Nomina Numina

It is an old and almost respectable error to presume that distance is measured in miles. I have no doubt that cartographers have committed this error for centuries. It served them well, I’m sure, because their concern is only with places that agree to be mapped. Where point A and point B can be drawn on paper the same way a box can be drawn to indicate a kitchen table, a bed, or a nation-state.

But some points innately evade mapping because their geometry exceeds that of things like tables, forests, skyscrapers, and planets. There’s a particular class of place that exists that is altogether different, and whose property it is to share no border with any other place we commonly call a place. None, whatsoever. These places cannot be near or far, since nearness and farness presuppose contiguity, shared relativity, and material coherence in kind. They cannot be near. Nor can they be far. As such, one does not travel to them. One is admitted only at certain times and places. Willingly or not, by virtue of their personal constitution and circumstances alone. It’s a strange sort of proclivity of their doors whose locks demand a very unique, immaterial key.

I know of such a place, though it is one of many. I feel I’m obliged to phrase my statements here very carefully, because I did not arrive at it and I have never departed from it, and yet I know it as one knows a childhood bedroom: by the particular way the light falls on a summer’s evening, by the air that holds the smell of the sea and wildflowers in the way of the gentlest lingering aromas that fade but are not forgotten. Any sensible person knows that one cannot remember a place never visited. This is a fact I cannot dispute. I can only report that the memories exist, complete in every detail because they are lived experience; however, I might struggle to point to them in an atlas book or on an astronomical map. Perhaps memory is a composite of experiences both within and without, between and betwixt. Perhaps we remember things on behalf of others. Dearest memories of our dearest others.

There are somatic signs. I know them precisely. On an ordinary August evening as the sun lazily creeps behind the western mountains, the room around me falls away. No, that’s not quite right. Rather, it fades like sand in an hourglass, revealing another shared household entirely. The duality defies the clocks on my bedside table, analog and digital. Was it only a few seconds or a few hours? I shut my eyes, hoping to retain the dimming light of that other household’s light for just a moment longer, so that I may imprint it permanently onto my memory, knowing the grief will linger whether I’m successful or not.

Grief is the word. It is precise, in the same way one grieves the dead. The etiquette is ancient and generous, with its rituals and ceremonies. For the mourner of a household that sits empty, waiting for its owners to return, in a country absent from any and every known atlas, there are few if any salves for the emptiness that follows. I have looked. That absence is suggestive. A negative is also a datum. Proof that some experiences remain undocumented because a reasonable person decides not to report them. I, however, am predisposed to be less reasonable and so I continue to pen these pages.

Other writers long before me have attempted the same. Writings that obliquely touch the corners of my growing pages. Hints of lands undiscovered and filled with visceral detail that defy even the most imaginative of people, and confound the most learned. Most accounts are treated as fiction, but I doubt that is what the authors meant when they scratched ink across the paper in the dead of night with only a dim oil lamp and a handful of brief, uncanny memories to guide their hand. I suppose there’s a sort of solace in that, too. At least, I’d like to think so. Not as a validation or even a kind of consolation. Rather, as an asynchronous companion who says: This is what happened to me. If you’re reading this from wherever and whenever you are, did it happen to you too?

Sometimes knowing that certain individuals hold the same address, one that appears on no register, and that neither of them renounces it. The owners hold the deed, and only the house knows their names.

Whatever the ontology, and I no longer believe the question will resolve itself, my practice is simple. I wait, however impatiently, since patience assumes a legible schedule, and I lack the access and faculties to read the astronomical geometries that would name the date, time, and place. No, I wait in the manner of a man who keeps a lamp in the window because the lamp is the portion of the nature and substance that belongs to him. Promises can be figurative. Lamps are literal. And mine is lit in the direction of the place I cannot yet go.

I suspect there are others like me, scattered across the world and throughout human history, who are also custodians of at least one such place. The distances and coordinates may differ — an ocean, a death, a fenceless border, a wall without beginning or end — but the space of longing is universal, and the Nation of Exiles issues no passports and takes no census. Somewhere, without any material proof of citizenship, we manage to keep a lamp burning. A reminder of a home close and far away, and the warmth and love that waits to rekindle there.