Episode 85 How spooky is language?

And welcome to episode 85 of Structure of Visions. Structure of Visions is a space for exploring new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Judy Clark, and I'm very grateful that you're listening today. You are very welcome here.

And by way of introduction, if you're new to the podcast, a little bit about me, I'm a linguist who's based in Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. I am absolutely fascinated about everything related to the study of language. I'm fascinated by the idea that you even get to study language and all of its intricacies and all of what I believe are its mysteries. And I've become so fascinated with what I call the mysteries of language that I've started exploring them outside of the kind of classical way that you would normally write academic work on linguistics.

And I've started exploring it through fiction writing. So I use my academic writing and my fiction to explore the ways that intimacy is bad in the structure of language. That's the sort of theme throughout all of it. And I won't say much more about me now, but if you'd like to know more, if you're curious, you can find out more on if you go to grammarfordreamers.com and click on About Me.

And if you click on Connect as well, you can connect to the news and the monthly newsletter and find out a few more things. So thank you so much for being here. I'm thrilled you're here. I just want to give a little bit of content advisory today.

We're going to be talking about dead loved ones today. And we're going to talk about receiving messages from dead people. And we're going to be talking about this in a pretty light-hearted way. And that might not feel that great if you've recently suffered a bereavement.

So if you have, and if that feels a bit raw, the notion of talking to the dead, you might want to skip this episode. And we'll catch you in the next month. So we're going to start off today. We tend to start the episodes off with a question.

And the questions this month are yes, no questions, which is not ideal. But I would really love to know the answer. So if you want to respond to this on any of my social media channels or on my email, that would be great. Again, you can find ways to connect with me on grammarfordreamers.com.

And the question is, have you ever used a Ouija board? And if you haven't, would you? So there you are. You're at the party.

You've had a couple of drinks. And somebody's like, you know, I've got this Ouija board. Should we give it a try? Would you try it?

Or is it the type of thing that you would like, oh, I hope somebody does that one day? Or maybe use them all the time. I don't know. If you're not familiar with Ouija boards, and just in the spirit of full disclosure, I've never used one.

And I would actually feel quite nervous about using one, which we'll talk about in a second. So I probably, I might, I'd probably maybe not. But in any case, what they are, and I don't think I've ever actually seen a real one. So I'm talking from a position of inexperience here.

So this is again a good reason to get in touch on the Ouija boards if you use them. So from photos of them, I know that it's a board. It's got pictures of the Latin alphabet, you know the alphabet that we use. All in capital letters missed at the time.

And then it's got the numbers, 1-2-3-4-5-6-8-9-0. And then it has the words yes and no and goodbye on them. Those are the pictures I've seen have had those on them. I suspect that there's others that have maybe other symbology on them as well.

And they come with something that I've learned is called a plalchette, which is like a little heart-shaped pointer. And it could be made out of water plastic. And I think it's supposed to be quite light. And what happens is you ask a question.

I guess you must have to get into some kind of like zone where you're kind of speaking to the beyond. And then you ask a question, and then two people put one person, you've got two people, and each person has their hand on the plalchette. And you're not supposed to push. You're supposed to allow your hands to be moved.

And ideally what will happen is you'll get a response. And the plalchette will sort of move and to each of the letters in order to spell out a response. So as far as I understand that, it's how you're supposed to use a Ouija board. And the question is, have you done it?

Would you do it? Are you nervous about it like I am? Or would you be nervous about it like I am? And there's a couple of different reasons for being nervous about it, or for not being nervous about it, I guess.

And one of them might be, if you're a party in Swoeple's on a Ouija board, you might just be like, oh god, I'm just not somebody who believes in this kind of stuff. I don't want to be associated with people who believe in this kind of stuff. It's a cult. It's weird.

It's superstition. It's anti-science. It's unrational or irrational, whatever the word is. It's not going to be a kind of distaste for that type of thing.

That's not the category I've fallen to. I've got lots of taste for things that might be considered sort of supernatural or paranormal or woo-woo, that type of thing. I love that kind of stuff. The Ouija board still makes me nervous.

For me, it's this idea of the leaving the kind of stuff, but it's like a Ouija board seems like a very simplified way of actually getting messages from beyond. And it seems to me that it would be, you're just kind of asking for a little bit of trouble. But another thing where you might not be there, another place you might be, you don't actually believe in that stuff, but you also don't want to know too much about it either. And so there might be an opening in your mind where it's like, I guess it's possible, but I'm not interested in exploring it.

And I don't want to have to go there. You see what I mean? So it might be like, not just that you don't want the extra information, but if you start playing around with that stuff, it might require you to open your mind to more things. And they might not be nice things.

So it's not like that you are necessarily entirely a naysayer. You might have some skepticism in you, but you might just think I just really don't want to actually go there. Another is, I've heard people say this, that they completely believe in mediumship and life after death and all that type of thing. But they're not happy about Ouija boards as a way of accessing that because it could bring in quote unquote dark energy, or there might be some sort of trickster energy associated with Ouija boards.

And there's another possibility, which is, who knows what you're going to open up. This is a little bit like me when people, when I was a unique, trying to get me to drop acid. And I'm just like, it could be great, but it could also be terrible. So let's just not go there.

So I'd be curious to know, would you try it? And if you wouldn't try it, why not? And if you would try it, what would be the thing that would be appealing about it? So if we can maybe, since I don't have you here, I don't have your answers, I'm just going to kind of make the assumption that there's something a little bit about Ouija boards that's either taboo or spooky or, I don't want to necessarily say scary because you might not be scared of it, but there's something that might put people, make people a little nervous or skeptical or, it's just not, you wouldn't do it like in a board meeting.

It wouldn't be an icebreaker exercise at your workplace at an away day, for instance. And so if we can say that Ouija boards have a kind of spookiness to them or culturally, we could say there's a little bit of a taboo around them. What if the, what, let's explore the possibility that it's not so much the idea that there might be beings out there who are trying to talk to us, or that there might be dead people out there who are trying to talk to us. What if that's not the spooky part?

Because I think that's where we would assume the spookiness comes from, which is this idea of where they're ghosts and they're trying to talk to us in this type of thing. What if it's actually the language part? That's the spooky part. OK, so this is what we're going to play with today.

What if it's the language that's associated with a Ouija board? That's the thing that makes it potentially spooky. So if you're picturing the board, if you're looking at a picture of one, the most of the board is taken up with those letters of the alphabet. And they're arranged in alphabetical order.

There's one letter for each letter of the alphabet. And they're arranged there. And when we see letter of the alphabet arranged in alphabetical order, I think the impression is that we're expecting that these letters could be rearranged in order to spell something. And so it would be different if the Ouija board actually did spell out a sentence.

Like if it said something like readings from the beyond. Well, then I don't think it would be quite so spooky because you couldn't then use it. There's only so many letters in the expression greetings from the beyond. You couldn't really use it to spell out a new message.

But if you've got every single letter of the alphabet in your language available to you in a particular known order, then you could use those letters to spell something. OK, now spelling isn't spooky. Spelling is something that we do as soon as we're kind of old enough to learn the letters and the fact that letters get formed into words in written language. So spelling in of itself isn't spooky.

But the word spell kind of is. Like if you think about the origins of the word spell or you think about the kind of multiple meanings of the word spell, so it could mean, and actually I'll just read you the OED definition. It could mean to name or set down in order the letters of a word or syllable to enunciate or write letter by letter or to denote by certain letters in a particular order. See, A T spells cat.

So that is the word spell. But you probably already thought, yeah, there's actually other meanings of the word spell. So if we turn it from a verb into a noun and you think A spell, then we could then think in terms of casting A spell. Right?

And so that's a little bit spooky. The idea that somebody gets a little bit of cult. That's very much a cult to the idea that somebody could cast a spell and bring love into their life or put a hex on some of the other type of thing. So the OED definition of the noun form of spell is a set of words, a formula or verse, supposed to possess cult or magical powers, a charm or incantation, a means of accomplishing enchantment or exorcism.

So one pretty benign sort of you learn this through primary school definition. And the other, if you were learning that in primary school, it'd probably be not a state school. It's probably like Harry Potter school or whatever, Hogwarts. We're in a different school if we're learning about how to do the second type of spelling.

But as you can imagine, they come from the same root. So they come from this Germanic word spell, which has to do with speaking. It has to do with discourse. It has to do with sometimes gossip, that type of thing.

So there is a kind of connection between those two words. And while we're at it, while we're talking about this connection between spell and spell, spelling out words and casting spells, I'm just going to throw something else into the mix, which some of you may have heard me talk about this before. And this is the etymology of a word that's associated with spelling, and that's grammar. I love to play with a word grammar.

My website's called grammar for dreamers. I love to think about grammar in ways that goes beyond thinking in terms of things like subject for a agreement and getting your grammar right. But in the comments in the right place, I like to think of it as a kind of window into a mysterious world. And I love to play with that.

And one of the things that makes me enjoy that the most is the etymology of the word grammar. So if you look again at the OED, you find that in the 15th century, grammar meant learning, study. It also meant grammar in the way we think of it now, but it also meant occult learning. And it was linked to the French word, a word that you might be familiar with, which is gimois, gremois.

That came from grammar or gremois. And that was a magician's manual for invoking demons, right? This is the type of thing that you wouldn't want to sort of have on your possession in the 15th and 16th centuries for fear of being burned at the stake. But those two words were linked to gremois and grammar.

And then in the 17th century, it came back into use in Scott's English. But the pronunciation shifted a little, and it went from grammar to glamour. And so to cast a glamour over someone meant to cast a spell on them. And so glamour now still keeps that, a little bit of that meaning of spellcasting because if someone is glamorous or someone has glamour, then we sort of think of them in terms of casting a spell on us like we're charmed by them.

There's another term from the occult. But grammar doesn't obviously doesn't have that meaning anymore. But I love to think about that notion of things like grammar and spelling, which are like, you know, every primary school curriculum and everybody has to sit down and learn these things and, you know, could also be casting spells and invoking the dark mysteries. So this is interesting to me.

So with that little connection in mind, take yourself back to the image of the Ouija board. And you're looking at the letters, and there they are arranged alphabetically, and there is nothing spooky about that. You know, there's nothing spooky about an alphabet. If there were something, anything spooky or occult or dark energy about an alphabet, then our kids would never learn to spell.

Literacy would become tricky, you know, because every primary classroom and probably every, like, educational gift your young child's ever received has an alphabet on it somewhere. And you think about those, like, magnetic fridge letters that you buy. When you have kids, I assume, I don't know, I don't have kids, but I think if I did have kids, I don't automatically buy those magnetic fridge letters, assuming that I'd be teaching my kids how to spell with those. And so if an alphabet were occult, you would not be able to buy those at, like, your local target, or, you know, your local Tesco, you'd have to get them from, like, an occult shop that sells sage smudges and crystals and pendulums and stuff like that.

That's where you would get your multicolored magnetic fridge letters. But here's a way of thinking about it. So we're going to think about the possibility that it's the language element of the Ouija board, the letters that creates the spookiness. So let's imagine the scenario and let's keep our magnetic fridge letters in mind here.

So you wake up and you open the fridge and you're pulling out the milk. And as you go to open the fridge, you notice the letters H-E-L-L-O, spelled out in those magnetic letters. And they weren't there before. They weren't there when you went to bed.

So what do you think? Well, you might think, oh, how sweet. Little Susie's really coming along with her spelling. Now, imagine a scenario in which there is no little Susie, maybe you live alone now, right?

And you come to the fridge and you see this and you know they weren't there before. And you see those letters H-E-L-O just showing up on your fridge. Well, then we potentially have the beginning of a horror movie. It's probably been done.

So don't necessarily take that idea. I'm sure that's been done before. But it's this idea that you don't know who spelled out that word. And it's the same with a Ouija board, right?

So like if you are doing the whole Ouija board thing and it spells out, you know, you ask a question and the first thing it spells out is H-E-L-O. You know, you're not thinking how sweet, you're thinking WTF, right? Like you might be like running for the door at that point. And so we've got two aspects of language.

One of them kind of freaks us out. It might be the stuff of a horror movie. The other one is perfectly fine. And I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, well, it's not that hard to discern what makes one spooky and the other one fine. And that is that it's an unknown disembodied consciousness that spelled out the letters in one case. And it's a known embodied person who spelled out the letters in the other case. And what is it really that?

Because if you say that little Susie, your daughter who's sleeping in her bed while you're looking at the fridge magnets, if you say that she's a kind of known embodied consciousness, she isn't really any of those things. Because when you're looking at the traces of what you assumed to be her message, those five letters on the fridge, she isn't there. You're not witnessing her body moving those letters on the fridge. So in that moment, you standing in front of the fridge, you seeing the traces of consciousness, it is a disembodied consciousness there.

Because the letters are in the fridge in the kitchen and your daughter is in her bedroom. So the letters might have been associated with the body at one point, but they're not in this moment, right? So it's a disembodied consciousness. And you say, okay, well, at least I know who she is.

And it's like, well, yeah, but do you know who Susie was when she spelled out those letters? Every aspect of Susie is not something that you know. And you can't claim to know the full extent of her consciousness when she was writing those letters on the fridge. So she's not really unknown in body consciousness.

And the same as the case with the Ouija, or if there's no little Susie, and does the letters sort of show up on your fridge, right? It's a disembodied consciousness where you don't know who it is that's spelled those things out. Now, what happens with the Susie story is you're actually assigning a kind of personhood to the message. And with a Ouija, either you are assigning a personhood to that and you think, oh, you know, that's gotta be Uncle Ralph, because he always spells hello with four O's or whatever.

So maybe if you assign a personhood when you're doing the Ouija, you might feel more settled. But if you aren't able to assign a personhood, I believe that's the thing that makes it spooky and a little scary. So I don't think it's so much about the fact that there might be these beings out there that we don't know about. I think it's more about what's acceptable and what's not acceptable in our culture in terms of what is allowed to be counted as a self.

Okay, let's just try another scenario for a second. So this is a slightly more disembodied scenario than Susie's leave her bed. So let's imagine your grandmother's just died and you've been tasked with going through her stuff and checking to see if there's anything you want or that type of thing, the kind of classic thing that folks have to do when a loved one dies. And maybe in her belongings, tucked away in a trunk somewhere, you find a stack of letters and they're addressed to you and they were never sent to you.

So there they are and you have just discovered them. And let's imagine that they're just absolutely affirming, like really loving, like the things she's noticed about you and her hopes for you and her dreams for you and how much she loves you and she just is writing all of this or she has written all of this and these are in these letters. And if it were me, this hasn't happened to me, but if it were me, things like the similar to it happen, but not the specific scenario. But if I read a stack of letters like that, I would not be able to stop the tears.

It would be such an emotional moment. It would not be a spooky moment for me. It would be a kind of loving, supportive, protective moment, right? It wouldn't be spooky.

Now, if I was doing like a Ouija thing and similar messages were spelled out using the sort of plalchett and I don't know, maybe we've got candles going in the room is dark or whatever, that would probably end, you know, and if the message spelled out, it's grandma, your lovely, whatever it is, whatever it is that the letters might spell out. That actually I have to admit would freak me out in a way that the receiving the actual messages, the letters on a piece of paper that were hidden in the trunk wouldn't freak me out. So I just want to check in and see if you and I are on the same page on this one, like maybe a Ouija message from grandma might be more spooky than a set of letters that she had written to me but never sent. So we're just going to assume that you agree with me that the Ouija thing is spookier than the onerthing the archived letters.

Now, what I just want to point out is that both our messages, so both of them are forms of language, and they are both addressed to me or to you or whoever they're addressed to, and both of them are from disembodied consciousnesses, right? So the actual letters in the trunk that I pulled out, that grandmother, her body no longer exists, right? It certainly doesn't have your life in it, right? So it's a dis- it's a consciousness, right?

So I can read that, I can read the message out, I can read the intentionality of it, it has all of the kind of energy of her loving kindness, but it does not come from someone who has a body, right? It's from a disembodied person, and it's the same with a Ouija board, right? You know, it's a message that's coming from a disembodied consciousness. So it's not the fact that it's a message from someone beyond the veil, right?

It's not that it's a message from a dead person that makes it spooky, because the letters come from a dead person, but that's not spooky. So what actually is the difference? And I can hear what you're going to say, which is that when Grandma wrote the letters, she was alive, right? And what I would say there is, yes, that's the assumption, but what is the living bit of Grandma when she was writing the letters?

That doesn't exist anymore, that's gone. But what I can do when I read the letters is I can imagine her writing them, okay? So I can imagine my grandmother, 20, 25 years ago, let's say, writing letters, and I can place that on a particular point in her timeline, and I can project a kind of self-hood onto that, and that secures me. So, and that's totally culturally acceptable, and I'm going to put it in terms of cultural acceptability.

It's completely and utterly culturally acceptable for me, and for most cultures. I can't think of any culture that, where this wouldn't be acceptable, but I don't know all cultures, but it's culturally acceptable for selves to exist in relation to other selves and in relation to their biographical timeline. So, ages after somebody has died, it's totally culturally acceptable to have an imagined self to project an image of the self of that dead person at a particular point on their biographical timeline. So, if Grandma lived from, I don't know, 1904 to 1984, then I'm allowed to imagine her culturally in 1967.

I can project a self onto her, I can picture that there's nothing culture doesn't call that to do, right? However, with a Ouija board, it may not in many cultures be acceptable for selves to exist outside of their biographical timeline, right? So, if Grandma lived from 1904 to 1984, and then in 2023, she is in real time giving me a message, I would argue that's actually in many, many cultures, and in most mainstream cultures, actually taboo. Like, we're not really, it's not really encouraged to think that a self can exist outside of their biographical timeline.

And so, in order to actually imagine that, we're actually going outside of the kind of norms of mainstream culture. And there's plenty of kind of cultures or particular schools of thought or sort of subcultures in which that's perfectly fine. It's not taboo within that sort of smaller version. So, if your part of the spiritualist community, for instance, is completely fine.

And in fact, welcomed to imagine a self or to, you know, project the notion of a self outside of someone's biographical timeline. But perhaps for sort of mainstream, like, let's say, European American culture, it might not be as okay. There might be an element of taboo about that. And so, I would suggest that it's that cultural expectation that makes something like a Ouija board spooky, not the notion of, you know, it being ghosts and disembodied beings and that type of thing and all the kind of like scary movie projections.

I think it's a cultural understanding of what selfhood is and where it's allowed to exist. And the idea is we assume that selfhood can only exist from the moment of birth to the moment of death. And we think of that space in terms of a linear movement through time. And selfhood can only exist at particular points on that timeline.

And outside of that, we can't even really think about it. Right? We can't, you know, except if you're moving into some of the subculture or a different domain, that in mainstream culture, to think about it is to go kind of beyond the pale. And if you like, and you're moving out of the kind of, out of the safety of the safety, the security that your sort of mainstream culture allows for.

So, maybe sit with that just for a moment. So it's not the fact that the spookiness is not the fact that it's a disembodied consciousness because we engage with disembodied consciousness all the time. But it's that selfhood isn't allowed to exist outside of a biographical timeline. Okay.

So, this notion of selfhood and whether or not it's allowed to exist, if you're sort of thinking, well, selfhood does only exist when somebody's alive. Like, there's, there's self is part of their body. It's like, when the body dies, that's it, they're gone. But what I'm actually going to propose, and you might have heard me say this a million times, is that selfhood is not a function of the body, if you like.

Instead, it's a function of language. I think language creates the self. I think that human language is endowed with this really unique and interesting quality, which is its capacity to form the self and the other. So the self and then another self and then a third self and then a fourth self.

And if you analyze any text, what you'll notice embedded in the grammar of that text or embedded in any language is a consistent pointing to selfhood. And so these are the linguistic terminology for this would be things like indexicals or grammatical person or shifters, that type of thing. But effectively, what you find is that language is replete with the capacity to shape the self. And with every expression, there's a possibility for a different shape of the self.

And this is what makes language so fascinating, is that it's constantly sort of shifting. And so I tend to think of language as a membrane that forms the self and that's constantly shifting around new ideas about the self. But the reason that we're not impressed by this all the time, the reason that we don't just kind of like stare and wonder with this all the time, is because we are working from the assumption that the self sort of pre-exists language and that languages are way of expressing the self. And I'm sort of suggesting the other way around.

Language creates the self. It doesn't come from the self. Language forms the self. And it isn't something that the self uses to express itself.

I've written a very short story called My Late Grandmother where I explore these ideas. I'm just going to read it to you real quick. If you'd like to follow along, you can find it on grammarfudreamers.com. It's just really short.

It's called My Late Grandmother. Our daughter found the Ouija board when we were clearing out My Late Grandmother's waterfront house. Rick gave me a meaningful look. You never told me your grandmother was into that sort of thing.

She wasn't. At least I didn't think she was. What's it for? Becca pressed.

Is it a game? It's a game for teaching children their letters, I lied. Becca discarded it disdainfully and Rick breathed a sigh of relief. Later we sat on Grand's dock to watch the sunset and share memories about her.

I told Becca and Rick that she taught me how to catch blue crabs by dangling chicken necks off this very pier. Gross, Becca said, but the memory soothed me. Restoring to me the grand I thought I knew who'd never dream of dabbling in the occult. But that night my own dreams were haunted by a fiendish alphabet that swam bewitchingly around the shadowy underworld of my unexplored ancestry.

The chickens were ritual sacrifices. The crabs charmed toward the spell they cast. The letters formed strings of words that tucked me to the surface. The point of a fish trap is the fish they spelled.

The point of the word is the idea. I too was netted and my grandmother was pulling me in. Once you've got the idea, you can forget the word, she said. I emerged from the depths to the light of day, gasping for air as the Ouija letters tumbled into disarray.

As a note, the quotes that grandmother gave there, the point of the fish trap is the fish, the point of the word is the idea. Once you've got the idea, you can forget the word. She has taken those from a Chinese philosopher called Zheng Ju. The translation comes from David Hinton's translation of the inner chapters.

There's a link to that on the grammar for dreamers page if you're interested in that. Let's have a little look at Grand Channelling Chuan Jiu and doing all that channelling through a dream. He's a multi-layered speaking of going on. So, Zheng Ju was a Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE.

His writings formed some of the foundational texts of Taoism. I've just started learning about his stuff and fascinated by it. There's not going to be any level of expertise or in-depth research when I talk about Zheng Ju this week, this month. But maybe in future podcast episodes, I'll explore it a little bit deeper.

I've been using Brooke as a porn translation of Zheng Ju the essential writings to explore those things. I used David Hinton's translation for the story because I liked the words that he used for the story better. I've been using Brooke as a porn translation just in my reading of Zheng Ju's stuff. I'll tell you a little bit about my reading of this philosophy in a moment.

Let's look at a story now. First of all, notice that the protagonist and the writer is lying to her child Becca about the purpose of the Ouija board. She says this again for teaching children their letters at which point it's successful lie. Becca is like, oh, it's that.

I'm not interested. They're reading a sign of release. We have this notion that it's taboo. She doesn't want to have to explore it with her daughter just now.

It's troubling. But it's also that moment of realizing, oh my God, Grandma had been into this stuff. She has that conversation with her partner. Here we've got a moment of understanding how intimacy might be embedded in the structure of language.

What happens is language gives us our capacity to imagine something that isn't here in our present, in our here and now. It gives us a way of structuring. What it does is it gives us a way of structuring ourselves in relation to some other, whether that other is another person or a scenario or whatever it is or story. Here she is imagining her grandmother and then something enters into the here and now Ouija board that says her grandmother might not have matched the version of her grandmother that her sort of mind just created through the medium of language.

So maybe the story is about her grandmother, maybe her experiences, maybe the way she thought about her grandmother. What happens next to the story is they sit on the grandmother's dock and they share memories. Later we sat on Grand Stock to watch the sunset share memories about her. And then she tells the story about doing this thing that we used to do when I was a kid called chicken necking, which I would never do now because I'm vegetarian and I wouldn't be using one animal to catch another animal.

But at the time it was really fun. You effectively take these chicken necks, I don't know where everybody got them from. I've seen them from the butcher or the grocery store or something and then you take some string and you knot the string around the chicken neck and then you just dangle it off the pier. You tie it to the piling.

And then when you can tell when it's a little bit like fishing, you can tell when there's a tug on it. And then you have to very gently pull up the string that has the crab eating away at the chicken neck and somebody else, or if you're very talented, you can do it yourself. But someone else takes a dip net and nets up the crab and sticks in a special basket. So anyway, that's the way.

One of the ways I used to spend my summers in my childhood, I wouldn't do it now, too vegetarian for that. But anyway, back I might be great at vegetarian too because she says that's gross. But what happens there is that that story is told, for two reasons. One, I need an image of sea animals being captured by something like a net in order to make the jenjoo stuff come through.

But also we need a way for the narrator to get restored to her memory of the grandmother. So the Ouija board has come in and it's interrupted her idea of who her grandmother is. So what she does is she recreates her grandmother in the image of what she thinks is true about her. And so this is something we do with language, is that we reshape ourselves and we reshape others in our lives.

Is that we will tell stories that allow us to consolidate who that person is and to lock them into place in the matrix of our relationship with them and our dual relationship with others. This all happens through language. And so that scene on the dock is an exploration of how do you kind of go back and reassure yourself and re-consolidate your image of the other person. So then we've got this sort of gross thing about the chicken necks off the pier.

And so again, later, grand is going to be invoking, well, the narrator is going to be sort of summoning grand in her sleep and grand is going to be summoning a fourth century BCE Chinese philosopher. And all of this to imagine this sort of crab that's emerging, so the crabs are bottom feeders, they live on the bottom of the water on the sea surface of the bay, for instance. And so they kind of come up to eat the bait. And then the net comes up from behind them.

We don't know where the crab hopefully doesn't know where it's coming from. And then suddenly, because it's enclosed in this net, the net is the thing, the means by which the crab can come out of one world, the world of the sea, and into another world, the world of the land and the air. So if we think, if we kind of see this metaphorically, we could see the self, which I'm saying is created by language. This is the net that shapes itself around the idea, and that brings it into a different plane of existence.

Right? So the crab doesn't join us on the dock until we have a net that can sort of appear around the crab and bring it into this other existence, this other plane of existence. And so when we're kind of engaging in our day-to-day world and we're moving through our human language, we fixate on the net. So the net is language, the net is the self.

But that net is actually our formulation. It's what is our version of whatever self is in question. It's our notion of who I am, who you are, who they are. And so when you are talking to someone and you think you're engaging in some kind of linguistic exchange, you might be asking, okay, let me pay attention to what they're telling me.

But what you're really doing is saying to yourself, how is what they're telling me? How does that help me consolidate my notion of our relationship? How does our interaction reaffirm what I know and believe to be true about self and other? If the message were to come without the net, right?

So this is what Jiang Joo is saying, you know, that once you have the meaning, once you have the idea, you can forget the net. If the message comes without the net, and that would mean a way, the way we're thinking about it, it comes without a self. If we've got no coordinates of selfhood to envelop it and to help us situate it in what we already know to be true or what we already believe to be true, then we're likely to call that spooky, right? So if there's a message that appears and we don't see it with a net around it, if it is not part of or consistent with selfhood, if it does not seem to be emerging from a self, then it's spooky.

It's a little scary. It's haunting. It's mysterious. And that's what I think makes it a little scary to think about Ouija boards, not because it genuinely is scary, but because we have a conditioning through the way our culture has engaged with language to say what matters is the self, not the idea.

And the way I have been excited to think about language, the way I've been excited to sort of reimagine language, is that what if human language was this new experiment devised by the earth itself of creating these membranes that allows new ideas into the earth plane of existence, right? So the earth is full of all of this complex information, of all of this mystery, so much that as human beings we will never, in my opinion, ever be able to understand all of it. And yet it's still found a way to create more. And the way it did that, play with me here for a moment, is to create this thing called human language.

And what human language does is it allows a self to be formed. And once there's a self, once there's a net that can shape itself around ideas that can be brought into the earth plane that weren't there before. And those of us who use human language, that is human beings, we're participating in this earth experiment. And we are all co-creators of these membranes of selfhood.

But what we do is we focus on the selves. The earth isn't focused on the selves. The earth is focused on the ideas that emerge from within the self. That's the way I love to imagine language.

And I will probably continue imagining language like that for as long as I'm allowed to, because I find it endlessly fascinating as a reframe of how language works. It emerges from the earth itself. It creates selfhood. And from those membranes of selfhood new ideas come into the earth plane of existence.

And we don't even know about it, because we're fixated on the membranes that we don't fixated on the ideas. But the earth is paying attention. Okay, I'm just going to leave you now with another story from Zheng Ju. This is the story of the board.

So this is again from the one I read earlier today from Brook of Siporn's translation. And so we've got two characters. We've got Zheng Ju himself, who's been called Zheng Z, which he's also called. And he's got its companion called Wie Z, who's kind of like the straight man to the philosopher.

He's the kind of built figure, the sort of foolish character who is used to get everything so wrong that the point is more easy to illustrate. So, who is the assistant? He says, he guess what King Wei gave me the seed from this great board. And I planted it and it's grown to maturity and it now weighs or grew into weight 100 pounds.

It's ginores is amazing. So I thought, okay, what can I do with it? And I filled it up with liquid, but then I couldn't carry it. And so then I thought, okay, well, cut it half, because then I'll have some really nice dippers, but they were too big to scoop anything out with it.

So I realized it's completely useless. So I just chopped it up into a billion pieces and got rid of it. And Zheng Drew says, you're really stupid when it comes to knowing about the usefulness of big things. So Zheng Drew is saying, the problem with you was that it was too big for you to understand what you could do with this.

This gourd was too big for you. And then he tells him another story about how foolish he is and how he can't understand the usefulness of things. And then he turns to him and he says, why did you think that the board needed to be something for you to manipulate? Why did you not think instead that you could enter into the gourd?

You could enter into the hollowed-out board. You could treat it like a boat. You could let it carry you on a lake or a river. Why did you not allow yourself to be surrounded by the gourd rather than feeling like you had to be the one outside of it manipulating it?

And I think we can ask ourselves the same question about a relationship to language. Why are we so busy chopping language up into these little bits, like phonemes and morthes and words and phrases and sentences? When language, we're chopping it up, we're trying to figure out how to use those bits, how to rearrange those bits, how to... But language is big.

Language is too big for us. Language is the thing that gives us the self in the first place. Language is for inhabiting. Language is what we live in.

It's what shapes us. It's not something for us to chop up and try to use. The usefulness in language is in its size and its capacity to create a space for us to inhabit. And once we acknowledge that capacity of language, then maybe we're in a better position to recognize how new ideas make their way onto the earth.

Okay, thank you so much for listening to these ideas. I realize they're kind of a little bit out there, perhaps maybe a little bit spooky, but I'm really glad if you've made it to the end, which you have, I assume, if you're here. If you want to know, like I said a little bit more about me, you can go to grammarfordreamers.com. You can find the story I read here called My Light Grandmother.

There's a whole host of other linguistic inspired stories I've written. And if you want to connect with me further, I have to do a monthly newsletter, which I'd love to write, so I'd be thrilled if you want to join that in go to grammarfordreamers.com. And you can also find all of my links to social media, like Twitter, Instagram, on grammarfordreamers.com. And also I'd recommend to our past that if you enjoyed this, please do subscribe so that you know when the next episode is out.

If you want to read and review, that would be great too. I think that other people know about the bloodcasters. If you know anything you think would be interested in these ideas, pass it on to that might be thrilled. Thanks so much, and I'll talk to you next time.