Living between worlds
A few months ago, I was walking down 7th Street near the arena when a young woman approached me and asked if she could pray with me. Skeptical and curious, I agreed. As I listened to her prayer, I followed the meaning of her words: a plea that I might obtain salvation through her conception of the divine, the supreme, the ordered heaven she envisioned above. I thanked her, declined her invitation to join her religion, and walked on to breakfast another block away.
There are truths that cannot be approached from without. They disclose themselves only when a particular geometry has been achieved: a witness standing in the necessary relation to a place, an hour, an object, an absence, or an event whose true beginning may lie elsewhere. Celestial motion — vast and indifferent.
We may often hear the word self-care, a term I first started hearing during the pandemic. When I queried this term on a search engine, here’s part of the definition that was displayed:
“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.” —Walter Benjamin
We never encounter anomalies in isolation. We always encounter them as part of larger structures and mechanisms.
I’m finding the term Anomalology to be very helpful in my research and investigation into anomalous experiences, including my own. Here’s the definition I’ve been working with for several months now:
I know now what I was never meant to know.
I would trade it. All of it. Without hesitation.
Knowing the way home isn’t the same as being there.
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.
Most of my days are spent thinking about, investigating, researching, and journaling the various aspects of my ongoing atopic (anomalous) experiences and the underlying circumstances. I once thought the experiences themselves were the hardest part. They're not — though that's not to say they're getting any easier either.
No, not hardly.
I suppose it’s presumptuous to assume that my posts are of any interest to anyone, let alone worthy of a few minutes of attention to be read. But that assumes I’m writing this because I desire or crave attention. Honestly, I do not.
But I am compelled, for reasons I myself do not entirely understand, to share my thoughts and opinions here on things that probably should not be shared.
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.