Episode 74 Create nothing

Hello, and welcome to episode 74 of Structure Visions. Structure Visions is a space for exploring new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Jody Clark, and I'm very grateful that you're listening today. You are very welcome here.

Okay, I'd like to start the podcast episode off with a few questions for you to mull over as you allow yourself to be lulled into a kind of journey with my words. Things for you to think about when you decide to phase me out a little bit. So the three questions are, the first one is, is there anyone in your life who truly gets you? So just mull that over.

So there's anyone in your life that truly gets you, who truly gets you. And the second one, seemingly unrelated, what's your favorite fairy tale? And the third one is, have you ever received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of yourself? Okay, so maybe that third one is, well, the third one is just a yes or no question, but nevertheless, it might be the toughest one.

And the other two are, is there anyone who truly gets you? What's your favorite fairy tale? Okay, so I promise that I will try to find a way to weave all those three questions together, but you can just allow those to circulate in your head as you listen to my words today. But we'll just start with, is there anyone in your life who truly gets you?

So this question sort of became prominent in my mind when I first moved to Britain. I moved to Loughborough to do my PhD at Loughborough University. I was in my mid-20s. This was in 2002.

And it was, I was so excited to be there. I really wanted to be in England. I really wanted to be in the PhD. The first time I had ever gone to England was the Lake District.

And if anybody's meant to Loughborough, they're probably thinking, you know, Loughborough is no Lake District. But to me, it might as well have been, it was just, it was just the fulfillment of a dream. I was so excited to be there. And I was in this like classic student house, so Terris house, if you live in England, you'll be able to picture exactly what I'm describing.

So it's a Terris house, sort of two up to down, two bedroom house. And actually it was a three bedroom house, a tiny bedroom on the first floor. But it was, had been converted for four students, right? So three bedroom house, one tiny little bedroom.

The attic had been converted into what was going to be my room. And the front room, the living room had been converted into a bedroom as well. So our only common area was this tiny little dining area next to the kitchen. The kitchen was tiny too.

And we spent a lot of time as you do in student houses arguing over who gets the bathroom next and do you don't have space in the fridge and that type of thing. I mean, honestly, I loved every new job. But if you've lived in student housing in the UK, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So you can picture my attic room and there was a door at the bottom and then a set of stairs that went up through the middle of the room.

And then I had a single bed on one side of these stairs and then a desk with like an easy chair next to the desk. And a window that looked down onto a Catholic church. And so, and then the, in that sort of opening where the stairs come up through the floor, if you like, or through the ceiling, whichever way you're looking at it, there was the, what you call it, the bars that go round to keep you from falling down that gap. So what was interesting about that setup was my housemates started, they started, they started getting into the habit of like coming up to ask me for advice.

I guess they just saw me as somebody who had advice to give. So they were only a few years younger than me, but I think they saw me as like older and wiser. So they would knock on the door, I'd love them come in and they'd come up. But there wasn't any place for them to sit except on the bed if I was sitting on the chair next to the table.

So if they sat on the bed, they'd be like across a couple of sets of bars that really sort of separated from me. So what they would instead have sit on the stairs and they would look at me through the bars, if you see what I mean, the kind of banister around that top bit of the staircase. And I would sort of talk to them through that. And looking back at the time, I remember thinking it's a little bit like talking to somebody in prison or something.

Now I actually think it's a little bit more like a confessional, you know that little screen that goes up between the priest and the penitent. So it was like a little confessional in my student room. And their issues were normally, often they were about each other, two of them were best friends with each other, and they were wildly different from each other. So they would be complaining about each other, asking why did she do that, why did she do that, you know, total mysteries to each other.

Sometimes it was about their boyfriends at the time. And I had one housemate and it just became a little bit of a theme with her, where she was fixated on this idea that he didn't get her. His boyfriend consistently didn't get her. And she's like, I just, I need to be with somebody who gets me.

And she needed to break up with him because he didn't get her and she needed to be with somebody who got her. And that kind of, she was so, it was so important to her that idea. It really made me think about her. It certainly made me think about it now.

But specifically because she turned to me and she said, but Jody, you get me. I don't think she was asking me to date her. But what was actually intriguing about her saying, you get me, is I just looked at her at that moment. I didn't say this.

But I was thinking, oh, I so totally don't get you. Like, I absolutely are you. I'm thrilled that you're here. I love listening to what you have to tell me.

But I absolutely do not get me. Get you. You to me are nothing less than a wild madcap unsolvable mystery, utterly ungetable. Like, I just, I don't get you.

No, I don't get anybody that I certainly didn't get her. And yet, something about sitting there with me and the friendship that we had and our relationship, something about that, even though I was it being myself, I didn't get her. She thought that I got her. Anyway, I spent a lot of time thinking about this.

And so this takes us back to question number one. Is there anybody in your life who truly gets you? And so I'm curious to know whether you have a list of people in your head or if you've got like one person in your mind. Maybe the question doesn't make, maybe it's an important question to you, which is absolutely fine.

If it is an important question to you, then the answer I'm going to give you're probably not going to like, which is, I don't think we ever really get each other. Like, I don't think any person ever quote unquote gets anyone else. And here's what I mean by this. I'm not sure if this is going to be in fact, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be reassuring.

But to get someone means to understand them, that's the best way I can understand that. And so you say, somebody tells a joke. You talk about whether somebody got the joke. And when we say that somebody got a joke, it means you don't have to explain all the assumptions that are inherent in the meaning of the joke.

They automatically just get it. They have access to all of the assumptions that make the joke meaningful. And so in linguistics, those assumptions are called implicatures. And it's great.

It's a great feeling when you get a joke and the person you're talking to sees you get the joke. And that means that you're just, you're in so invisibly, unspeakingly accessing the same set of assumptions. And it feels really good. And here's the thing, jokes are simple.

And people are vast and complex, and you are not a joke. So nobody can get you. You don't have a singular meaning. There is no one set of assumptions that people can have access to that will make them understand you.

You are utterly ungetable. You are a wild, madcap mystery. Now, that doesn't stop the longing. Okay, so, and I think this is what was coming through in my housemates moments of sitting in that little confessional stairway.

There's this longing to be seen, to be understood, to feel held, to feel like you're on the same wavelength as someone, to feel like you're resonating. Or that really beautiful sense of freedom that you have when you don't have to explain yourself. Like you're having an emotion and maybe you're with someone who just understands. Like on a real heart level, that emotion, they don't expect you to explain yourself.

And in that moment, maybe it feels like you are understood. But I think that actual idea that there is one person who will always quote unquote get you, I don't think we get that. Okay, so, I would definitely call it a longing, and I think that longing is real. It's something I have certainly felt.

I particularly feel it. I feel it most poignantly when I feel like I'm not being gotten. If you like, when I'm not being understood, when I feel completely isolated from whoever I'm talking to. And it's a very, it's a hard feeling.

It's a very lonely feeling. And it's like you just long for that person who knows you. And there have been, sometimes I feel it like for a moment. And sometimes in my past I felt it for like months at a time.

And it's really, really hard. So, I'm interested. I'm not, but I'm interested in it because I felt that longing to be understood. But I've also, I've also interested in it because I think that longing speaks about a particular type of intimacy.

And I've often said that my work is about the intimacy embedded in the structure of language. And so I'm curious to know the role that language plays in that longing to be understood. And so we could explore that a little bit today. Okay, so here's where we are.

I've told you I believe it's impossible for people to experience the type of intimacy that comes with getting somebody else. I've told you that I believe the longing for someone else to get you is never going to be fulfilled. So it's looking pretty grim. So let's just skip on over to the next question, which is what's your favorite fairy tale?

Okay, so this is question number two. What's your favorite fairy tale? Okay, so think it through. And honestly, it's, it could be absolutely anything.

And I have absolutely no problem at all if your favorite fairy tale is not some sort of literary thing. It could just be you really liked a particular Disney movie. I have no judgment here. Maybe you're not that into fairy tales in which case you can skip this question.

But once you've got your favorite fairy tale in your head, I would ask you, are any of these words that I'm about to say? Are any of them key themes in your fairy tale? So how about longing? Is longing a key theme in whatever fairy tale you're talking about?

Or whatever one is your favorite? And what about loneliness? And what about abandonment? Okay, so, you know, maybe your favorite fairy tale has a child who's beloved parent dies and is left to be looked after by evil people, like evil stepmothers or evil step sisters or something like that.

Or a child has to ransom herself to a beastly being to save a loved one's life. So that's the sort of beauty and the beast thing, right? Or something like canceling Gretel where the children who are left to fend for themselves in some barren and hostile wilderness. Or you have a hero or a heroine who's faced with impossible tasks and doomed to face death when they fail.

So this is having to separate grains of wheat from some other impossibly small seed or having to spin straw into gold or these types of things. So in every single one of those cases, and there's a hundred million others of them, there's this sense of isolation, separation, separation, and all of that. And so, there's a lot of people who are not going to be in the cellar or they're not going to be in the cellar or they're not going to make you facie-wurst, fears, etc. So this business about the fairy tales constantly focusing on that theme of abandonment, separation, isolation, not being gotten, if you like.

I think these are narratives that last that get repeated over and over again, they get told to each other, they get written up as different stories, different versions exist, films are made of them, etc. I think they're addressing, I think the reason they keep being told and retold is that they're addressing some of the deepest aspects of the human condition. And one of the deepest aspects, in my opinion, of the human condition is loneliness, separation, isolation, potentially abandonment. And, this is a real pick-me-up, isn't it?

And I believe that at the very heart of this sense of loneliness, isolation, separation is language. Right? This very thing that we think that we use to connect with each other, I think it separates us from each other. And the way I can explain this, or the way I will explain it today, is in relation to my favorite fairy tale.

So I wonder if my favorite fairy tale is the same one as yours. So my favorite fairy tale is Rook Punzel. I haven't actually seen the Disney version of Rook Punzel, so I think that's called Tangled, so I'd be curious to know whether that's worth seeing. I don't want it to ruin my favorite fairy tale, but tell me whether I should see it.

Okay, so anyway, I've just, I love this story since I was a little kid. Not totally sure why. I mean, it could have been because I had long hair, but then lots of little girls had long hair. I don't know.

But now when I look back on it, one of the things that strikes me about that particular tale is there isn't really an actual evil video. Like, there's a witch, but she doesn't, she's not evil. She genuinely is in love with like, she really does love and careful Rapunzel. So you start off with a mom to be in her husband, and the mother is like longing for these salad leaves that are called ramping in her.

I also know there's Rapunzel that are in the garden of the witch who lives next door, and her husband loves her so much that he's prepared to steal the leaves, and then the witch next door, the sorceress, you know, she effectively says, yeah, you can have as many as you want, you've got to give me the child that's born. The witch wants somebody to take care of and to love, and she says, look, the child will be well taken care of, and to be fair to the sorceress, you know, she dies. The only thing that she does that's a little bit questionable is she sticks her up in that tower and doesn't let her see anybody else and doesn't put any doors in the tower and forces her to throw her hair down when she wants to come up. So I mean, whatever, that would be a little bit codependent, but it's not like evil, evil, evil, and in a locker, you know, all kinds of mean things.

So it's just a bunch of people actually longing for something, loving each other and longing for something. So you've got a mother who longs for these particular salad leaves. You've got a sorcerer for someone who longs for someone to share her life with. You've got Rapunzel, who when she meets the king's son, she's got this longing for him because it's like, oh, you're new.

This is interesting. So she longs for the prince, and the prince longs for Rapunzel because he's like, wow, you know, what she did up in that tower? That's intriguing. Great hair.

So we've got that theme again in this particular fairy tale. We've got longing and loneliness. Rapunzel's up in a tower separated from the rest of the world. So there's her loneliness.

She doesn't really notice it actually until somebody other than the sorceress comes up and she's like, oh, gah, looks like I've done a load up here all this time. But in any case, this longing loneliness I still believe is a key element of the human condition, and I still believe that what causes it is language. Okay, so in order to understand this, or in order to illustrate this, I've rewritten this story in a story called longing. So if you want to read it to you in a second, if you want to find it yourself, it's on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com as are all of my usually flash fiction pieces, linguistics inspired fiction.

Okay, so this story is very short. It's called longing. Your mother was the earth herself. She loved you fiercely, but was required to release you to the sorceress language, who once fulfilled the void of her longing.

Language built you a tower, and pressed patterned strands through your smooth scalp into the hollow spaces of your mind. When these would hold no more, unspoken sentences sprouted like early eager grasses, then like singing reeds, and eventually like willow-wans weeping at unimaginable lengths. Rapunzel, Rapunzel cried the sorceress. She'd named you after your mother's ancient longing.

Throw down your hair. You obeyed. In your loneliness, a ladder appeared. At its base stood the wandering other, gazing upward, ever hopeful.

Okay, so a quick side about the Rapunzel story. I said before Rapunzel as long been my favorite story. Also, the word Rapunzel also became a little bit of an inside joke, a little key word in my family, to signal that I was talking too much, because I think it was once when I was at my Aunt Nancy's house, and I decided she needed to hear the story of Rapunzel, because she wouldn't have heard it before. And I decided that there were lots of details that needed to be included in that story.

And I think Aunt Nancy maybe felt that I was a little bit too expansive with the storytelling, and she thinks that I included a few too many descriptive details. And so then, any time it sounded like I was going to use too many words, she would just simply utter the word, oh god Rapunzel, and then I would be single to say that she was talking too much. And that was supposed to be my cue to shut up. I'm not sure it ever really worked.

But what can I say? Clearly I was a child or a family where I was. People didn't get me. So I was a little nervous about doing a podcast about the Rapunzel story, like that sort of triggering moment where people are telling me to shut up.

But this is a beautiful thing. Now I record podcasts, and I just talk for lots and lots of minutes, and with no one to interrupt me and tell me that I'm talking too long. And if you think I'm talking too much, you can just turn me off. Is it a beautiful thing?

And no one needs to be the wiser? So anyway, the other little bit of irony here is that my own retelling of Rapunzel, because I'm a grammar for Dreamers blogs, I sometimes do retail, fairy tale. So I retold the Rupple Stilts Cantail ones and the Hanseling Gretel tail ones, and various other types of stories. And I still think Rapunzel is just over 100 words.

I think it's my shortest story on that entire blog. So clearly I got the hint, at least on one level I got the hint. But let's move away from that aside. And let's talk about my interpretation of the Rapunzel tail.

I've made the main character, the Rapunzel character. I had her mother be the Earth, and the mother relinquishes her child Rapunzel, who in the story is the second person who is you. You have been released, relinquished, abandoned to a sorceress called language. So I've personified language, and I've turned language into a being who has taken you away from your mother, and your mother is the Earth.

So without worrying too much about exactly precisely what that means, just let that settle in for a minute. We're imagining a world in which your mother is the Earth, and you have been given up. You have been given up for adoption to this other caretaker known as language. So language, this personified version of language does two things.

The first thing she does is she builds you a tower. So the way I'm going to understand this is that language separates you from the Earth. So the tower separates you from the Earth, so it makes you feel like you're higher than the Earth, so it makes you feel like you're in this raised position in relation to the Earth. It allows you to still see the Earth, but not be on it, not be on the ground.

You're up higher than the Earth, you're separate from the Earth. You can't really access the Earth. My question for you is, is that your experience of humanity versus the natural world? And it is mine, not just my own personal experience, but in everything that I read and everything I see.

I believe that we treat ourselves as human beings as if we are separate from the Earth. And I believe that our experience is that we're separate from the Earth, that we're not part of it. And I think often we describe ourselves as if we are above the Earth and the things of the Earth. Like we are higher than those, that we are the apex of evolution perhaps, that we're smarter than the dumb beasts and that type of thing.

Okay, so that's the first thing language does, is she builds you a tower. And then the next thing she does, we've got this idea that she presses pattern strands through your smooth scalp into the hollow spaces of your mind. Okay, so she's putting language into your brain. And so she's like she's pressing them down.

And then it sprouts out the language sort of forms of its own, you've got almost like the seeds of language pressed into the hollows of your mind. And then it grows at its own accord and it presses out of your brain through your scalp and it turns into something that looks like hair. So I'm treating the hair in the Rapunzel story, which comes out of your brain. It doesn't, hair doesn't come out of your brain because of your scalp.

It comes out of your head in the way that language, human language, the language centers are in the brain. But they don't stay in the brain, they come out, not through our mouth and through our fingers. Okay, so, but then when she does this, she's got the language, she's molded the language into your head and she allows it to grow. And when the language grows, it forms a ladder.

So I'll just read that part to you. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Cry the Sorcerer's, she named you after your mother's ancient longing, throw down your hair. You abade in your loneliness a ladder appeared at its base, stood the wandering other, gazing upward ever hopeful. So language separates you from the earth.

She puts language into your mind and then that language then becomes your reconnection to the earth. It becomes the ladder that allows you to reconnect to the earth. Now, here's the thing, the ladder is connected to your scalp, so you can't climb down your own ladder. This is the problem with Rapunzel.

This is why it was such a great ladder for the sorceress. It's a ladder that another can climb, but Rapunzel herself cannot use. So what then becomes your connection to the earth? And it's if there is someone else around, if there's someone else outside of your tower, then language becomes the way that you can discover them and discover the rest of the world.

And here's the other interesting thing. Because you're separated, because you're in a tower, because you're separated from the earth and all others, the language thing, the thing that reconnects you, that separation and that reconnection, the people on the outside who climb up the ladder, they are seen as utterly mysterious, as total mysteries, as utterly ungetable. They are, for lack of a better word, interesting. You don't know who they are.

And this is another moment, okay? So, yes, we can have that moment of longing, where it's like, oh, you get me, we understand each other, we complete each other's sentences. But there's also that moment where imagine you're like completely in love with a person sitting across from you, and you think, oh, and it's the very, very beginning. And you think, there's so much about you, I don't know.

And that is a real beautiful feeling. That the other person is a mystery. And the reason they're a mystery is because they are distinct from you, they're separate from you, and it's an exciting mystery. They're actually ungetable, like they will remain mysterious.

Okay. So, now we've got this idea of what it's like to, how separation can create a sense of mystery about the other, and that that can be wonderful. So, hopefully, we're on a little bit of an upswing. So, let's now read to question three of the podcast, which is, have you ever received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of yourself?

My hesitated put that question in, because even asking a question, you must know that for me the answer is yes. And when you listen to that, you might completely resonate with that and thank you, I have actually had that experience. But you also, some of you listening might think, no, that's weird, J.D. or even crazier than I thought.

Okay, so I have received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of myself, or guidance that seems like it came from outside of me, even though there was no one else in the room. I have researched this. It turns out I'm not crazy. It turns out this is actually a pretty common experience.

I certainly researched it a lot when it first started happening, and it turns out I might not be crazy. But in any case, let me describe the experience, and hopefully it won't sound seem quite as unusual as it might sound. So, there, and again, this is, people have different levels of experience of this, but there's been lots of times in my life where I just have been in a state of what feels like unfathomable loneliness. Like sometimes it's just like you're at least on a Friday night, and then sometimes there's like this existential loneliness.

And not at an intellectual level, like at a real feeling level, like you are untethered, like there's nothing to root you in the world. And it's very scary. And sometimes it feels like you're falling, but that you're not going to hit ground, and you don't know how to stop yourself, and there's nothing to actually hold on to. This is sometimes called, maybe not this exact experience, like I say, we are all entirely unique, we're all entirely ungetable.

But the term the dark knight of the soul has been used often to describe these types of experience. Anyway, that's often what I used to call them. The only problem with the dark knight of the soul is that it's often spoken about in the singular, which makes it seem like, oh, once I have that, then I'm done. And unfortunately for me, there were periods where it's like, oh look, another one, here comes another dark knight of the soul.

And there was, sometimes it was like every time a sunset, I would feel like this type of thing. And there were particular times, when I was living in France, I lived in Paris and in Strasbourg, and a lot of that was just so lovely. But a lot of that was me in the midst of huge transitions, and transition periods, you're leaving behind a lot of the structures of your earlier life. And you just don't know what's coming next.

And in my experience, it was very scary. And so I would just have these, I didn't have anything to distract myself from them either. Like I didn't actually have a television in my flats in Paris. And when I had friends around, I can promise you that there was a lot of destruction going on when there were friends around because they would be drinking and partying and all that kind of thing.

But when the friends were busy and I was alone in my flat, it was like, oh God, how do I face this? So the way I did face it was to write in my journal. And journaling is something that I've done very consistently ever since probably I moved to France. And so it was something that I did when I was feeling bad, but also when I was feeling good, it just kind of kept me on track to see the words on the page.

And so in these moments, I would describe whatever, I would let myself be as moddling as I wanted to be, because I needed to see what was going on in my head so I could really genuinely evaluate it, I guess. It wasn't even really that intellectual. It was actually very feeling oriented. But I would let myself be as moddling as I wanted to be.

Every melancholic, depressive, miserable, oppressive thought and feeling. If it felt like it was in me and it needed to be recorded, I would put it on the page. And then at the end of that, I would usually say, I just don't know what to do or some version of that. And that would be absolutely true.

Like, I would not know what to do. And at some point, I remember a response sort of showed up in response to that written thing. And the response was, the morning is wiser than the evening. So the question I asked was, have you ever received guidance from a wiser, more loving version of yourself?

Now, the morning is wiser than the evening does not originally come from a loving, more wiser version of myself. It comes from a fairy tale. You might be familiar with a fairy tale. And it might come from more than one fairy tale, but the fairy tale that I associate it with is the Russian folktale called Vassalisa the Beautiful.

And this is, that's a list of beautiful. It's another great fairy tale. I think now I even like it more than the pencil. But the morning is wiser than the evening is something that was said to Vassalisa.

So Vassalisa, again, another abandoned tale, another loneliness and longing tale. Her mother dies, but before her mother dies, she gives her a doll. And the doll serves as a magical helper or protector. And Vassalisa is thrust into the arms of wicked stepmothers and step sisters.

And they're horrible to her, but then it gets even worse because they force her to go into the hut of a horrible terrifying witch named Baba Yaga. And Baba Yaga requires Vassalisa to do impossible tasks, like go into a warehouse full of poppy seeds and separate the dust from each individual poppy seed. So Vassalisa takes care of the doll, has been taken care of the doll ever since her mother died. Inviting her, she saves food for it, she keeps it warm, she dresses the doll in lovely clothes, etc.

And when she's absolutely at the end of her tethers, so when she's having to do these ridiculous tasks and if she doesn't do the tasks, cleaning every single individual poppy seed in a warehouse, then Baba Yaga's going to eat her, she says, this is beyond me. What I'm being asked to do is beyond my capability. So she's recognizing where her limits are. I genuinely can't do that.

And then she does what anybody does, which is to panic, which is to panic and melts down and weeps. And she speaks to the doll and she says, you're going to have to go to my aid. I've got nothing I do not know what to do. I'm falling here.

I'm about to get eaten up. And the doll would consistently say to Vassalisa, the morning is wiser than the evening. You know, go to sleep. Go to sleep.

The morning is wiser than the evening. Things will be different in the morning. And I just find that sentence so reassuring. The morning is wiser than the evening.

I also find it genuinely true. Like, just if you can, go to sleep. Now, that's not easy to go to sleep. But when you have a call being magical helper telling you that, it is actually a lot easier to go to sleep.

So Vassalisa would be comforted to go to sleep and she would wake up and then the doll would have achieved whatever it was that Baba Yaga had asked her to do in a live safe her life. So, you know, Vassalisa on one side of the warehouse and the poppy seeds are all piled up neatly on the other side. The doll was able to do Vassalisa good not. How does this link to language?

Okay. I've said this a million times, I've been saying a million more times, is that the function of language from my perspective is that it creates selves. So for you personally, what language does for you is it gives you a self. Now, what the self does with the self comes loneliness, isolation, separateness, because you're alone.

Like, your self is just you. It's only you in there, right? That tower that language built for you. It's just you in there.

You're separate from the earth itself. You're up high above it. You can't get there. And the other thing the self does is it makes you aware of your own limitations.

Like, you can't climb down your own self to reconnect, right? You can't climb out of your tower. You can't get out. You can't clean up every single poppy seed.

So that's the bad news. The good news is language gives you a different thing too. It also gives you the other, right? With a self comes another.

So if the self is limited, if the self is bounded, if the self just has itself, it can look outside of itself and look outside of its tower and see, oh, there's another self. There's somebody other than me. And maybe it's a witch. Maybe it's a prince.

But I'm limited in the other. Is there too? I can see beyond my limitations to see there's another person. And in fairy tales, the other, you always have the self in a fairy tale.

There's the heroine and then you have various others. It could be evil villains. It could be kind parents. It could be romantic love interests.

But also the other is sometimes a magical helper. So it could be a friend, godmother. It could be a magical doll. It could be an object like a handkerchief that your dying mother cried on or something like that.

But when the other is a magical helper, when I read fairy tales in which the other is a magical helper, I always interpret that magical helper as an other version of the same self. So this isn't intriguing, isn't it? If you have a self, that self itself can create an other. Language creates the self and the other.

And what Vasilisa does with the doll, when she recognizes the limits of her conception of the self, it's at that precise moment that she has access to this greater sense of self. In other words, she has access to this other. Now it's a damn doll, right? She must have always had access to it.

Whatever it is that made it possible for her to fulfill those impossible tasks must have always been with her. But it's not until she can see that aspect of herself as another that it can kind of go to work for her. And the other bonus of that is that when she sees this greater sense, this wiser version of herself, this more capable version of herself, when she sees that as an other, it's imbued with mystery. Like a sacredness, like a curiosity.

It's like it's suddenly something that you can love. It's separate from you. And so you can send your love to it. It's like a blessing, right?

So the bonus of having a self is you also get to have another. So the, when I, in all this journal writing that I've done, the other does keep coming up and it's kind of stopped plagiarizing fairytales and it's come up with its own things. And so it's, it's this other, like when I say, ah, wait, I've actually reached the limits of myself. I'm going to invoke this other and then inevitably better wisdom emerges.

So just as an example, I mean, one night, I'd had like a big blowout with my then boyfriend and I just was completely undone by it, just utterly undone by it because I had not, I'd never been treated that way before. And it was just like a astonishment and a grief and like a kind of innocence to have been treated this way. And so I'm sitting on the floor like you always are, right? Dark nights of souls always require you to be on the floor, I guess.

And I was actually hyperventilating. Like I was so stressed out by this I couldn't breathe. And I'm writing in my journal and I was writing all of the things I love myself to write, all of the depressed thoughts and all of the fear and the anxiety, etc. And I actually wrote, I can't breathe.

You know, I'm going to, what can I do? I can't breathe. I can't breathe. And then the next words that appeared were close your eyes and think about the tip of your nose.

Okay. Now that might not sound like an overwhelmingly wise thing to say, but it's all about the moment. And in that moment, to have someone that I was perceiving as other say, give me the most easily achievable task, close your eyes, I can do that. Think about the tip of your nose.

I can do that too. You know how it's like, didn't say take a deep breath. You can't tell somebody who's hyperventilating to take a deep breath because I'll just keep hyperventilating. But this wiser version of myself, just think about the tip of your nose.

And when I stopped thinking about my breathing and instead kind of like focused my closed eyes on the tip of my nose, the breathing regulated. And it was just so beautifully practical and simple. It worked. It was like, I felt utterly held in that moment.

And it feels like it was because it was an other, right? And it wasn't an other. It was clearly me. It was my hand who wrote it on the page.

But by perceiving of it, by linguistically creating the other, that then allowed me to see that guidance as imbued with mystery and blessing and love and compassion. In a way that I wouldn't have seen it if I just thought it was just me alone in there. So these days I invoke that kind of guidance all the time. I don't wait until dark nights this old because thankfully I don't have as many as I used to.

Many, many, many, many fewer than I used to, which is wonderful. But it's just like, well, okay, that's great. I don't want to lose all the guidance. So I just ask for it.

These days I don't wait until one of the absolute end of my tether. Recently I got some really good stuff, which was, and here I was just saying, oh, I'm really actually struggling to rest. How do I get myself to rest? I can't even let I sit still.

My mind just goes like, I can't actually struggling to actually stop. And so that was all in my journal. And the response that came was, oh, I love this so much. The response that came was, create nothing.

And I was like, oh, okay. And again, I think these little bits of wisdom that come again, I think they're entirely contextual. I think you have to be in a precise moment and have this other say this thing that lands, right? And at that moment, that just landed.

It's kind of hard to explain why. The next thing I went to the journal before today's podcast recording, and the next thing I wrote was, holy shit. That's exactly the right wisdom. And secondly, I didn't have an impact on me.

And it just became crystal clear to me at that point that create nothing has a couple of different levels of meaning. So one thing is, okay, look, you've been creating all these things. You've been writing all these stories. There's other creative projects I'm working on that aren't seeing a light of day yet.

You're creating podcasts. You're creating lots of things. Stop that. You're a permission to stop creating things.

And if you're a creative person, you know that sometimes that would be a really nice thing to hear. You actually have permission to study. You love making things, but you also have permission to stop. So in fact, you're being told to create nothing.

But there's also another element which was, I think this is very freeing. Actually, this recognized how much of the drama in your current life is your own creation. And it's not as much drama as it used to be when I was in my 20s, but it's still drama. Even if it's inside my head and I'm not sharing it and I'm not weeping and wailing and gnashing, it's still drama.

And it was really nice to be like, don't create that. Don't create stories that are going to go on your blog right now. And also don't create drama. Just create nothing.

Create nothing. And that was great. You don't need to create a story about how you can't rest. Just don't create that.

Create nothing. I was like, okay, I can do that. I love that. But the thing that really resonated with me, with create nothing, has to do with the first part of my version of the Rapunzel story.

So let me take you back to the first part of my version of Rapunzel. So I'll read it again. Your mother was the Earth herself. She loved you fiercely, but was required to release you to the sorceress language, who once had filled the void of her longing.

Okay, so I just read that and comment on that first little paragraph before. And that to me is the most interesting paragraph to talk about. I'm going to work as if it's interesting, but why the hell not? So in my version of the story, the Earth once had a longing that only language could fulfill.

Okay, so we're not talking about, you know, our classic mythical story of human beings, you know, evolve. And then they got these fantastic, amazing, huge cerebral cortexes that make language allow them to be really smart. Instead, we've got this other story where we've got the Earth and the Earth has a longing. Okay, so what could the Earth possibly long for?

Okay, because we've talked about how longing comes out of separation and isolation. And the Earth, and by the Earth, I mean like everything on the Earth, everything in the Earth, the natural world. The natural world itself is like nothing but symbiosis and interconnectedness. You know, it's all this sort of, you know, I was going to say harmonious balance, and I realized that harmony is sometimes interspersed with rocky and tumultuous modulations in between movements.

But ultimately the Earth is balanced and connected and symbiotic, right? The Earth doesn't see its different parts as separate, right? It's probably not, you know, to personify the Earth. The Earth's elements are not separate from each other.

They're all connected to each other. So what could the Earth itself long for? And see, this is the thing that I just love to play with. This is my favorite fairy tale, I guess, is the one that I've invented, which is that the one thing that the Earth or the natural world doesn't get to experience is separateness.

The Earth, with all its symbiosis and all its interconnectedness, does not have the experience of isolation or loneliness or separation. And so if we see it that way, what the Earth might be longing for is longing itself. The Earth wants to know what it feels like not to have everything, right? Not to be connected to everything.

What does it feel like to be separate? And if you want to know what it feels like to be separate, have a self, invent the self. And so in my version of the Rapunzel story, I have the Earth abandon one of its beloved creatures, right? So the Earth is the mother, the Earth loves everything.

It creates among many things, it creates this sort of interesting sort of squirming thing called a human being. And it says, do you know what? Okay, I'm giving this child up, and I'm going to give it up to language. Language says it'll take care of it, let's see how it does.

It gives it up to language. And language creates for the human being the tower that is the self, the source of the separateness. Why would the Earth want that? Why would the Earth want that?

Like, other than like, mere curiosity, other than like, I want to live like common people. Do you know what I mean? It's like, why would the Earth actually want that? Does this fairy tale hold together?

Now here's the answer. I think that it's possible for the Earth to long for separateness, and I think there's a two word reason for why the Earth would long for that. And that two word reason is create nothing. What you have with a self, what a self creates is precisely nothing.

If you see the self as a membrane, and that's another one of my favorite images, when you, the self is the membrane that separates, the self is the separation, right? So the self is the sort of membrane. And you look, if you were to look inside that membrane, if you were courageous enough to look past the self and into the membrane, looking at the inside, into the space inside the membrane, you would see nothing. You would see this, the self is what we have access to.

The self is what separates us. If you look inside it, you'd see nothing. Nothing we can grasp, nothing we can get, nothing fathomable. Just miraculously fertile void from which new ideas can emerge.

So the self allows the Earth to experience ideas that weren't already there. And when they come out, when they actually see the light of day, when they themselves are surrounded by their little self membrane, we see them as other. And so having a self allows you to experience a new idea, something that feels like it's outside of you, and even if it came from inside you. So the self allows you to see new ideas as distinct from you.

And it feels magical, mysterious, sacred. And so by creating, by giving human beings over to language, the Earth then can have the experience of mystery as well. I would love to know what you think about all of that. So please feel free to get in touch with me.

I'd love to hear your ideas. In the show notes, you'll have all the ways that you can connect with me on Instagram, a grammar for dreamers, on Facebook, a grammar for dreamers, on Twitter, at Jodie Clarkling. You can take my writing through the lens of language course. There's that.

That's on my grammar for dreamers blog. There's a link to that there. And that'll be a link in the show notes as well. And then you'll have access to my monthly newsletter, which I love to write.

I also have a Patreon community, which I love to make things for, except for when I'm creating nothing. But I always pause from creating nothing to create something for Patreon. So I do mini courses. This month I did one on pronouns in personhood, and that was great.

So, or at least I enjoyed it. I don't know if you enjoyed it. And then on my grammar for dreamers blog, grammarfordreamers.com, you can find the story about the puzzle version called Logging and all the other linguistics inspired. Thank you so much for making it to the end.

And I can't wait to talk to you again. Bye-bye.