Author Archives: jodielclark

Longing

Line drawing from Grimm Brothers' Rapunzel story. The king's son climbs Rapunzel's hair to reach her in the tower.

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.

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 wands 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 wondering Other, gazing upward, ever hopeful.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 74 of Structured Visions.

Guest

Close up of two women's faces, each showing one blue eye
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon

What we were told about the project was little enough to be written on a napkin.

I can say this with some confidence because I did write it on a napkin.

I got the call in a Starbucks, and scrawled some barely discernible notes from my barely discernible conversation with my deep-voiced, disembodied interlocutor.

An extraterrestrial species (humanoid, intelligent) had been discovered on Earth. The agency (governmental, top secret) was looking for adoptive carers.

‘You want me to adopt an alien?’ I looked up from my phone to raise my eyebrows at my fellow Starbucks regulars, who smiled sympathetically.

‘The preferred term is Guests.’

It wasn’t a joke. They were choosing potential Guest-adopters from a bank of experts (biochemists, neuroscientists, psychologists). My area is linguistic anthropology. They wanted to know about Guest languages.

They’d named my Guest Ella. I put her in my daughter’s room. (She lived with her father now and never came home.)

I wished I’d adopted more than one Guest. I couldn’t learn anything about Ella’s language because she didn’t have anyone to talk to. Also, she’d achieved native-level proficiency of English within several weeks, which made it harder to make hypotheses based on her acquisition patterns.

One anomaly gave me a clue, though—her use of pronouns. She acquired the first-person singular (I, me, my) without any trouble, but she never used second, third or first-person plural.

The implications of this hit me one night after dinner. Ella had just polished off a generous bowl of ice cream (Madagascan vanilla with dark chocolate chunks).

‘I’m hungry,’ she said.

She didn’t eat the second helping I gave her. Instead she held the bowl out to me. 

‘That’s for you, Ella,’ I reminded her. I don’t eat ice cream. (I stopped eating sweets when Pieter left.)

She placed the bowl in front of me with uncharacteristic stubbornness. 

It was then that I noticed how malleable her facial features were.

‘That’s for me,’ she repeated. ‘I want it so much.’

I tried not to stare as her face morphed. She was starting to look like someone I knew.

‘It looks so delicious,’ she said, and her longing nearly broke my heart. ‘I’m empty inside. Maybe ice cream would help.’

I stared longingly at the decadent chunks of chocolate speckling the soft cream. (My weight was one of the reasons Pieter left.)

‘I miss ice cream,’ she said. 

It was not until the first spoonful passed my eager lips that I understood.

Guest language had no second person pronoun. 

‘I miss myself,’ she continued, ruthlessly. ‘I don’t know who I am, now that I’m all alone.’

Ella had no way of saying ‘you’. 

Which meant she probably didn’t even have a concept of ‘you’.

‘You’re not alone,’ I said.

Her uncannily familiar face made it clear that she was not reassured. 

I tried again. ‘I’m not alone,’ I said. 

Her eyes glowed with warmth, like light in a guest house. (Inviting. Welcoming.)

The relief in her smile mirrored my own.

Would you like to know more about this story? Check out my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

No and the ark

Round gold icon painted with a scene from the Biblical story of Noah's Ark
Photo of Noah’s Ark icon by Jim Forest

Who are all these people, and why are they all here?

Belinda has not responded to her three-year-old daughter’s repeated questions, though the answers are easily available.

The beach house seems ready to burst at the seams, either from the heaving throngs of family sprawled about in various stages of multi-family chaos within, or from the howling gales that hammer against the paper-thin walls without.

These are my cousins, and they’re here for your great-grandmother’s funeral.

They’ve reached that drunken stage of family gathering where everyone tries to remember Nan’s stories.

Bill, once the thick-headed bullying eldest cousin, now professor of comparative literature at Boston University, tries to convince everyone their grandmother’s vast collection of stories consisted solely of variations on Bible themes.

Carly, who runs a tattoo salon in Brooklyn says he’s reading way too much into it.

Gina, the Montessori peacekeeper, is praising the artichoke dip.

Who are all these people, and why are they all here?

Belinda has breathed barely a word since they congregated at the family vacation home, not even to her daughter – just enough to manage the logistics of getting Ella fed and tucked into the cot in their shared room. She’d like to be in bed herself, but can’t risk it yet. Ella sleeps lightly and might hear her crying.

Bill reminds Carly that Nan was once a nun, and professes his belief that the endless stories were her rebellion against the church and its narratives. 

If she was that pissed off about the church, why are we burying her in one, Carly wants to know, and Gina pipes up that there was one story in particular that reminded her of Noah’s ark.

‘The story Nan told was about a man named No.’

The words have escaped Belinda’s lips as a breathy whisper, but the wind has just ceased, and everyone’s heard her. The cousins and their partners stay silent, waiting for more.

Who are all these people, and why are they all here?

‘No was the only person on the Earth. He lived among all the animals, who named him “No” because he had no speech. No matter how much they simplified their language, he could never make sense of what the animals were saying. He just kept shaking his head, “no”.’

They’re your family, and they’re here because my Nan died.

What would Ella know of people gathering when someone died? Greg died suddenly, in the middle of the pandemic, and they weren’t allowed a funeral. What Ella knows of her own daddy’s death is loneliness and silence, not this expansive hearthside festival of laughter and story.

Belinda shakes her own head, ‘no’, at her cousins’ clear desire to hear the rest of the tale. Still, the words tumble out, as relentlessly as the newly revived winds.

‘The animals got together and decided No was too distracted by all the beautiful things on the land, so they called down the rain to wash it away. They built a boat and drifted away on the monotonous sea. For forty days and forty nights they taught him their language.

‘No remained silent, confused.’

Her family had tried various ways to contact her, to keep her company during her grief, to occupy Ella, to encourage Belinda to go out for a walk at least to clear her head. Belinda turned off her phone and retreated inside herself, silent. Ella stopped crying, and Belinda’s own tears remained voiceless, wracking, heaving. 

‘When the rains stopped and the waters finally abated, the animals gave up hope. They moved back to the dry land in the springtime and made their dens there. No did not follow them.’

It’s a strange place for the story to end, but Belinda cannot remember any more.

No must have died alone on the boat, starved by his own silence.

Perhaps he found peace at the end.

‘In the silent nights, No’s ears were opened,’ she’s saying now, finishing the tale. She can hear her crazy grandmother’s soothing tones of her voice in her own voice. She puts her arms around herself and keens slowly, more than a little crazy herself by now, she imagines. 

‘No’s ears were opened to the whistling tunes of the wind. His heart beat to the staccato rhythms of the waves drumming the boat’s resonant hull. He swallowed the wind and the waves, and at once he had language.’

But it was not a language the animals knew, and No remained alone.

The tragic ending of her grandmother’s tale remains unvoiced, except by the wind that still beats insistently against their mourning house.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 73 of Structured Visions.

The Oracle of Sudsarama

Greyscale photographic portrait of a bearded man
Photo by Jorg Karg

The homeless guy was naming things.

This was my big revelation.

It took a month’s worth of visits to the laundrette to work it out.

On Saturday of week one I had no idea at all. I was consumed with my abysmal turn of fortune—my own washing machine damaged beyond repair, my kitchen flooded and clothes likely ruined. I hauled the sopping load through bitter cold rain to Sudsarama on Market Square. The tramp was settled in so comfortably in the room’s wet, fragrant heat that at first I didn’t even notice he was there.

He did not afford me the same courtesy.

‘They’re spinning,’ he croaked.

I did not need to make eye contact to know he was talking about the thrumming dryers. I nodded as politely as I could manage.

On Saturday of week two I was nearly out of underwear and entirely out of patience. My new washing machine had been held up at the warehouse. I made my reluctant pilgrimage to Sudsarama, heavy laden with shopping bags filled with smalls.

The tramp sat sedately in the same spot as the week before, like a priest of the oracle.

‘They’re helping,’ he said.

I followed his gaze to a woman outside walking her dog. The latter sported a hi-vis vest that endorsed its support-animal status.

I kept my gaze focused just beyond the window for fear of being drawn into some maddening conversation.

Still, I couldn’t help but be curious about what sort of assistance my homeless companion thought the human-canine pair was providing, and to whom.

‘They’re helping?’ I asked.

To my surprise the objects of our discourse opened the door and entered into the Sudsarama shrine. 

‘They’re helping,’ the tramp affirmed. He leant down to scratch behind the dog’s ears and whisper into them. ‘They’re spinning,’ he told the dog, pointing his gentle chin toward the dryers.

By week three, I’d formed a few hypotheses. 

The tramp used the plural pronoun for everything, even singular referents, like the dog. 

He was too polite to make assumptions about people’s pronouns. Or dogs’ pronouns. Or dryers, for that matter.

And the -ing words—spinning, helping—the tramp wasn’t using them as verbs.

They were names.

He’d named the dog ‘Helping’, and the dryer ‘Spinning’. 

No, he hadn’t named them—suddenly it was somehow clear to me—he knew their names already, he was simply stating what was true.

Everything he encountered already had a name, a name that revealed the entity’s essential quality, and the name of everything was a verb.

On the fourth Saturday I decided my duvet needed a clean and that my newly installed washing machine wasn’t big enough for the job. I raced across the square, fixated upon the plate glass windows of Sudsarama and whether my guru would appear through them.

When his shadowy figure came into focus I felt something release in my chest, like an unacknowledged longing spreading its wings to take flight.

I leant against one of the dryers and gazed shamelessly into the man’s weathered eyes. ‘They’re Spinning,’ I said.

With his nod I felt a wave of compassion wash over me.

‘And him-’ I said, pointing to a terrier running free on the street, who’d stopped to cock his leg on the lamppost opposite. ‘Them, I mean. They are-’

‘They’re Helping,’ he said.

I made a mental note: All dogs are Helping.

‘And those?’ I asked, flinging my pointing arm wildly toward the fountains in front of the City Hall.

‘They’re Flowing.’

‘And those?’ I pointed to the semi-circle of bare-branched cherry trees that framed the water feature.

‘They’re Breathing.’

I could no longer speak, only stand in awe of the man’s wisdom and the grace with which he bequeathed each thing with his essential quality, its name.

‘And me?’ I begged when I finally found my voice, thumping my chest, a frenzied chimpanzee. ‘Who am I?’

His silence precipitated a gaping despair at the heart of me, like a landslide on the edge of a vast abyss. 

In a desperate attempt I tried again. 

‘These?’ I hadn’t stopped drumming on my sternum, so urgent was my need to know. ‘What are these?’

His lips fluttered as if brushed with the briefest of smiles.

‘They are Being,’ he said. 

Then he stood before me and raised an oily palm as if in benediction. He patted me lovingly on the head and left the Sudsarama sanctuary, making his procession into the freshly blessed city.

Would you like to know more about this story? Check out my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

A remarkable outcome

Photo of outerspace
Photo by NASA

Your first experiment rarely works. You shouldn’t expect it to. You’re supposed to see it as an apprenticeship project, a learning opportunity. You’ve only failed if you’ve failed to learn, etc.

My first experiment was Earth.

Sorry, Project 649BQ8. (They don’t like it when you use the local names. It usually means you’ve gone native.)

I’ll admit a certain fondness for the place.

I still think of it as a phenomenal planet, one that, quite frankly, should never have been assigned to a newbie.

Did I learn anything from my failure?

Of course I did. The protocol was the same as with any of the intelligent planets. Connect it to the network. Calibrate the existing information systems so they resonate with network frequencies. If the planet resists connection, abort the project and move on to the next.

Should I have followed protocol?

Look, I know I’m supposed to say yes here, but can we please stop ignoring the genius of what I achieved? When the planet resisted connection, I didn’t abort. I designed a new species.

Human beings, they called themselves.

I made them out of local components, then attuned their nervous systems to be conducive to network frequencies.

And damned if it didn’t work!

I nearly wept for joy when they started developing their own communication frameworks, extra-local ones, using what they’d later refer to as their language.

Once they had language, all that was left to do was to calibrate it to the network system, and we’d have the link we were looking for.

It would have been a phenomenal achievement.

What went wrong?

I’m supposed to cite the protocol breach and leave it at that. The higher ups have neither the time nor the imagination for more nuanced analysis.

But I’ve developed my own theory.

These ‘human beings’ are so attached to their ‘Earth’ that they keep trying to use their language to describe their world. It has become an obsession for them.

They cloy to their material environment so resolutely that they have forced their rarefied language upon it. It causes them great suffering. Still, they persist.

It fascinates me.

The idea that you’d link language to base matter!

And that I created a whole species devoted to that endeavour!

What a remarkable outcome!

like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 72 of Structured Visions.

Finite

Silhouette of people standing on a rock at sunset, their hands in the air
Photo by Natalie Pedigo

Sentences losing binding power.

Verbs shaking loose from subjects.

Clauses dropping phrasal components.

Words falling away, like pearls untethered from strings.

The mass extinction eventually happened, yes, but it was not human lives that were lost. It was human language. It had occurred to no one that syntax was a non-renewable resource.

Humans populated the planet as widely as before, but now they remained speechless. Textless.

A collective human silence rose to the starry heavens, bearing strange melodies on its wings, songs that may have always existed, but that no one before ever could hear.

The planet was at peace. Its people were finally happy.

The stores of language replenished, very gradually at first. 

Once every decade or so a child would be born who was notably different from the others. 

Agitated, problem children, they seethed with an inner, unexpressed flare of fury. Their families feared them.

These were the children to whom language had returned.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 72 of Structured Visions and in my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

A day at the lake

Multicoloured rocks
Image by Oliver Paaske

On Saturday I drove the kids to the lake. They were grumbling because I made them leave their phones at home. 

Mom would’ve let us, and all that.

But I’d decided that all their various devices were robbing them of their imagination. 

Then, in a flash of inspiration, I made each of them go to the lake shore and select a rock.

I held each one of their specimens in my outstretched hand and made the same proclamation for each one. 

‘This is not a rock!’ I bellowed. I made a big ceremony of it.

‘What is it, then?’ they muttered, petulant. 

‘Whatever you want it to be. Use your imaginations, for fuck’s sake.’

Ariana took her rock back and launched it at my face. I swerved just in time.

‘This is not a rock,’ I repeated, unscathed, scrambling up to recover the projectile. ‘This is a weapon.’

‘Cool,’ said Ariana. ‘What’s yours?’ she asked Finn.

‘A princess,’ he said, unapologetically. He was painting a smile on it with a stick of lipstick he’d been hiding in his pocket.

Did his mother know about this? I wondered. Did she encourage it?

‘You have to say the whole thing,’ Ariana said, finally getting into the spirit. ‘This is not a rock, it’s a…’

‘This is not a rock, it’s a princess,’ Finn murmured dutifully, adorning it now with a wig made from the wet remains of a plastic bag he’d dug out from beneath a pile of pebbles. 

‘What’s yours, Clive?’ Ariana asked. Clive was hiding among the branches of a fallen beech.

I watched as he tried to shield himself from her approach, hunching his bony shoulders, his quivering lip jutting out.

‘Come on, it’s easy.’ Ariana was jumping on the tree, as if to shake her brother out of his driftwood fortress. ‘This is not a rock, it’s a… You just say whatever it is you want it to be.’

‘I don’t want it to be anything but what it is,’ he said, his voice pleading, his eyes blinking back tears.

‘Don’t be absurd, Clive,’ I chastised him. ‘It’s just a game.’

Solemnly my youngest child extracted himself from the beech branches and walked to the exact spot from which his rock had been extracted. It took him forever to get it balanced in what he must have decided was its original position.

The weakness of his imagination unnerved me to the point of rage. 

‘You do realise,’ I seethed, ‘that the rock wasn’t always a rock? Once it might have been a mountain. And one day it will be dust, scattered across the earth.’

‘It’s not a rock now,’ said Clive. ‘It doesn’t want to be a rock. It wants to be what it is.’

But what is it? I wanted to scream, but refrained, faced with the silencing force of my own lack of imagination, stretched out before me, threatening, an abyss.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 71 of Structured Visions.

Whale song

Greyscale photo of a humpback whale leaping from the ocean
Photo by Mike Doherty

‘You’re frigid, you’re rigid and you have no soul.’

Jack’s break up words played in Evie’s head like a haunting melody on repeat. 

These were not his exact words. What he’d actually said was something like, ‘I dunno, babe. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like it’s impossible to loosen you up. Sometimes I look at you and it’s like, you’re not even there. Nobody home.’

He was a little stoned when he said all this, but she knew he didn’t regret it, because he got together with Cassandra Carrington the next day. They were relentless in their mutual affection. They both signed up to do a summer semester at sea so they wouldn’t have to spend their vacation apart.

Against her better judgment, Evie signed up to the same program. She’d imprinted on Jack like a duckling on a pitbull. She couldn’t keep herself away from him, no matter how cruel he was to her.

They were learning about marine mammals. Evie couldn’t concentrate. She wasn’t good at environmental science or biology. These subjects were too messy, fraught with error and doubt. She preferred math. Computer science. Linguistics.

A specialist on whale songs joined their boat when they reached Maui. She taught them that male humpbacks sing to each other in low frequencies that can span up to 10,000 miles of ocean. She played them some of their melodic sequences, and pointed out how the whales changed them slightly over time. The students listened to her recordings with appropriate awe.

‘That’s a beautiful song,’ Jack crooned, his hand stroking the back of Cassandra’s neck.

A beautiful song.

The phrase jolted through Evie like an electric current. It was decidedly not a beautiful song. It was absurd to say such a thing. It was—what was the term?

Ill formed. 

The term they used in linguistics to label an expression that a native speaker would never utter.

The whales would never say it was a beautiful song. 

They’d say—they were saying—singing—that it was a gathering song.

The humpback songs were not just melodies, they were strings of syntax—a series of noun phrases, with the noun and indefinite article remaining ever constant: a song, a song, a song. What varied was the adjective that preceded the noun. It never-failingly referred to the song’s purpose.

A gathering song.

A loving song.

A healing song.

A journeying song.

Sometimes, in the response times, the whales would insert an evaluative adjective, but this new addition never occurred alone in the phrase. It always accompanied, and preceded the purpose adjective.

A beautiful gathering song.

A raucous loving song.

A helpful healing song.

A circuitous journeying song.

The whales would never utter ‘a beautiful song’. A phrase without a purpose adjective would always be ill formed.

Evie listened to recording after recording to validate her findings. A new tune formed in her own mind, a response to the whale melodies. A discovery song.

Would you like to know more about this story? Check out my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

The Mosaic Makers

Blue, orange and white floral mosaic
Photo by Raimond Klavins

In linguistics, periphrasis is the usage of multiple separate words to carry the meaning of prefixes, suffixes or verbs, among other things, where either would be possible.

The species once known as the Atlanteans were the Galaxy’s great curators. They visited the artisanal planets to observe and appreciate their masterpieces.

The great masterpiece of planet Earth was its language. The Atlanteans admired its manifold morphemes, suspended like raindrops in sunlight, producing perfect prisms of meaning with each shifting syllabic breeze. So great was their awe, the Atlanteans stayed longer than was their custom, each day noticing anew the delicate balance of conceptual contrast and the subtle harmonies at the core of each spiralling staircase of syntax.

Then one day the balance was destroyed. The Atlanteans discovered that the most remarkable pieces from the Earth’s linguistic repertoire had been plucked from their displays and smashed to bits. Their astonishment intensified when they learned that this damage had been wrought by the leaders of their own company.

‘The Earth is inviting new guests to arrive after we depart,’ they explained to their bemused companions. ‘Their task will be to create a new language out of these broken pieces.’ 

‘Ah,’ chorused the Atlanteans, reassured. They recognised the prophecy. ‘The Mosaic Makers are coming.’

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss ‘The Mosaic Makers’ in Episode 70 of Structured Visions.

Maize

Close up of colourful corncobs
Photo by Alexander Schimmeck

All languages have expressions to indicate causation, whereby a process is depicted as having been set in motion by some external actor. In some languages, causation is expressed morphologically, through inflections that change verbs into their causative forms.

What happens when you change your name?

Barbara was once Eleanor.

Was she always both names? When she became Barbara, did the Eleanor part of her simply switch off, like suppressed genetic information?

Nobody believes her discoveries. Her fellow scientists have no precedent for her independence of thought. It’s confusing to them, how she revels in working alone.

She does not work alone. She works with Eleanor.

Barbara studies gene sequences in Indian corn.

Eleanor studies morpheme sequences in Indian languages.

At the end of each working day, they share a cigarette and discuss their findings.

One evening Eleanor describes the causative morpheme in Navajo. It consists of one phoneme only; it would be easy to miss. A linguistic element smaller than a syllable can change a verb from ‘it’s moving’ to ‘he’s making it move’.

Barbara describes her revelations about the variegated patterns on the maize kernels she’s cultivated. The microscope has revealed to her highly-tuned vision the regulator genes that move about on chromosomes, activating or suppressing certain sequences.

‘Bits of information that activate the expression of a new meaning,’ Eleanor says. ‘A causative.’

The weight of their parallel discoveries lands on them simultaneously, like a crow settling on a snow-covered branch.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.