I was perusing John French’s 1650 English translation of a text by Michael Sendivogius and found a tale of a poor alchemist who was visited once in a dream by an old man, and then spends his days trying to initiate another visit.
Upon rereading A place I cannot yet go, I noticed my framing through the use of the word yet. Such a small but profound word. Yet is not soon. Soon measures distance on a clock, the ticks that jump from second to second, as if time were some supreme mechanism ticking toward an appointed hour. But time is less a matter of gearworks than of celestial motion, bodies turning in relation to one another — souls intertwined despite and because of their geometry. Yet asserts not when but where, a place behind a door that only one key can open, and that key belongs to a particular hand.
When forming an understanding of anomalous experiences, it helps to ask the history and meaning of the concepts and terminology it has evolved from, and what those words were attempting to do. For that, the word “Spiritualism” and the history surrounding it is a worthy starting point, keeping in mind that people have had what is conventionally now known as ‘spiritual experiences’ throughout the world and history. The Encyclopedia Britannica in the early 20th century described “Spiritualism” as:
I came upon this quote while searching a book from my library regarding what to make of alleged psychical (anomalous) experiences when corroboration is lacking or insufficient:
I have lived my life surrounded by a series of synchronistic experiences nearly always focused on music as a means of conveying the quality of certain relationships, events, and their meanings. I never paid them any mind until this year, having chalked up such experiences to nostalgia, trauma, and other such joys and sorrows one collects as evidence of living.
There are different kinds of places we call home. The one the nomad calls wherever they may roam. The one the exile calls when there’s nowhere else to go. The kind I remember from childhood and can never return to. No place now to truly call home.
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:
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.