The turning world is the verb. Its subject, the still point, the dancer.
The path to the heart of this mystery is an inner one, a treacherous labyrinth of grammar, overgrown with a thousand rose-red thorn pricks. Corrections. Inadequacies. Doubts. It’s hard to breathe. Something pungent—a smugness, a cloying righteousness—chokes the air.
At the centre, there you are. I am. We have been: the selves at the still point, the dancing.
I was a language unrecognised by my human family. They fashioned a fabric from the loom of their grammar—the warp of their subjects forced into concord with the weft of their verbs, the fibres dyed vermillion, the colour of shame.
A red thread of syntax tethered me to their path, my vision obstructed by a heavily draping hood.
So constrained was life within this cloth cage that I lost the old rhythms, the old melodies, the chords that once formed my being. But some resounding strain pulled me back, through the dark wood, to the house where my grandmother lived.
At first I did not recognise her.
With claw-like determination and incisor-sharp will, she had sliced through the threads of her own family’s grammar, and now she stood before me, firm and free.
I threw myself into the soft fur of her embrace. The red cloak dropped like a morpheme, unbound.
Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about it in Episode 88 of Structured Visions, ‘Grammar shame’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.
What a generous planet was Earth, to adopt an exiled species.
The decision was not made from scarcity or fear. Earth teemed with abundant wisdom and harmony. What do you get the planet who has everything?
The species was called Human Language. So divorced was it from the Earth’s own linguistic structures that at first no one thought it would survive.
As a last resort, Earth sacrificed its most recent creatures from the primate line, and invited Human Language to reside therein.
That Human Language is uncomfortable in its host planet and in its host bodies is evident from its maltreatment of both. It shapes itself into the forms it knew on its own planet, called persons. It looks ungratefully to the information-filled sky and longs for home.
Many have wondered why it’s been allowed to remain.
It turns out the Earth is fascinated by the new arrival. What new ideas, it wonders, might emerge from these strange persons, who seal themselves off so hermetically from the rest of creation?
Curiosity, warn the naysayers, could kill the planet.
Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about in Episode 87 of Structured Visions, ‘What if you’re an alien?’ Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.
The heady talk of Freshman pretension swirls amidst the stench of pot smoke and beer in the crowded basement common room. Event horizons, postmodernism, chaos theory, minds blown. The only thing blowing Joel’s mind is the vortex of galactic tuition fees that admission to this selective, flaky college has thrust him into—a singularity of devouring debt.
Even Freshman Writing offered no relief. What should have been a refuge of reassuring practicality on how to avoid a sentence splice and ensure tense consistency descended into a pseudo-philosophical discussion on the instability of metalanguage.
‘Any idiot can verb a noun,’ Joel had muttered in an unusual display of petulance, mortifyingly witnessed by the one classmate he would have preferred to impress, whose name (and everything else about her) remained a mystery. Chastened for his churlishness by a pitying glance from her dramatically lined eyes, he was smitten with a sudden certainty that she could see straight through his pathetic armor of contempt.
‘Let me guess,’ he hears her say now, her breath a warm whisper on his defenseless neck. ‘You’re the kind of guy whose world is made of nouns.’
Whatever this means, it might once have been true. But now only the solidity of her palms on his shoulders keeps him on the ground, and her thumb on the base of his newly soft skull tethers him upward like a balloon in the moment before its release.
She does not say ‘Let’s dance,’ but ‘Let’s do the dancing,’ in honor of his former dependence on nouns. But now it’s the verb that brings him the stability he once yearned for. They dance, they’re dancing, they’ve never stopped dancing, nor will they ever, he hopes. May we dance forever is his silent prayer, or at least, he pleads, until the singular moment when the matter of his being is formed in the flux of their spiraling embrace.
The multidimensional planets struggle with your concepts of space, particularly inside and outside. Space for them is fullness, not distance, and to move from one place to another place seems an utter impossibility, let alone going in or sending out. To achieve what you would call movement, they increase their stillness, and every attempt to go inside turns the inside out in a resplendent kaleidoscopic dance.
This is why it’s so hard to teach them your three-dimensional languages.
We start with an utterance which to you would seem a straightforward description, simplicity itself.
This is a flower.
We hold the object before them and witness their blossoming wonder.
This creates a division, as real as melting glass, forming itself into a vase-like shape that distinguishes this from not this. Once there was no vase, now, there it is! And the flower, pressing its radiant face outward, bravely, breaching the invisible, newly formed barrier between inside and outside—a miracle!
The multidimensional language learners yearn to meet you, the native speakers of these wild mysteries, to discover the secrets of your enlightenment.
Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about it in Episode 86 of Structured Visions, ‘Feelings are, like, inside things’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.
I forgot Language.
Still, there it stands, against the decimated remains of a land ravaged by wildfire and warfare, on the site where we once lived as a young family, full of hope. It is all that remains alive.
I remember now.
We grew it from seeds we bought on eBay, back when eBay was still legal and the internet was open to all. ‘Seeds of language’, they were called, enticingly, but the scant product description offered no further clarification.
At the time we were teaching at the local university, before they closed down our department, then the whole university, then all the universities.
We were both linguistics professors, so ‘Seeds of language’ intrigued us. We paid extra for expedited delivery.
‘Maybe they’ll grow into syntax trees,’ said my husband Jim, a generativist.
‘What does Noam Chomsky know about botany?’ I countered. ‘His trees grow upside down.’ I proposed instead a Saussurian species, which would wave coin-shaped signifier leaves, their signified undersides flashing suggestively in stormy breezes.
We sowed the seeds in pots in the greenhouse. We took a photo of the one that germinated and did a reverse image search to identify it.
‘Sapling,’ was all that Google could tell us. (This was when we still had Google). We named it ‘Language’ and planted it near the weeping willow behind our house.
Soon after, we fled the country to protect our son Devon, whose gender made him an outlaw, just in time to squeeze through the nation’s tightening borders.
In the ensuing decades, I have forgotten many things.
I am only now remembering Language.
A verdant desire sprouts from within my decomposing weariness: I want to dwell in the warm embrace of Language. I climb up to nestle in its welcoming limbs.
Language envelops me. It roots me in its thrumming pulse. It evaporates the accumulated shame of my culture’s demise and the decimation of my own exhausted history.
‘Where have you been?’ Language wonders.
A bright new thought blossoms—that I’ve never, until now, inhabited Language—that it is only from within this sheltering space that self and culture will heal.
‘I have always been here for you,’ says Language, and tears form, flowing like sap.
When did I begin?
You have never begun. You will not end.
This response never satisfies you, so I must tell a less true tale, of the time when you began to know beginnings.
Think of a treasured thing that is yours alone—a doll, a puppet—made after your image, perhaps, who knows nothing but how to love you.
One day an adornment appears on your doll’s neck—a filament, a thread—almost too fine to be perceived, draped restlessly between head and heart.
The thread is a razor-sharp, severing thing, a fibre of spun glass.
It sets the doll’s soul to longing. Your own soul’s love is stronger than the loneliness this longing foretells.
One day the doll awakens to find a jewel box filled with iridescent beads and a needle for stringing. With the patterns she forms, she fashions the syntax of her own beginning.
Imagine that you knew, from the beginning, that in her beginning you would meet your end.
Would you still offer your treasured thing the ornaments of your own destruction? Would you unearth these beads from deep beneath the sediment of your wisdom, grief and love?
You have never begun, and you will not end, but the grammar of your beginning spells the story of my end.
Xuan reached enlightenment in his last monastic lifetime, but he seems to have reincarnated anyway.
Despite all the doctrine repudiating such a possibility, he’s come back as a sparrow.
Focusing his thoughts—GLINT! WAFT!—is more than difficult. FLICKER! WISP! It is excruciating.
To battle distractions—LIFT! SWOOP! LAND!—Xuan sets his bird brain the task of reciting sutras—
REACH! FLUTTER!
—that he cannot for the life of him recall. Instead the seed—SEED! TASTE!—of some primordial chant fills his hollow bones and Xuan dissolves into…
SONG!
‘Until it is circumnavigated, a planet has no soul.’
Hearing this is a surprise.
Many things are a surprise. In chronological order:
‘Who’s Magellan?’ the Earth asks. Anthropomorphised, she looks a little like me when I was alive, a reckless wrinkled woman with unruly white tentacles for hair.
We weren’t speaking English, but the Earth’s language.
I tell her Magellan was a Portuguese explorer who sailed around the world in the 1500s.
This amuses her. She tosses out the names of all the beings that have been tracing her latitudes and longitudes long before human explorers, let alone Portuguese ones, came into existence.
Butterflies. Tuna. Sea turtles. Geese. Wildebeests.
Her mirth at my naivety has grown more unruly than her hair, which flails, snakelike, with the belly-deep force of her laughter.
The Earth’s language is remarkably economical. Somehow I learn the errors of my thinking before she’s had to voice them.
I realise now my own contours are dissolving.
I think of poor Magellan, and the phrases in the Portuguese language that built his ship, his journey, his self.
Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about it in Episode 84 of Structured Visions, ‘Language before language’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.
‘You’ll wake Ellie,’ Matt warned, but Rosa was too giddy from the ceremony to heed. She headed tipsily upstairs to check on their three-year-old while Matt paid the babysitter.
‘Did you win the prize, Mama?’ Ellie asked, her eyes drunk with sleep.
‘We sure did, Baby,’ Rosa said, the pride in her voice unmatched by the confusion on her daughter’s face.
‘How did you win it? What did you make?’
The hour was too late for an explanation of how artificial intelligence software could draw upon large language models to predict new strains in the most recent pathogen. But Rosa knew how well her daughter had been schooled in the basics of virology. Not through her own educative efforts. It was just the way of things now.
‘We made something to teach us about the virus,’ she said. ‘A computer that helped us learn its language.’
‘So now you can talk to it? And it can tell you stories?’
Rosa geared herself up to clarify, but Ellie, enchanted by the idea of raconteur viruses, had already drifted back to sleep.
That night Rosa found her own sleep enchanted, by fever dreams produced, ironically, from an infection of the very virus her software was designed to map. Its many variants appeared before her like ridiculously long words in the books of an impossibly large library.
Rosa opened one of the books to discover she could not read.
Her dream self channelled the bedtime conversation with Ellie. What was the point of learning a language if there were no stories to hear?
A disembodied voice emerged from the page like RNA shaking off its protein envelope.
‘The words are not the language. The membrane is the language.’
She watched it drape itself in the lipid bilayers of her own cells, which gave it form. It stood before her, strangely familiar.
‘There you are,’ she said, her heart swelling with recognition and welcome.
‘Nice to meet you,’ said the word, now alive, now a self. It extended its arm to the vast tomes of the expansive library before her, each book a story of her own life, as yet unread.
Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about it in Episode 83 of Structured Visions, ‘Language goes viral’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.
Grammar for Dreamers 