All the wrong words
Every language I reach for comes pre-loaded. Biased. Stigmatized. Traumatized. Baggage.
Clinical language wants to diagnose me. It hears “experience” and answers: pathology. It reduces the living to objectified processes it can quantify and name externally, or pretend to.
Literary language wants to aestheticize me. It wraps lived truth in soft prose, diluting what overwhelms into what entertains, seeking clever metaphors for things that aren’t metaphorical.
Philosophical language wants to parse me. It embeds ontology, epistemology, phenomenology. Frameworks that map the unknown to the known, assuming the coordinates always correlate.
They don’t.
And no amount of mental or linguistic gymnastics can impose a Kantian architectonic on lived experience without mistaking the unassimilated for the unreal.
Every vocabulary has its uses. None of them are adequate for the blessings and burdens I now bear.
I’ve tried using the language of others: Jung, Corbin, Grof, Ferrer, Hillman, Nasr, Arabi, Bhārgava.
They all have their place. But here they are misplaced.
My search for meaning requires finding the right words.
Part of my journey is finding those words.
Another part is speaking them.
The rest is just life, however uncanny.
And uncertain.
By D. Bowman
Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.