“Para”normal and the Failure of Language

By Nicola Cates

What comes to mind when someone says the paranormal? Is it ghosts of dead natives haunting the new residents of a house built on their graves? Or perhaps a demon lord controlling a cult to commit sacrifices? Maybe even the vengeful resurrected corpse of a summer camper who died killing the counselors who neglected him? All of these ideas of the paranormal stem from popular culture using the paranormal as an entertainment trope. In reality the paranormal is everywhere but we lack the culture and language to fully see it. Which is why we need a new culture… a Paranormal Culture. 

I understand why many people have a hard time understanding the paranormal. By definition it seems impossible. How can something exist which is outside of the possible? The thing is though, the paranormal is not the impossible happening, it is momentary shifts in what is possible. It is the unrepeatable, not the unexplainable, it is spontaneous, not the un-documentable. That string of words is very intentional, documentable, explainable, repeatability, are some of the base concepts in the scientific method. If there is something you don’t understand then document it and try to explain it. Does that explanation lead to another question, document that and repeat from the beginning.  While an oversimplification of the scientific method it gets the point across. What is that point? That the paranormal is strange and sometimes rubs against our understanding of the natural (or normal) world, but that shouldn’t disqualify it from being taken seriously. 

There are many concepts which can’t coexist with our view of ‘normal’ reality. And despite this we have no problem accepting these instances of breaking normality. Zeno’s Achilles paradox is a perfect example of this. The Achilles paradox goes as such; Achilles decides to race a tortoise, but to make it fair Achilles will run half of the race and wait for 30 seconds. After that he will run half of what’s left and wait 15 seconds. Then he will run half of what’s left after that and wait 7.5 seconds, and so on and so on for infinity. The problem is if Achilles does that he would never finish the race as there will always be half of the distance and time he just traveled. No matter how many times you divide a distance in half you will never reach zero, so Achilles will never finish the race. No serious person would suggest that it is impossible to finish a race, in fact we have plenty of evidence towards the contrary. Yet, there is no problem in the logic, you can always find a shorter distance and shorter increment of time. It is turtles (or should I say tortoises) all the way. The ‘normal’ understanding of reality and the application of Zeno’s sound logic can not coexist, one seemingly cancels out the other, yet they do coexist and everyone is fine with it. Why not then don’t we consider this outside the normal? By definition isn’t Achilles’ race beyond the concept of reality? 

There is another problem  with the paranormal in regards to our culture and our language. The fact is it is not very well suited for talking about the temporary, the “para”. See the literal breakdown of “para” is outside of, so the paranormal should literally be things outside the normal. What exactly being “outside” the normal is isn’t clear. Lots of things are outside of the normal. Anything with some barrier of statistical anomaly could be paranormal. Right now as I’m writing this the Atlanta Falcons are 1st place in the NFC south, taking the last decade into consideration that is absolutely outside the normal. While Tom Brady’s downfall might be because his wife is a witch I still struggle to believe the Falcons success as paranormal. Then there is the strict interpretation where ‘normal’ takes the place of ‘possible’ meaning the paranormal is ‘outside of the possible’, and therefore can’t exist. As  well the cultural definition has similar problems, that definition being “phenomena outside of normal scientific understanding”. The vagueness of normal scientific understanding aside, there are a million interpretations of phenomena. It seems we are left with a dilemma… 

If the paranormal is ‘real’ then it wouldn’t be paranormal, but if the paranormal isn’t real and is instead a category of improbable things tied to coincidence then almost everything is ‘paranormal.’. 

All of this is to show that we don’t yet have the language to properly discuss the ‘paranormal’. So how could we even begin to discuss the depths of, the unrepeatable, the momentarily  possible, the improbable and possibly coincidental, the “real” yet not unreal, and the paradoxical, when it just took me twenty words to even describe the concept? For now “paranormal” is a placeholder. In my opinion a shabby and barely working placeholder but there are more important things to discover. And I hope you, dear reader, will join us in the creation of a new culture, a Paranormal Culture. 

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