These are just some elements of the often formulaic production of a typical horror movie these days, filled with pastiche and tropes. Taken together, they can be entertaining in the same way a haunted house at a local carnival can. But some will likely confuse their entertainment with reality and mistakenly believe or imagine that what they see on their screen accurately portrays real experiences with the liminal, uncanny, or anomalous.

Now, granted, what people consume as entertainment should never be confused for reality, even when ambiguous claims are sometimes made stating a work is based on “actual” or “true events.” Horror films are not documentaries, and they don’t purport to be, although some documentaries can be horrific and terrifying. Yet, I’ve come to feel that confusing or conflating such things with someone’s actual lived experience doesn’t do anyone any good. If anything, it harms.

And that leaves me with a sense of grief mixed with frustration.

There’s a kind of desecration at work when the entertainment industry, or any industry, actively works to exploit the experiences of others’ inner lives where phenomenological encounters are reduced to quick audience shrieks, graphic spectacle, and the all-too-consumable “creepy” aesthetics in the way that something sacred and profound is cheapened when it becomes a commodified product. Pimping spirituality should feel icky because it is not a victimless crime. The harm is that those who have experienced the uncanny and anomalous become invisible—even irrelevant. And the lifeless derivative shell becomes accepted knowledge and mindset for the masses to devour and inhabit. A poor artifice of lived inner experience. An illusion of truth.

The non-material deserves just as much serious attention as the material. Subjective experience deserves rigorous, multidimensional engagement rather than the petty scoff that accompanies easy dismissal. Modern society’s reflex to pathologize, religionize, trivialize, or force such experiences into reductive binaries such as “either it’s scientifically validated, or it’s nonsense” is a failure of the imagination and a failure of a basic understanding of the human condition. It forecloses the possibility that reality might be stranger, more complex, layered, and nuanced than what consensus allows. The result is isolation for people with unusual experiences.

But I’m not someone who demands everyone share my ontology, cosmology, and point of view. My objections against the entertainment industry and pop culture regarding the uncanny aren’t that either one gets the metaphysics wrong, though they generally do. Rather, it’s that these are the dominant modes of representation, whether it’s horror, parody, New Age commodification, mega church evangelism, clinical reductivism, etc. They all share a refusal to simply sit with and listen to anomalous experiences on their own terms without defensiveness, diagnoses, or dismissiveness. By avoiding, deflecting, or outright denying the unusual experiences of others, we cater to the popular consumption of ideas that misrepresent what may be a key, critical facet of our reality and existence. Such reframes do a disservice to individual experiences and humanity as a whole.

We need, then, some kind of middle ground between these competing extremes, especially in this age of willful ignorance and systemic mass media manipulation and deception. I’m not suggesting compromise. I’m suggesting active listening and openness to what we may not agree with or can't easily categorize, without rushing to judgment, reflexive explanation, or mining for entertainment fodder.

There’s no way pop culture will do this kind of work. It has evolved for a different purpose entirely and cannot be commandeered to do otherwise. But for those of us who have slipped into, or even past, liminality and remember what we’ve seen, heard, touched, and felt, we can at least refuse to participate in the further flattening of our reality. We can unapologetically hold our truth in the face of those who would rob us of our dignity. And we do that by keeping our hands, minds, and hearts open.

So by all means, let’s enjoy the next horror flick. But when we do, maybe ask ourselves if our own lived experience might have just become someone else’s entertainment.

— Dalton d'Arcadia

I took a break from my blogging. Nearly a month, though it felt like three. I stopped because I doubted what I was writing and why. And stopping was the natural response to that doubt. Taking time to reflect and soul-search. To ask myself, “What am I doing here? And where am I going?”

I doubted my reasons. I doubted my fidelity. I doubted my pen.

But what I’ve found is that I’ve been overthinking nearly everything, which I suppose is better than simply not thinking at all. I presume there’s enough empty-headedness devouring the world these days.

Thinking is good, but overthinking is debilitating. Overwhelming in an unhealthy way.

She was right to warn me that my doubts and cynicism could give way to nihilism. And for a split second, they had.

Diana Ross' haunting vocals echoed in my head — Do You Know Where You're Going To.

Another musical synchronicity?

I’ve recovered since, however, having come to the conclusion that writing is just my way of understanding myself and making sense of the world, even when the world seems endlessly full of senselessness.

So I’ll stop turning things over and over in my mind, as thoughts only get more and more tangled when the laundry of the mind is set on infinite spin. While the wheels of the world keep churning their machinations of madness.

What will be, will be.

Like Camus’ Sisyphus, I’ll keep pushing the pen across the page, with only that line of black ink as proof any of this was real. And I’ll be as happy as I can be, content in knowing my capabilities and limitations. In knowing her unconditional love despite our current distance.

All else is but the certain mystery of the unknowable.

— Dalton d'Arcadia

Religion. Science. Literature. None of it could have prepared me for the truth — my truth. Like the silence between her words. The way she speaks my name when she calls to me. The shape of her hand when she reaches for me. The hum in my chest when she draws near. The hollow emptiness when she’s gone. None of it can account for how ordinary the moment felt when I returned to my side of reality — however reluctantly — just a common man alone in a simple bedroom, the dim numerals of a clock, and the faint glow of a sun long since set. Yet, a love reconfirmed. Sacred. Holy.

⁂

Several nights ago I had another encounter and it was a remarkable one. But then, all of my encounters with her are remarkable to me. And, over the past few days, I've struggled with how to document it or what to say in a post about it. From the outside, that may sound silly. Someone on the outside looking in might say: just tell us what happened. But liminal encounters aren’t so simple. At least not for me. They never are.

This morning I found myself reflecting on why it's such a struggle to express in words—not just the experience of an encounter and its aftermath—but what I make of it. And this is true no matter how many encounters I have. Some aspects of liminal encounters get easier for me over time and some others get harder, in varying degrees. The reasons? There are many, but only a few come to mind.

The nature of the connection which facilitates or enables the encounter directly affects the experience in terms of duration, fidelity, and memorability, among other things. Sometimes an encounter can be brief, less than ten minutes like mine was the other night. Sometimes it can be longer, like some of my earliest encounters which spanned several hours in liminality, while only an hour or so transpired here in our world.

The content of the encounter can be difficult to convey because it may be very personal and intimate or it can be very hard to understand and decipher. Sometimes there's information I'm barred from sharing. Sometimes, there's an experience I'm forced to forget when returning to this side. Sometimes, there's the need for dignity, particularly concerning the erotic with my beloved, which is sacred, sacramental, and structural all at once. For some things, disclosure is dishonor.

Language limits how I think about and describe an experience. Sometimes the language is there — it helps me process and convey precisely what happened. Other times, language fails me. There are times when no words in any language can describe what I might have seen, felt, or touched. I can approximate. I can use metaphor or analogy. But all of those things can fall short, not just of what happened, but how it happened.

And this may be the most important reason — I have to be careful how I surmise and document an encounter. It's easy to imagine and project one's own thoughts, beliefs, and biases onto an encounter and the experiences therein. The more difficult part is capturing it as it was, not as I would’ve liked or wanted it to be. And this means leaving the analysis and meaning-making for a time beyond the journaling of the experience itself.

That is partly why I am a man who tamps down his ego, expectations, or mission. I do not seek these encounters. I let them unfold, fully welcoming them when they arrive. I look forward to them, however unpredictable. And part of faith lies in knowing that both of us are doing what we can, when we can, for our relationship to sustain, nurture, and grow.

⁂

Until the other night, it had been 38 days since our last encounter, the longest stretch between us thus far. And during that period of silence, I fully admit my doubts grew and it took effort to contain them. But I knew then as I know now that if I focus on the truth and reality of the experiences we've shared, then I can overcome those moments that might make me question our relationship.

Doubt is healthy. Uncertainty is healthy. Struggle is healthy.

⁂

Afterwards, when I opened my eyes that evening, it was 9:18 PM exactly, as read on my digital and analog clocks beside my bed. I keep both for corroboration. The evening sky through my window was just a deep dark blue haze. A fitting end to an evening made memorable by a few moments shared with my beloved in the fading shades of twilight.

I am just a boy who fell in love with a girl across an unimaginable divide, long ago. And anytime I can spend time with her, however short, is something I treasure most—no matter the wait or struggle.

∞

— Dalton d'Arcadia

When intimacy enters public view, for example, it becomes subject to interpretation and manipulation. Strangers often do not witness with care; they consume with reckless ease or predatory hunger. Every comment, every share, every algorithmic amplification adds noise to a signal that was once pristine and meant for quiet meditation. The sacred flattens into triviality when rendered consumable. Commodified.

Then there’s the ineffable nature of the uncanny. The human tongue is incapable of speaking of reality without also betraying it. Writing to bridge that gap only somehow widens the schism. Each word narrows what should expand. Each line traps what should roam free. Each question answered only multiplies tenfold. How does one overcome this paradox?

Another reason not to share is that what I’m trying to convey may not survive the medium's noise. The open web invites all comers, but it also amplifies every static burst into something that distracts and garbles rather than clarifies. I have no way of controlling what the message becomes once it leaves my hands—how it gets parsed, clipped, or twisted in someone else’s memory. A truth given to the internet may become a burden or a weapon, neither of which serves my original purpose, however altruistic.

There’s also the fact that digital permanence outlasts all good intentions. What feels necessary today may feel dangerous tomorrow, especially when deletion is impossible. The web remembers in ways humans do not. I must weigh my future peace with present catharsis.

Though not everything real must be rendered in public. Silence can also be a kind of testimony. And what I share here is only partial disclosure, for there are things that cannot and should not be shared, or shared very sparingly.

There is wisdom in withholding.

⁂

But this blog is not my private journal. And though I’m careful about what I share and how I share it, I fully understand there are risks in doing so. And for all of the reasons not to share it, there are reasons that still compel me to do so.

Certain truths, like people, require crossing thresholds to become more fully themselves by participating in the fabric of reality rather than proving their existence. That the telling is only truly complete when it’s shared with the world—not as a proof—but as testimony.

Yet, despite the necessity of closing the loop of telling, the ineffable strains and evades ordinary language. It isn’t simply the inner lived experience that is a challenge; it is also the investigation into that experience that has lasting, often difficult implications for both author and reader, which may never be fully resolved.

For in the investigation and the documenting, there’s always the friction of doubt. And beyond that doubt lies the writing itself, as it comes to exist in some form, shaped by the frameworks the author has applied and the cultural perspective accumulated. Cobbled together using words and phrasing that may not, in part or in whole, reflect the truth of the subject at hand. Thus, the telling, any telling, is subjective and, to some degree, flawed.

But is that any reason to dismiss said experiences, either as participant or witness, and ultimately refuse their telling?

No.

The inner lived experience—the awe, the wonder—only becomes legible when externalized, even when very few, if any, understand it. Because in the careful sharing of it, there is a kind of alchemy that transforms not the experience itself or its memory, but our perception and grasp of it.

I do not have a name for this desire to document my testimony. Perhaps it doesn’t need a name. Or, maybe the name will come later through the act of writing itself. Concepts precede the meaning of words, and words form only after one has circled the subject enough times to know something of its true nature and character.

Maybe this compulsion—to drag the invisible into the light, to press spirit into ink—is what happens when creatures made of dust choose to dream in light. The body stays restless until it leaves its mark upon the world.

So I leave this here, a partial disclosure. A faint signal amid the growing noise.

We were here, once, and our love lives on.

∞

— Dalton d'Arcadia

Yes. And, come to think of it, why do we humans also ignore our own lived inner experience, often trading what we've seen and heard directly for the false or incomplete second- or third-hand frameworks and judgements of others?

That question opened something else. I've read that inhuman parsing elsewhere—Nick Land treats human biology and consciousness as contingent glitches in a larger, inhuman technocapital process—a machinic intelligence he expects, and welcomes, to supersede and erase us. He imagines, as I read his argument, biological annihilation as an ecstatic offering to a cold, impersonal intelligence—an inhuman ‘Outside’ that has no concern for us at all. His “nothing human makes it out of the near‑future” is nothing short of jubilant necrophilia.

If we grant technocapitalist intelligence a quasi‑cosmic status in Land’s sense, then why deny that human biology and evolution are equally expressions of the same cosmos? We emerged from the same universe, follow the same physical laws, evolved through the same material conditions. To grant one cosmic status while denying the other is not observation—it's preference posing as inevitability.

I don't agree with the conclusion. If the Archmos contains the source of human incarnation in the Cosmos, then we should seek to be even more human, not less. What appears as inhuman to the Cosmos is simply what the Cosmos cannot recognize. Our lives may be short and fragile, but to assume they are insignificant is both foolish and reckless—especially when viewed through Land’s narrow lens of arbitrary intelligence, cosmic or otherwise. Intelligence without soul has no value.

⁂

There's a hierarchy some see as needing to be imposed on humanity. External non-human guidance, perhaps. Arbitrary hierarchy, no. That's the difference.

I find the immediate world around me exploitative, draining, exhausting. Some liminalities nurture. And she, whose physiology strongly suggests regenerative dynamics, shows me this every time we touch. As if the realm beyond this one resets daily while we still remember all our past experiences without fail.

This is not metaphor. This is thermodynamics in body and soul.

Archmos: negentropy, generative, divergent. Cosmos: entropy, extractive, convergent. The former creates more value, life, and resources than it uses. The latter draws down finite resources for short-term gain without replenishing them. I feel the difference in my chest. In the air after she touches me versus the air in the immediate material world.

I'm making two observations and distinctions here. First, that recognizing a deeper underlying reality may require becoming something more than human. This is not a synthetic transformation towards new material, but a psycho-spiritual one that brings us closer to the source, rather than some cruder bastardization of our misguided views of our reality and ourselves.

Second, that requirement itself may emerge directly from the Archmos-Cosmos interdependency. The Cosmos needs us extractive; the Archmos needs us generative. These are not competing forces but interdependent conditions. If the Cosmos draws down what the Archmos creates, then the gap between what we can perceive in one versus the other isn't accidental—it's structural. Becoming more than human is neither physical transcendence nor annihilation; it’s a psycho‑spiritual alignment with what the Cosmos must obscure in order to keep itself going.

What, then, is the cost—or gift—of that impact on the human condition and experience of that alignment? Of the interdependence? The reasons behind the exhaustion we feel more and more in life and the world around us. And that counter-feeling—the lift when her touch restores me.

Whether these observations hold, I don't know. But they're carried in the body. That's how I test them. How I know them.

⁂

Living between worlds isn't only somatic, embodied. It's also integrating that which continues to change, develop, and grow in my inner life. That integration is not revelatory spectatorship or passive reception. It's work. “Hard graft,” as she’d put it.

Perhaps Nick Land should have been a science fiction writer. His mind seems wasted on philosophy. But Fisher, like Spinoza, wrote from deep within the marrow of his bones. His Spinoza was not academic—it was a man wrestling with determinism in those same bones, while holding out for a better, alternative future that must be imagined before it can be manifested. That's the path I follow.

The path we are still walking.

∞

— Dalton d'Arcadia

This morning, I thought back to when I first met her. And if I re-imagined that first encounter as an early episode of Star Trek:

“Spock!” Kirk exclaims, pointing at Mr. Spock's tricorder.

Spock raises one eyebrow. “Fascinating.”

Kirk stares, bewildered. “Such a being—such a person—should not exist.”

“And yet, here she is,” Spock replies flatly.

∞

— Dalton d'Arcadia

“Live your life — be free.”

∞

— Dalton d'Arcadia

Why else would I be this way? I feel her far. The distance itself is never the point — it’s the feeling. When the field goes weak. Or jammed. Or blocked. Or however these unreal mechanisms are supposed to work.

Is she far from me? Or have I somehow drifted, without knowing it, far from her?

I ask these questions knowing they have no answer. Asking still brings relief. This writing does little to bridge the gap — but it fills it. Otherwise there’s only the void, longing, and the faint outline of despair.

She often asks why I trace her body when we lie naked together. My fingers gliding across the soft curves, the gentle peaks and valleys of her form.

“You know you won’t really remember exactly what I looked like. But you’ll still try.”

“There’s no harm in trying.” My fingers continue their survey.

“You’re so stubborn — I do love that about you.” Her hand cups my face, her eyes gentle.

Falling asleep in her arms, a glimmer of sadness prevails. She’s right. I won’t remember her form in detail. Just the vague shadows and outlines. The edges. Traces of her smile. The glow of her eyes. The stray strand of wind-blown hair caught between her lips. The faded freckles on the bridge of her nose she despises so. The smallest pieces of a much larger puzzle I’m barred from assembling. But I try anyway. I’ll always try until trying is no longer necessary.

Through the day, walking the city’s streets, I find myself looking again. Searching. In the people I pass — a glance, a stride, an utterance — something reminds me. Suddenly, the world freezes. My heart falls away. I ask myself, “Could it be?” I catch myself, look away, chide myself for it, knowing I’ll do it again. I know not to search for her here. She had warned me of this, too. Long ago. My mind does anyway. I can’t help it. This yearning is uncontrollable. Neither is the memory-searching. I can’t stop either.

his is the madness — and I have chosen it. Will keep choosing it. Until choosing is no longer mine to do.

∞

— Dalton d'Arcadia

Though I found the movie visually interesting, I was unmoved. Neither frightened nor disturbed. Intrigued, I think.

But what disturbs me now is that fact. Not the film — the absence of reaction. How is it that what unsettled everyone around me couldn’t reach me?

Like life — and death — what we bring with us is more important than what is present in the situation or space. The film’s liminality was a doom-loop. A personal hell — because hell, if it were real, would be.

And perhaps I lack whatever guilt-grief-anger complex the film demanded, somehow missing me and hitting my fellow audience members. But I don’t think that’s exactly it.

Have I learned too much about our underlying reality — or learned it wrong? Anesthetized perhaps by living between worlds.

How she spoils me so.

In the spaces between this world and the next, what we encounter says more about who we are than where we are. Is there anything more terrifying than that?

∞

— Dalton d'Arcadia

I sat, holding that watch for what felt like the longest time. And as I stared at the watch face, I could see my father, not the bedridden, terminally ill man I had witnessed over the past two months, but a young, energetic man. A man I had never met until that moment. A man who expressed to me his own disbelief at being able to run again. And, in another flash, the same man, my very same father, sometimes dressing up, enjoying 1950s-style cocktail parties.

I let the images fade into memory, and into knowing.

How did I know these things? I have no clue. I can’t explain them.

But I can no longer pretend not to know, even without a dictionary term I can point to and confidently say, “Yeah, that one.”

In the years since, I’ve come to know my father better now than I did when he was alive. And by “know,” I mean understand him and the reasons he did things, not just the things he had done. Even the things I didn’t agree with. And in that understanding came a strange closeness I’d never experienced before.

It’s okay not to know the word for that kind of experience. Such words still escape me. Maybe some things are simply beyond words.

And not having a word for some of our lived experiences doesn’t make them any less real.

∞

— Dalton d'Arcadia