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.

#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.