109 - Laurel Airica: Word Magic and the Secret Spells of Language
Get the wax out of your third ear and prepare to expand your vocabulary with the secret spells of the English language! In this conversation, poet and punster Laurel Airica is going to teach us about the magic in everyday words. Here you will hear a fascinating foray into the metaphysics of your mouth-sounds!
Affectionately known as the metaphysical mother goose, Laurel reveals occult meanings hidden before our eyes as unconsciously uttered linguistic white lies. And by exposing the programs inserted in the sentences that make up our lives, she has helped many magical beings break free of language slavery and put spirit back in its place in our hearts and our words.
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In this episode
Core themes
The Secret Spells of Everyday English
Chance opens with the word animal, suggesting its roots can read as bad spirit, and Laurel calls this kind of play anagrammatology. She then walks through what she calls the secret spells of the English language, the way we describe an ordinary day: waking in mourning, going off to earn a living, calling our jobs undertakings and ending up with a weak end. She pairs pray with prey, prophet with profit and worship with warship, and argues that words like these quietly send people in the wrong direction. Her remedy is to navigate by the heart, which she calls the compass of compassion.
Green Language and Soul Harmonics
Asked about green language and the language of the birds, Laurel describes a collective project rather than an invented tongue: no one person can impose a new language, she says, but many people speaking with the same high intention can tune English until it uplifts whoever hears it. She compares good conversation to energetic acupuncture, two people amplifying each other like batteries. Chance answers with his own idea of soul harmonics, the sense that two people talking openly create harmony or dissonance like two notes on a guitar, with imagination supplying insights neither had alone. He says that realization is what led him into podcasting.
Rhyme, Memory and Imagination
Chance asks how Laurel memorizes her pieces, and she describes rhyme as an electro-poetic force, coupling a big idea with a sound of several meanings until it plays over and over in her head like magnets finding their balance. She then performs Word Fire, a piece she says nobody had heard, including the line that a heavy heart must be gold. Chance ties that gold to authenticity through its chemical symbol, Au. Asked what imagination is, Laurel hears I'm a genie inside the word and notes that imagine and enigma mirror each other, since it takes imagination to solve an enigma.
Omnificence and the Question of Control
Laurel shares omnificent, a word she found in a dictionary meaning possessing full creative power, and argues that a species which has already shown its full destructive power must hold the creative side too. Chance offers imaginal cells turning a caterpillar into a butterfly as a picture of human change, and Laurel urges him to make it a children's book. When Chance asks whether an architecture of control lives in language, Laurel answers in verse: some propaganda was surely implanted, she says, but like sounds also gather naturally, and the hypnosis is reversible. On non-human interference she says she does her best not to go there.
Taking Command of the English Language
Laurel summarizes her anthem Taking Command of the English Language in verse, arguing that English is the leading software of the Western mind, carrying biases she likens to computer viruses and says the church promulgated as mind control. Her fix is participatory: words others have offered, such as hallow in place of hello and greatfulness, and a planned literary lotto on her Word Magic Global forum. She cites Confucius on correcting language first and explains kotodama as the recognition that words have spirits. In his closing, Chance shares his own forum entry, borning for the start of the day, and invites artists and musicians to collaborate with her.
Quotes
“The thing to do is to navigate via the heart because we each have the built-in compass in the heart. It is the compass of compassion.”
“We could create a chorus of beautiful music through our social intercourse with a language that has been so tuned up that when we speak to each other, we're uplifting each other.”
“The imagination is what creates that extra new awareness or insight that you reached when talking to this other person that you never had before.”
“If your heart is heavy, it must be gold.”
“It's often been said enlightenment is a destructive process and what that really means is getting out of our own way.”
“People sometimes say, "Well, I'm not creative." But, as a species, we've already demonstrated that we possess full destructive power. So, the other side has to be true as well.”
“English is the leading software of the Western mind and it's filled with cultural biases that are akin to computer viruses that infect our thinking.”
“I think it's a good idea that we start investing more intention into this meme magic that is possible to ignite things for good or ill in people's mass consciousness almost overnight.”
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