Nomina Numina

Anomalology

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.

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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.

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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.

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For the past 40 years, I've lived my life as a logical empiricist who refused to believe or deny anything that could not be proven objectively. Recent anomalous experiences have made that position untenable.

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#Philology

Philology concerns the reading, transmission, interpretation, and afterlife of texts. It gathers notes on words, names, translations, fragments, documents, variant readings, inherited traditions, and the unstable histories through which meaning survives or changes, including mythic or cryptic texts.

#Anomalology

Anomalology is the careful study of anomalous experience: experiences that resist easy explanation, and the evidence, language, memory, cultural context, and competing interpretations through which they are understood.

#Intermundia

Intermundia is testimony from a life between worlds: reflections on liminality as it is lived rather than solved. It gathers accounts of estrangement, grief, memory, wonder, spiritual dislocation, ordinary endurance, and the persistent work of making meaning in an unresolved place.