Unstoryable.com is an experimental space for using language as perception rather than description. It treats writing not as a record of experience, but as a way of entering it—deepening contact between inner and outer worlds, between conscious awareness and pre-verbal knowing.

Inspired by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the project by John Koenig discussed in the video above, alongside David Bohm’s rheomode (Stamenov, 2004) and prior collaborative psychometric research in which I worked with colleagues to study atypical experiences of time and identity using conceptual metaphors, the project approaches language as an active force. Words here are not meant to capture what is already known, but to reshape how time, space, and relation are felt. Writing becomes a living experiment in world-contact, not self-expression.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The name Unstoryable draws partly on the work of David Boje (2014), who argued that conventional narrative is not neutral but restrictive. Linear stories impose a false order on experience. They compress complexity, exclude what does not fit, and harden meaning too quickly. A finished story is sealed. In that sense, it is no longer alive.

Boje used unstoryable to name what resists this closure. Not because it cannot be expressed, but because it exceeds narrative form. Experience does not arrive as a coherent arc. It exists as overlapping fragments, partial signals, and relational currents. In this view, storytelling is not representation but practice. It does not report reality from the outside. It participates in how reality is held and navigated.

Unstoryable names that open condition. It shifts writing away from producing a resolved account and toward sustained contact with what is present but under-formed. Meaning is not finalized. It remains in motion.

This space follows that logic. It treats the field as relational, a living terrain where multiple strands of experience coexist. The aim is to loosen the dominance of the narrative self and make room for forms of knowing that precede plot, identity, or explanation. This is not world-building. It is traversal. Writing here does not construct fiction or document the past. It opens passage into coexisting subjective realities that cannot be inhabited through story alone.

References

Boje, D. M. (2014). Storytelling organizational practices: Managing in the quantum age. Routledge.

Stamenov, M. I. (2004). The rheomode of language of David Bohm as a way to re-construct the access to physical reality. In G. G. Globus, K. H. Pribram, & G. Vitiello (Eds.), Brain and being: At the boundary between science, philosophy, language and arts (pp. 149–166). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/aicr.58.10sta