But some points innately evade mapping because their geometry exceeds that of things like tables, forests, skyscrapers, and planets. There’s a particular class of place that exists that is altogether different, and whose property it is to share no border with any other place we commonly call a place. None, whatsoever. These places cannot be near or far, since nearness and farness presuppose contiguity, shared relativity, and material coherence in kind. They cannot be near. Nor can they be far. As such, one does not travel to them. One is admitted only at certain times and places. Willingly or not, by virtue of their personal constitution and circumstances alone. It’s a strange sort of proclivity of their doors whose locks demand a very unique, immaterial key.

I know of such a place, though it is one of many. I feel I’m obliged to phrase my statements here very carefully, because I did not arrive at it and I have never departed from it, and yet I know it as one knows a childhood bedroom: by the particular way the light falls on a summer’s evening, by the air that holds the smell of the sea and wildflowers in the way of the gentlest lingering aromas that fade but are not forgotten. Any sensible person knows that one cannot remember a place never visited. This is a fact I cannot dispute. I can only report that the memories exist, complete in every detail because they are lived experience; however, I might struggle to point to them in an atlas book or on an astronomical map. Perhaps memory is a composite of experiences both within and without, between and betwixt. Perhaps we remember things on behalf of others. Dearest memories of our dearest others.

There are somatic signs. I know them precisely. On an ordinary August evening as the sun lazily creeps behind the western mountains, the room around me falls away. No, that’s not quite right. Rather, it fades like sand in an hourglass, revealing another shared household entirely. The duality defies the clocks on my bedside table, analog and digital. Was it only a few seconds or a few hours? I shut my eyes, hoping to retain the dimming light of that other household’s light for just a moment longer, so that I may imprint it permanently onto my memory, knowing the grief will linger whether I’m successful or not.

Grief is the word. It is precise, in the same way one grieves the dead. The etiquette is ancient and generous, with its rituals and ceremonies. For the mourner of a household that sits empty, waiting for its owners to return, in a country absent from any and every known atlas, there are few if any salves for the emptiness that follows. I have looked. That absence is suggestive. A negative is also a datum. Proof that some experiences remain undocumented because a reasonable person decides not to report them. I, however, am predisposed to be less reasonable and so I continue to pen these pages.

Other writers long before me have attempted the same. Writings that obliquely touch the corners of my growing pages. Hints of lands undiscovered and filled with visceral detail that defy even the most imaginative of people, and confound the most learned. Most accounts are treated as fiction, but I doubt that is what the authors meant when they scratched ink across the paper in the dead of night with only a dim oil lamp and a handful of brief, uncanny memories to guide their hand. I suppose there’s a sort of solace in that, too. At least, I’d like to think so. Not as a validation or even a kind of consolation. Rather, as an asynchronous companion who says: This is what happened to me. If you’re reading this from wherever and whenever you are, did it happen to you too?

Sometimes knowing that certain individuals hold the same address, one that appears on no register, and that neither of them renounces it. The owners hold the deed, and only the house knows their names.

Whatever the ontology, and I no longer believe the question will resolve itself, my practice is simple. I wait, however impatiently, since patience assumes a legible schedule, and I lack the access and faculties to read the astronomical geometries that would name the date, time, and place. No, I wait in the manner of a man who keeps a lamp in the window because the lamp is the portion of the nature and substance that belongs to him. Promises can be figurative. Lamps are literal. And mine is lit in the direction of the place I cannot yet go.

I suspect there are others like me, scattered across the world and throughout human history, who are also custodians of at least one such place. The distances and coordinates may differ — an ocean, a death, a fenceless border, a wall without beginning or end — but the space of longing is universal, and the Nation of Exiles issues no passports and takes no census. Somewhere, without any material proof of citizenship, we manage to keep a lamp burning. A reminder of a home close and far away, and the warmth and love that waits to rekindle there.

#Intermundia #Anomalology

By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Fellow exiles are welcome.

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.

Does writing this go against my better judgment? That depends. What constitutes ‘better’ judgment? Is it the act, the process, the substance, or the consequence of such writings? Writings that would certainly be labeled as strange at least, insane at most. Or, worse perhaps, as I have a limited imagination.

As a writer, I’m a mere amateur. This means I have something to say but lack the language to make it truly compelling and memorable. But after five decades on this earth, the prose I offer here is likely the fullest and best version of my written capabilities.

But that doesn’t really answer the question of why I’m doing this. And after much soul-searching and back-and-forth in my mind, the best answer I can offer is this: Because to keep what burns inside me has begun to devour me from within.

Speaking my truth to the world is better than letting my inner world consume me whole.

I recognize the risks.

Our world has tidy boxes for what it considers untidy things, no matter how wrong the world’s boxes may be.

Human societies and civilizations have a long history of misunderstanding, preservation bias, and erasure when it comes to the weird, anomalous, or uncanny — the atopic. The system is efficient and expedient with its assigning of labels: episode, delusions, possession, psychosis, blasphemy, mania, hallucination. Pick your favorite. The thesaurus has plenty more. And modern medicine has an endless array of chemicals they’re happy to pump into you at cost, while religion has an endless array of dogmatic corrections they’re happy to also pump into you at cost.

To both I say, “I’d rather not.”

I suppose it's safer and easier to stay silent. After all, there’s no real benefit for me here other than some hope of processing, integration, and, if I’m lucky, a bit of solace. I thought I’d say peace of mind, but that seems impossible at this point. At least, not in this lifetime. Silence would certainly keep me out of the vile filing systems of this world. But.

Silence also corrodes.

If left unmanaged, some unspoken words and thoughts become toxic. They rush the mind, body, and soul like a firestorm, leaving nothing but ash and cinder in their wake.

And there’s a naive part of me that clings to the old-fashioned notion that the sort of thing that happens to one person and is never shared has no resistance against the onslaught of preservation bias and erasure the world never seems to get enough of.

No.

It folds inward. It becomes indistinguishable from reverie, invention, and madness. Writing it down, even into the void of the internet where no one listens, and no one cares, gives it the one thing silence can’t: continued existence outside the tiny vessel of the mind that now contains it.

This is all I have to offer the world.

#Intermundia #Philology #Anomalology

By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Fellow exiles are welcome.

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.

#Anomalology #Philology

By D. Bowman

Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Fellow exiles are welcome.

I’m well aware that what I write here has little chance of being seen, let alone believed.

Yet, I offer my testimony anyway.

An uncertain act for an equally uncertain world.

#Intermundia #Anomalology

By D. Bowman

Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Fellow exiles are welcome.

#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.