[from the archives] the liminal and the liminoid
from January 2021. revisiting liminality and the idea that "liminal spaces may be the most 2020 of trends." feat. Victor Turner and Jane Hirschfield
The artwork in this issue comes from Hamonshū, a 1903 study of waves, ripples, and water movement by Japanese artist Mori Yuzan. Since moving to Sweden the ocean has been so much more present in my life and waves have become such a symbol for me this past year in particular—undulations, swells and troughs seem the only predictable cadence of things.
hello friend,
It feels like ages since I’ve landed here with you, and even though it was just a short hiatus, ages seem to have found their way in—we’ve endured a coup attempt, a vaccine rollout, new virus mutations, Trump’s exit (hallelujah), & are navigating a host of other existentially overwhelming things (collectively and individually). In the midst of it all, it’s good to be back in this little corner of the interwaves; I missed you.
During our pause, a surprising number of you forwarded me this article from Ann Friedman’s newsletter — “liminal spaces may be the most 2020 of all trends”—which I read with great interest. If on-trend means dumpster-fire-chic, I’m so proud we are on trend(!!) Uptakes of words always fascinate me, especially this one. I understand the attraction of “liminal” when taken, as the article self-described, as “its internetty version”: the eeriness and discomfort, the “dismaying” feeling of being neither here nor there, that interminable middle-ground characterizing so much of our day-to-day lives in Pandemia (pandemic-era).
But there’s something we miss when we think of liminality as merely the in-between or not-yet. In anthropology, liminality is slightly different than its Latin translation (līmin // threshold). It’s inextricable from the study of ritual, symbolism, and rites of passage, as put forth by Arnold van Gennep (1908) and, more popularly, Victor Turner (1960). Rituals, in many societies, mark off the boundaries of liminal space. Liminality is that formless & identity-less spacetime right before—no longer what we were; not yet what we’ll become—a ritual marks a new symbolic identity.
Life, on both personal and societal levels, is essentially a series of punctuated liminal spaces. This is nothing new. What’s new is that now many of our liminalities are intersecting+colliding simultaneously, projected up and down scales. Old rituals are needing to be redefined, transformed, improvised, regenerated to survive.
Liminality, in its formlessness and destruction, is also a space of exceptional creativity. Hidden deep in Turner’s pages is another term—the liminoid—which suggests that sometimes even ritual is not enough to cement a new way of being. The transition is, quite simply, nonexistent. The liminoid is a state of permanent statelessness, one in which play and creativity supplant structure and stability. Flux becomes permanence. I can’t decide if this is comforting, exciting, or horrifying.
This January, I’m finding myself plunked right back into the thick of things, all the lessons I thought I’d downloaded from the School of Pandemia (the conditionality of time; the myth of certainty; my own struggles with control) knocking on the tired door of my endurance. I’m (potentially) about to complete (in May?) my PhD, working for 6 years(!!) on this project that has quite literally changed the course of my life (as in, led me to move countries, meet my human, and blew wide open my imagination for my career let alone life). The reality is, I won’t know till a month before (complicated job market things). So, I’m racing a clock I have no clue when will expire. I’m mourning not only the ritual but the myth of being able to anticipate it. I’m worried that I won’t see it till it’s in my rearview. Will it be a Zoom defense? Will the last time I’ll see all my colleagues and advisors be in their little tiny screensquares? Those questions bely the bigger ones haunting me during this quiet work—Do I even want the structure I’ve worked so hard and long to sculpt myself to? (when) will I jump ship on a traditional academic career? Will I land in the liminoid? I can say a lot more about this, and probably will in future issues.
Anyways, my moods as of late have been mirroring the Nordic winter, and as much as I try to keep these letters inspiring and uplifting, I can’t write to you from where I’m not. So, in effort to remind myself that we don’t have to be in a certain ideal affective space in order to write/speak/share, this is me just showing up.
Issue 13 of T H E | L I M I N A L is a space to reflect on (grieve? digest?) new flavors of the same things—not-knowing, in-betweenness—but especially life in the absence of Ritual as we know it, and the mundaneness of the rituals we perform every day without knowing it. It’s a meditation on the liminal and the liminoid.
Things are going to look a little different around here this season. I’m not entirely sure in what way, but we’re going to experiment with content and form. I’m kicking off two new series—Spilled Thoughts (below)—and, beginning in February, Portraits, featuring mini-interview portraits with makers/thinkers/ doers/healers in this community. You all are so brilliant I can’t wait to share and celebrate your vibrance with each other.
Thank you, as always, for being here. Let’s dive in.
xx
A
VOICE
The Envoy by Jane Hirshfield
One day in that room, a small rat. // Two days later, a snake.
Who, seeing me enter, // whipped the long stripe of his //
body under the bed, // then curled like a docile house-pet.
I don’t know how either came or left. // Later, the flashlight found nothing.
For a year I watched //as something—terror? happiness? grief?— //
entered and then left my body.
Not knowing how it came in, // Not knowing how it went out.
It hung where words could not reach it. // It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat, // neither sensualist nor ascetic.
There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.
Through them // the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.
SPILLED WORDS
2021 I’ll be sharing more of my personal writing in-process, in-formation. terrifying, but thank you for holding a space that feels safe to experiment in. this one’s for the mornings that feel like mountains you’re daunted to climb.
today’s ritual is
Bear with me. I want to tell you something about the fog. Not the kind that creeps on little cat feet but the kind that settles in to the crevices of your grey matter before you wake up. Today’s ritual is rolling over in the tangle of blankets and hoping it’s gone but it’s not, that fog between your scapula and the hollow of your chest. “Oh, you again.” Today’s ritual is not being surprised that the hard things take time to leave out the door and maybe they never do, try as you may to show them the way out.
Here’s what I want you to know: that the days and weeks are blurring together and in theory I don’t want to wish them away, but practice is not theory. I’ve grown to resent this waiting; it too resides in the space between my shoulder blades and the hollow of my chest, a bubble about to burst. I’m dragging Hope around by her collar and she’s digging in her paws her claws her heels. It’s Tuesday, which is to say it’s Saturday.
Today’s ritual is the still sound-asleep body of my husband next to me, his skin slightly cool-velvet under the blankets, and realising he’s the only in-human contact I have, the closest thing that sometimes feels far away.
What I’m trying to say is: there are real human limits to that which you can affect. Maybe the thing to ask for is not relief but release. What can you release? The expectation you’ll wake up and one day it’s gone, like that, and the birds are singing and the city facades are technicolor and so are you. No, it won’t be immediate, but maybe there’s technicolor too in the way that you roll over onto your stomach, swallow your grief like it’s nourishment, and roll your toes onto the cold floor, lifting yourself up into the world anyway, even if today “the world” is contained in the few walls of your apartment, or the few walls of your human animal body.
Trust this: that it won’t go on this way forever, but that you don’t know how long this not-forever will last, or what it will look like “after.” That just because you feel deeply doesn’t mean it is wrong. That just because you don’t doesn’t mean that it is right.
Today’s ritual is about the space between you on your back and you on your feet.
“There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.”
It’s that pause when you ask yourself “even today?” And the answer from somewhere you can’t quite locate—its own statement or just an echo?—nods “even today.”
Today’s ritual is not about writing the day before it’s done. It’s about taking the evidence around you to know that you can’t. It’s the scorched oatmeal that sticks to the pot and needs to be soaked for hours before it can come loose.
The good thing about fog is that it burns. I won’t soon forget that puffy-coated hug just us after we scrambled on crab legs down that cliff to the rocky beach below. Through the fake fur lining of my parka hood framed by the edge of yours, held, I could see the fragments of landscape: ocean, sky, horizon cross-cutting the frame of fur and black puff here and there, and all I recall really is for that moment, the sky was so damn blue.
WRITING PROMPTS
What is your relationship to ritual?
What separates big-R Ritual (i.e. social performances/ceremonies like weddings, graduations, inaugurations) and little-r ritual (i.e. the mundane habits you do on a day-to-day basis)?
If R/ritual were a feeling in the body, where/what would it feel like?
Can you write about a routine you do every single day (like brushing your teeth, getting out of bed) as if it were as important a ritual as Ritual?
RESOURCES
OFFERING:
WITHIN SEASON 2, my series on yoga + embodied writing, is currently underway and these humans are blowing me away with their curiosity, bravery, and willingness to show up for themselves and each other through movement, inquiry and writing. Our gatherings really are the highlight of my weeks. I’m not sure when I’ll offer another session (not this spring as I’m finishing the PhD), but please pop your name on the waitlist if interested and you’ll be the first to know about the next series.
DOING:
THE 100 DAYS PROJECT || A free global art project that takes place over 100 days begins Sunday, Jan 31. Join me! I’m going to be spending 100 days writing at least 15 minutes of my own stuff, posting one line a day from it on the blog.
CREATIVE MORNINGS || A monthly breakfast speaker series in cities around the globe, focused on creative careers and entrepreneurship. Something I’m looking forward to attending live in Malmö once we can meet in-person again, but if your eyeballs haven’t fallen out yet, there’s always Zoom.
WATCHING:
"The Scared is scared" || I discovered this film on the eve of graduating college back in 2013, and I return to it whenever I’m feeling scared or anxious. A soothing, humorous take on fear and possibility from the perspective of a six year old.
LISTENING:
Jacqueline Suskin’s EVERY DAY IS A POEM course on Insight Timer.
I also really appreciated Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow’s analysis of the inauguration on Call Your Girlfriend.
READING:
Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost; just ordered Queen Joan Didion’s newest; relatedly What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion; and my friend Katiy’s amazing column on at Catapult.
GIVING:
Satya Yoga Cooperative, the United States’ first yoga teacher training by and for BIPOC, working to decolonize the wellness space one teacher at a time.