Yesterday, I was looking up a word from my reading notes of Carl Sagan’s final book, Billions and Billions: adumbration. When I looked it up, I was given the verb ‘adumbrate,’ which seems to mean one of three things, according to Merriam Webster: 

• “To foreshadow vaguely; intimate”
• “To suggest, disclose, or outline partially”
• “Overshadow, obscure”

The online editors also offer some helpful context, quipping: “Don’t throw shade our way if you’ve never crossed paths with adumbrate—the word’s shadow rarely falls across the pages of casual texts.” It’s typically used in academic and political writing, which explains why Sagan was using it in a politically-leaning science book, as simply meaning “to foreshadow.” Thanks to its Latin root umbra — meaning “shadow” — the editors suggest “it’s a word worth knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

Silly wordplay aside, in Sagan’s context, he was talking about glimpsing into the wonders of the cosmos, seeking obscured universal truths — adumbrations — in the shadows. It seems that while he was writing for a general audience, his tendency towards the academic was always present. I’d say in an academic sense that being vague can work in your favor, and the use of the verb form of intimate is something I should note here. Yes, intimate as a verb is quite a different word than its more popular adjective form; in this case, intimate means either to ‘to communicate delicately and indirectly’ (essentially, hint at something) or ‘to make known especially publicly or formally.’ It puzzles me that these two meanings, which are so variable in intensity, can both be suggested by the same verb, but such is the absurdly context-rich nature of the English language. 

The way I’m using the noun form for this essay, adumbration, leans heavily into the transitive verb’s second meaning, partially suggesting or outlining ideas and concepts that hint towards a larger overall philosophy or worldview. Many of my own works are often little more than clever adumbrations — partial outlines or half-baked ideas obscured by my very own knack for leaving most of my writings frustratingly open-ended and incomplete.

How I take this word, especially with its Latin root being what it is, is quite useful for reckoning with my own earthbound shadows. I’m talking about those things we only gesture towards with our words and actions because we’re still becoming brave enough to speak them, or even fully realize or acknowledge them.

I can also see myself in the near future using the third meaning of overshadowing or obscuring because in many of my own personal works, I do tend to obscure or overshadow certain truths that I’m not quite ready to share. I think this is okay to a point, as long as you’re not just burying the reader in shadow, which is something many academic texts end up doing for many people, myself included.

The reason I decided to use this relatively rare word for the title and overall theme of this essay is that in my current Recalibrate era, I’m trying to far better appreciate these little sketches, half-formed ideas, and suggestions towards grander themes that are scattered across my notes and writing archives for what they are. Yes, they can be seen as raw material for something greater, but they’re also little artifacts in and of themselves that deserve more love, care, and attention. I don’t need to be shouting into the void so often, as that gets me nowhere any way. I need to be content with just letting some ideas hum in the background on the back burner until I’m ready to return to them. 

Because of my overwhelming backlog of adumbrations, I created an open notebook, repurposing my old Obscure Curiosities website as a sort of philosophically-leaning digital garden. Turns out, that was the perfect branding for exactly what I’m trying to do, gather all these adumbrations and give them life as open threads for anyone to parse and use as their own creative firestarters. 

Since there’s no need for me to appease the algorithm gods anymore, I can allow myself to trace the contours of thoughts without attempting to rush them into final forms. I don’t need to be hasty with setting out the baked goods before they’ve fully risen, no longer hoarding my ideas like some anxious dragon. While I’ve had a few flirtations with the sublime (nod to Longinus) throughout the years with some truly profound essays that seemed to write themselves, I realize this doesn’t happen often, nor should it.

Carl Sagan himself was certainly one to gesture at enormity. He was talking about the cosmos after all. My focus was once aimed towards the stars, too, but I think we have enough obscured stars ready to shine right here among us, so I’ve shifted my eyes back to more earthbound concerns. I’m not saying we shouldn’t look up; after all, one of my favorite all-time quotes is from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.” But I think so many of us can get caught up in imaginary infinities when we have a lot we can do right here and now. 

Sagan himself was clear that we need to clean up our own messes on our own planet before we get truly serious about space exploration. I need to clean up my own mess within my writing archives, too, but whereas before I was sort of just doing spring cleaning and just discarding what didn’t work anymore, I didn’t have much of a plan with what to do with what was leftover. So, kind of like with donating items we don’t need anymore to a local charity or thrift, it seems like Obscure Curiosities is the perfect way to put my half-formed ideas and obscure discoveries out into the world. I’m never going to fully satisfy them all. 

I’ve recently chosen to focus on those threads that fit into one or more of four pillars: Criticism, Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Philosophy. Anything else can be safely filed away as retired threads, but I’m sure to post these too, even just in archival PDF form, to acknowledge their existence, long as I feel they still may have some value to someone else. Why bog down my primary website and the digital garden with things that just don’t connect to anything currently relevant? Why those four pillars? Well, they spell out CRAP, which is hilarious because that was entirely unintentional. But it’s also just where a lot of my best work tends to go, down one or more of these paths. It’s the guiding principle I’ve been seeking for decades, and somehow, this CRAP just fell into my lap!

Lately, I’ve just felt emotionally and mentally overwhelmed. It’s not just with life and the greater world, in general. As I’m approaching age forty, I’m looking to secure some sort of legacy with my words. Right now, it’s a few hundred essays, plus over a thousand drafts, and tons of reading notes, journals, and appendices. There’s also four published books, some of which have revised versions of their component parts online. For me, writing is never finished, even if some versions inevitably become abandoned to some arbitrary state of completion. This is why having Obscure Curiosities as a place I can constantly tweak without constantly picking away at my more complete works like the essays on The Phoenix Desertsong is so vital for me to have. 

I need to constantly be in motion as a writer; it’s just how I operate. As soon as I step away from writing for too long, I stagnate. This is why this single-word definition essay focused series has come to exist; it’s my way of overcoming a long period of creative stagnation. I haven’t stopped writing, per se, but it’s been a struggle lately juggling my daily mess of adumbrations, all these not-quite-answers and the messy evolution of my jumbled thoughts as they move from feeling to adumbrated articulation.

Because we live in such an algorithm-driven time, it seems there’s been increasing fetishization of clarity and transparency in written works. I’m fairly certain that things becoming too cut and dry — especially when these works intentionally leave out key facts and are written to deceive anyway — is why the literary classics of past centuries have enjoyed such a major resurgence in the 2020’s. Sometimes, we need to enjoy a bit of shade to let certain ideas sit with us and being constantly bombarded by information just isn’t healthy for human beings. We need to leave some space in the margins of our thinking, because otherwise we’ll fall into these polarizing black-and-white columns of thought that so many of us do. There’s power in writing (and reading) suggestions, incomplete works, and not-quite-there arguments. We don’t need to answer absolutely everything; we just need to keep asking better questions and open up more avenues of possibility.

The beauty of these definition essays is that they sort of create their own frameworks so that I don’t have to force an outline. I can let my thoughts meander a bit long as I remain within the blurry edges of defined meaning from a consistent authority, in this case Merriam-Webster. It always fascinates just how many meanings even the most obscure (and common) words truly have in the English language, and I’m sure this is the case for pretty much every tongue out there. 

Part of why I struggle to learn foreign languages is that I have a hard enough time trying to reconcile the many quirks of English as my mother tongue. But I do plan to introduce some “foreign” words into this series that may not have direct translations into English, simply because those types of words fascinate me so much. Heck, English borrows from so many other languages that the quantity of words we’ve stolen from across the world could make your head spin. These ‘loanwords’ make up around eighty percent of English!

Anyway, before I go off on any more tangents, I should probably wrap up this latest essay with some straightforward advice. Don’t feel like you have to pin down the truth, because very likely, you’re going to often stumble across some new piece of information that changes your opinion of something, your approach to your daily life, or perhaps even your entire worldview. Being flexible often means finding ways to express our thoughts, no matter how scattered and adumbrated they may seem, without ourselves getting too much in our own heads. And lately, my autistic fog has definitely left me stuck in my head all too often, especially at night when I have nothing else to distract me but not the energy to be productive on something. Even as I’ve been struggling to find myself lately, these essays are giving me hope that I still have plenty of things worthy of writing. Hopefully, you find them just as worthy of reading.

~ Amelia Desertsong