get up, won't you? Right? Even if you're addressing yourself. And if you, if you stick a little, if you want to call yourself by a name, you know, you might say, it's like, get up, you idiot, right?

And we notice the you shows up again, the pronoun always tells us which person it is. So the you is second person, get up you idiot. You don't, you're not thinking get up, me idiot, that would be first person. So that when you're talking to yourself, and you're using an imperative to tell yourself to do something, you're using the second person.

So you're dividing yourself up into first and second person. I'm splitting myself into grammatically, splitting myself into two people, two persons first and second person. So if you can have an imperative, if there's a language that allows for an imperative, first person imperative, how is that managed? Does that mean that somehow a singular self, the first person can tell itself what to do?

And it's genuinely not a division? Well, here's the secret to that. The first person doesn't have to be singular, right? What's the first person plural?

We, right? So when we think about the self as being more than one, it doesn't have to be divided into first and second, I and you. It can also be divided into a we. Okay, so when we're talking about first person imperatives, I think in all those dollars and cents, I can't think of any exceptions, we're talking about the first person in plural imperative.

Okay, so there is actually a way of doing this in English. There's a way of, it was a kind of workaround for doing a first person, imperative, first person plural imperative. And to get, you might already have it. But imagine you belonging to a group of people.

And one person says to the rest of the group that they want the whole group to go, what do they say? They say, let's go. Let's go, right? You might have already gotten that, especially if you speak French or Spanish, you might have already gotten that.

I don't see, you would have gotten, let's go. Let's go. It's a little bit of a workaround in English because it still requires that second person, that second person imperative, let, like we're asking for permission of someone, please let us go. But that's the way we do in English because we don't have a first person imperative, we need that, we need that, that workaround.

So this is kind of cool in my mind that we're not just generating the selves that we generate don't necessarily have to be divided into the one who gives the command and the one who follows it. The selves who are generated could be a group who are also singularly offering each other the opportunity to do a thing, right? It feels almost like an offering rather than a command. You know, a little bit less, get up, you idiot, let's wake up now, shall we?

Maybe tomorrow when I do my little dialogue, maybe I'll think of myself in terms of all the bunch of first person selves rather than a first person and the second person self. And this is, I don't know, just thinking of these terms, it sounds so basic in some ways, but I just love it about language. It just gives me a window into the different ways that the self can be constructed, not just in different languages, but also in different conversations or even the same conversation or even in just the same stream of thoughts that's constantly going through my head, that there's always a different way of understanding the self, there's always a different way of constructing the self, and then there's always a different worldview that comes with it. I don't, I don't believe language is the only thing that lets us do this, but I know it's not the only thing that lets us do it, it happens to be my favorite way, and for lots of different reasons, but potentially just my own affinity.

But another way of doing it is to go back to the night sky, which is the way we started this podcast. So we can go back to the Maden Sarab quote, Copernicus, Darwin, Marx, and Freud have all in their different ways, he centered the human subject by decentralization, I mean the individual consciousness can no longer be seen as the origin of meaning, knowledge, and action. So once when I brought this quote out and we were all talking about Copernicus and when did you know about the sun, the earth going around the sun and that type of thing, and one student had a massive worldview shift right in the classroom, which was really fun to watch, I was really impressed, she said, how is it possible that some guy from the 15th century would figure that out, how could you suddenly figure that out, when you didn't already know it, because here we all are with our worldview, we've got our little set up, we're imagining the kind of what's it called, mobile, where you've got the sun in the middle and all these other planets moving around and sort of hanging down in your elementary school classroom, right? You've got that image in your head, which is kind of impossible to get rid of.

Well when you don't have that image in your head, how do you look up in the night sky and suddenly think, oh hey, maybe we're the vehicle moving around rather than the sun, and it would look like the sun was moving around if that was the case. You know how do you do it? So that question got me so curious, but I was like, do you know what? I'm going to start being a star case, or I'm going to start looking at the sky, I'm going to learn everything that I can about the way the planets move over the sky and where in the sky they move and how the sun moves across and with different parts of the seasons of the year and whether it's more towards the north, more towards the south, the one in the clip that goes, I'm going to learn about phases of the moon, I got into this, because I wanted to be able to think about things differently.

I wanted to be able to pursue this, this retidinous feeling of not knowing whether you're the passenger or the center, or whether you're the satellite or the center. I bought one of those circular star charts and you'd line it up with a time of year and you'd look at the pull star and then there was a little window in it, I'm explaining it very well. And you line it up so that you can look up and see where the constellations are, and then if you know where the planets are at this particular date in history, and if the planets are visible at night, you can check those across the ecliptic. Anyway, I got one of these little red filters from my flashlight so that if I was outside, I wouldn't blind myself to the white light of the flashlight.

I mean, my gosh, I was like, all the way there you go. So it ended up not working as all I wanted to do because I live in Britain. And the only time you can really go outside when it's warm is the summertime and it's never dark. It's never dark enough to actually do star gazing in Britain in the summertime because it's so far north, it's such a northern latitude.

It's also never really that warm in the night time, even in the summer. Also, it's almost always raining. Where cloud is, you'd have to line your star chart up with the north star, like between the clouds. So but God bless me, I did try it.

I had the system set up where it's like, okay, it's only between like certain hours, like maybe between like 11 and 3 that you get any type of real darkness despite the fact that there's also all this light pollution. So like, okay, here's what I'll do. I'll get myself ready. If I wake up in the middle of the night, you know, I don't know, I'll wear something.

If I haven't to wake up, I'll just have everything ready. I'll go outside, I'll get my little chair and my little binoculars and I'll make a flask of tea and I'll get my star chart with a flashlight ready and I'll hell that ready and blanket in case I get up in the middle of the night. So that's what I was doing if I happen to get up in the middle of the night. And then I just should ring under my blanket and I'd be staring up at the sky looking through the clouds and I would just try to reflect and be like, what was it like before I knew the earth traveled on the sun?

You know, what would it be like to have your whole world view shift like that? Like suddenly you think it's one thing, it's really this other thing. You know, what if you're a passenger? What if you're a satellite rather than the center?

What if you were the center rather than the satellite? And I would just, to be fair, like if you do that for long enough, even though it's a little bit cold and your fingers are getting numb, it kind of does start to work. And what you realize is that you're kind of priding your mind to welcome new ways of seeing things. You're preparing yourself to think things that before you didn't allow yourself to think.

And I started reading books about, you know, how these world views shifted over time, how the scientific cosmology's changed over time. A great, great book is Arthur Christ later, The Sleepwalkers, is a phenomenal look at the history of different views of the Solar System. And one of the things I learned from that book was that people in the 15th and 16th centuries forget about, you know, which planets traveling around which solar body, you know, which part of the solar system, you also have to think in terms of what are the forces that keep these trajectories in play, right? You know, it's not just what's my location in relation to the other celestial bodies.

It's also, you know, how is it all staying out there? You know, and one of the things Carcilla mentions is that in the 15th and 16th century, people weren't really allowing themselves to think about what Newton was going to discover later, that what keeps everything in place is gravity. And the reason they weren't allowing themselves to think about something that might be gravity is sort of, is because it's kind of superstitious, it's like to think that there was some force, some invisible force, keeping everything in play. Like, that seems like a very backward notion, the idea that there's some invisible force that works in some weird, spooky way to keep everything in place.

You know, that is actually kind of strange to think about, you know, that's kind of hard for me to think about. That de-senders me a little. And in everyday consciousness, in everyday worldviews, thinking that things act on us from a distance, if it's not sort of enveloped in a scientific language, it starts to feel a little whackadoodle, it starts to feel a little superstitious. Like this notion that I put in that story, that there's some force outside of you urging you to do something, there's some force telling you to go to see someone's funeral, go go go go.

That's actually kind of weird. That is de-centering. And I'll read you this next bit. Was it an angel that had whispered the imperative to her go?

That sent her to Washington to stand among Dr. Amina's grieving Howard University students, her conspicuous white skin blushing with the inappropriateness of her presence among those tear-stained black and brown faces? Who was she to pretend to mourn a woman she despised? Or thought she despised?

She'd never even trouble herself to get to know her. So the idea here is that there's something in a jellic force telling her to change a worldview, right? And that isn't something that feels that comfortable talking about in academic settings where the discussion was supposed to be around postmodern ideas of the self and linguistics, right? And so if we start going too far in this direction about the selves and the language and the possibilities and the more welcoming world, we might be moving towards this notion that we contain multitudes, that we have these multitudes of selves, and that they can act on us from a distance, they can act on us without us knowing it.

What? They might give us direction, they might wish for us to have a positive shift in worldview, they might offer us blessings. Okay, let's talk about the blessings real quick and then we'll finish up. So we've got Anna in the story having a conversation with Adam, they've had a few drinks, they're having dinner, they're falling a little bit in love with each other.

He's asking her what she's learned from Dr. Amina's PhD thesis, she's telling her about the different types of the paratours that exist in easy Ethiopian languages that don't exist in English. By the way, I got all of that stuff about omodic languages from the brilliant linguist Alexandra Eichenwald, and I'll post it from her work in the show notes. So here's the quote from the book.

So sorry, quote from the story. So speakers of omodic languages are more likely to use first person imperatives, Adam asked. They're not necessarily more likely to use them, but some of them have more distinct ways of encoding them in their grammar, oratives they're called, the first person imperatives. Jess is the name for third person commands.

Third person is he or she, right? Or it or they, yes, someone or something outside of the interaction. How can you command someone you're not talking to? Anna had wondered it about herself, but an example from Dr.

Amina's thesis had cleared it up. Peace be with you, she said. Her friends in Roanak would have automatically produced the response and also with you. Adam's silent suggested he wasn't a churchgoer.

His pop-a-dum clicked as he broke it into. Isn't that a second person imperative? Peace be with you? No, she said.

I'm talking to you, but the one I'm commanding is an entity that's not in the conversation. Peace. Third person. You can tell it's an imperative because I've used the infinitive form of the verb.

It's not peace is with you or peace was with you. Peace be with you. So what do we have with peace be with you? We have a blessing, a third person imperative, which it turns out English does allow peace be with you.

We can use the imperative form of a verb to offer blessings. The language offers blessings. The language produces selves. And maybe the language is producing selves that have the capacity to bless us.

Maybe with our different selves, maybe there's a possibility that there might be some who are wiser, who are protective, who are blessing us, who want the best for us. Now that's decentering. It also doesn't sound overwhelmingly intellectual. Kinda sounds a little whack-a-doodle, but listen, this is the risk we're going to take because we want a more welcoming world.

We want to explore the possibilities and we want to challenge our conventional worldviews. So is it superstitious to think of selves that are wiser than us that are protective that wish to bless us? Potentially. But it might be reckless, not to.

Okay, everybody, that's it. Thank you so much for listening today. If you want to hear more from me, you can click the link in the show notes. There's a monthly newsletter that I'd love to send out.

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