The third question
Having answered the first and second questions, the third and last question remains: how. How do I explain the inexplicable? How do I describe the indescribable? How do I share the unsharable? This may at first glance appear to be just a superficial, craft, or logistical question, but that assumption would be far from correct. The very question about how is, in fact, the most difficult question of the three. There are several reasons for this that I believe are intrinsic to the sharing of anomalous experiences.
First is the nature of method. Selecting the method to share your anomalous experience is shaped in part by the medium itself. The medium is, after all, the message. How we deliver a message, any message, shapes and determines the form and scale of human connection, cramming the actual content of the message itself into a small conceptual corner. For example, a short simple story, when told three ways, is no longer a single story but three that once told escape the confines of the witness, the teller, and the lived experience itself.
When we speak of an experience to a single listener from the comfort of a living room or coffee shop, the account stays rather soft as it can be corrected mid-sentence, laughed away, or even denied by the speaker the next day. When we write it down, the experience then hardens into narrative and message. The ink, whether physical or digital, solidifies that which memory held fluid and amorphous. Once written, the experience becomes a non-negotiable record. And when shared publicly, either online or in print, it is completely surrendered by the author, metabolized into the body of the internet, where it becomes indexed, searchable, logged, and permanent—passed to readers the author-witness never imagined, including the indifferent and malicious ones, to be interpreted and manipulated in whatever way the receiver chooses. Meaning is, after all, subjective and meaning-making is quentessentially human. In this way, the method isn’t just a container or mode of conveyance, it is also the dice roll that decides the experience-turned-narrative’s fate.
The method may provide some degree of shelter, such as the anonymity of a pen name or the veil of fiction, which try to screen the witness from exposure and likely ridicule or censure, particularly online. But this kind of shelter isn’t free, and usually costs the author-witness a degree of credibility and immediacy, forfeiting the raw power of direct testimony. Most witnesses, I suspect, once they’ve decided to share their anomalous experience, never consciously think through these costs and the chain of consequences resulting from them.
There is also the matter of closure. A journal, for example, is to some degree always unfinished as it is an ongoing record that follows the witness until their passing and never quite completes their integration. A published book, however, demands an ending that the experience likely never provided. Thus, choosing the method is also choosing which truth is told and the degree of completeness that truth embodies. It presents a paradox where the story goes on through the author-witness even as it has ended with publication. And neither is ever totally true.
Second is the nature of narrative. Selecting the narrative model is really a choice of form which, in turn, helps decide what claims the narrative makes about itself. Point of view, for example, shapes whether the narrative says “this happened to me” versus “this happened to someone else” versus “I’m just sharing what I heard.” None of these are correct or incorrect, but each has different weights and impacts on the receiver that the author-witness may or may not be aware of. This goes beyond simply stylistic choices since each one hides an epistemology without the author-witness’s knowledge or consent. So no matter the choice of POV, fact or fiction, diary or drama, the lived experience is always left incomplete and inexact in its telling.
One of the main reasons the question of how is the hardest of the three is that narrative models force the author-witness to commit to a particular truth among several possible truths that are each and all not wholly true. For example, first-person non-fiction must make a declaration of what the events actually were insofar as the author-witness understands them at the time of telling. Fiction lacks this obligation by holding the uncanny experience as both psychological and spiritual without collapsing one into the other. It can, I hope, honor the possibility that the truth is enigmatic and elusive beyond the witness, and perhaps even to the witness himself. Whether the witness is diarist, memoirist, or novelist, he is trapped in the reality of having to choose how to tell his lived experience knowing that his way of telling is itself an ontology inherent to the method. Three different narratives then become three different ontologies from the very same experience — a dynamic, I feel, that is far stranger than the anomalous experience itself.
Finally comes the cumulative domino effect. Having already answered questions one and two doesn’t mean that there aren’t impacts on the way one shares their experience. In fact, the way one answers questions one and two, and the underlying motivations behind them, have a direct impact on the way one will share their experience, and leave an indelible mark on the final output one shares. This is in many ways unavoidable and, in turn, can be viewed as a feature, a flaw, or both of the decision to share the anomalous experience fully or in part.
Though I’ve presented the three questions in a sequence, the reality is that all three are interconnected, creating a loop where any change to one has a domino effect on the others, and, as a result, the final output. The sequence is subjective and once undertaken becomes unimportant.
Because of this, I find myself frequently getting lost in the labyrinth of my responses to each of these questions and the dynamic it creates among them. And I’ll admit that I’m continually struggling with my responses. I recently answered questions one and two completely, only to get mired in question three, falling deep into a rabbit hole I still can find no way out of.
And I’m certain that the more complex one’s anomalous experience, the more difficult each of these questions becomes. But for those who have integrated their experiences, even somewhat, they’ve come to realize in their own individual way that none of this is simple or straightforward, and I would doubt the testimony of anyone who presents their story as such. Not because the narrative of their experience isn’t simple, it may very well be, but any contact with the anomalous is far from simple both in terms of its substance and its effects on the witness, both short and long term.
I’m uncertain how long I’ll remain lost in the labyrinth of my own reasoning, but I hope that there is an end soon. The cognitive overhead is already overwhelming, only making the challenges of living between worlds all the more difficult.
But I also know that buried deep inside these coveats and cautions are my deepest self-doubts and fears of failing to manifest my own experiences in a world that might likely mock and reject them. I guess that is why there is courage, though I do not know how I shall find it.
By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.