– Not a grammar of meaning, but a climate of existence.

I began by using the word grammar to describe how action is organised. Grammar seemed adequate at first: it named the inherited rules, expectations, legitimacies, and interpretive structures that shape how the self becomes legible. But as the ontology developed, grammar became too narrow. It could describe rules, but it could not describe the total environment in which action takes place.

The self does not simply follow rules; it moves within conditions. These conditions are not linguistic. They are structural, atmospheric, and lived. They include the pressures of scarcity, the deformation of the practico-inert, the weakening of consensus, the visibility of contradiction, the reorganisation of intention, and the shifting conditions of perception that follow rupture. None of this fits comfortably inside the metaphor of grammar.

Grammar describes how meaning is organised. Climate describes how existence is organised.

Grammar can be taught. Climate must be inhabited.

Grammar tells you what is permitted. Climate tells you what is possible.

This is why the Inherited Field and An Aimsir are climates. They are not sets of rules but total organisations of action. They shape what can be seen, endured, attempted, or refused. They determine how the relational dialectic operates and how the practico-inert is experienced. Rupture is not a change of grammar but a change of climate: a shift in the conditions of perception that reorganises the self’s movement.

I use the word climate because the phenomena I am describing are too complex, too structural, and too atmospheric to remain inside the linguistic metaphor of grammar. Climate captures the lived conditions in which the self moves, the pressures that shape its possibilities, and the transformations that occur when those conditions change.

David Marshall
Skerries
January 2026