Do you believe in fairies? In his 1911 book, American anthropologist Walter Evans Wentz hypothesises ‘tentatively’ that the invisible world of fairies should be examined ‘just as we examine any fact in the visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry, of physics, or of biology’ (pp. xvi-xvii).

In this episode I put forward my own hypothesis: that human language is what keeps us from seeing fairies… and all the other multidimensional mysteries of the material world.

What is it about language that so comprehensively excludes us from a more expansive experience of the world? I draw upon principles from M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar to explain what aspects of the ‘architecture of language’ keep us confined within the dark prison of selfhood. Each of Halliday’s metafunctions contribute, I posit, to how selfhood confines us, through the linear experience of time (the textual metafunction), the need to vie for social status (the interpersonal metafunction) and the assumption of separate worldviews (the ideational metafunction).

We can learn about the world we can’t access by examining the restrictive shapes of selfhood that human language produces. We can also imagine the possibility that our experience is restrictive by design—that the Earth developed a means to create separate consciousnesses so that it could experience the mystery of intimacy.

The story I read in this episode is ‘F in the ELLPH.’

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