At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside.

That’s a quote from Simone Weil’s essay Human Personality, written in the last year of her short but extraordinary life.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 7 of my series of episodes on Imagination creativity, based around my book Create.

I used to be in a prison, the prison of Creativity, something I talked about in depth when I explained how Ursula LeGuin made me understand that Creativity has been co-opted by corporations and academia but that Imagination is still available to us as a relatively uncorrupted, or co-opted word. Imagination, which hasn’t been as coopted is one of the ways of breaking out of what I will be talking about today, lexical prisons. So, today I want to talk about lexical prisons, something Weil referred to at the beginning of that quote how “a mind enclosed in language is in prison”.

Last time I spoke about school and education, and how the industrial revolution and a utilitarian, way of educating can be detrimental to the imagination and inspiration of young people, leading them away from creativity instead of potentially opening Doors towards inspiration and enthusiasm.

For example, in this podcast I don’t curse. This is very difficult for me, or at least it was when I first started out, to not curse. Why? Because where I grew up we all curse. Most of my close friends who listen to this podcast are probably thinking, Why isn’t John cursing? That me speaking the way I am, the language I’m using, is not me, that I’m in a kind of prison by not letting myself express myself with curses, which is totally acceptable for Irish males, as that’s our reputation, part of our culture of craic, our maverick, iconoclastic buck the system. And don’t get me wrong. I love listening to the Blindboy podcast, and still curse when I’m having a laugh with friends and family.

So why did I stop? Because when I stepped back to look at my way of communicating I realized I was in a lexical prison. I noticed when I left my country for a long time that I was cursing a lot more than everyone else, but more importantly, the curses were taking up the space where adjectives, nouns, phrases should have been. I’m a writer. I’m all about words, how they’re arranged, which ones are left out, how long the sentence. But when I cursed I didn’t have as much control of what I wanted to express,