are you liminal?
Simple answer: no. Why? Because liminality is impermanent. Never lasts. Like mono no aware. (In my limited understanding, anyway.)
Can a person be liminal? Everyone has liminal moments, and maybe some of us feel more liminal than others. But nobody exists in a purely liminal state.
Can a person claim to be liminal? No. It’d be like claiming to be ethereal or ephemeral. I wish I was those things, but waste still flows out of my body. I still sweat. I feel disgusted with myself about those things, but they still happen.
If you want to create a sense of the liminal, ephemeral, etc. in your work, then this is something you need to be aware of. (Of course, liminal and epehemeral aren’t exactly the same thing, but you get what I mean.)
Yasunari Kawabata’s ethereal prose came from a longing for the ethereal. He was just a human being, but he wanted to be close to something nobody can ever quite touch. And in a similar way, the art about liminality that affects me the most is about a similar, human longing.
Sometimes you’re inside. Sometimes you’re outside. Briefly, you’re between.
Sometimes, those states aren’t wanted. Forced on you. Think about homeless people, or refugees. They end up between things without much choice. But they aren’t living a truly liminal existence. The reason they end up between things is because they’re forced to be outsiders, exposed and unable to hide.
I’m lucky enough to never have been homeless or a refugee, so I can’t say for certain how it feels. But I can picture myself being stuck in one state while longing for another. I’d be liminal in the sense that there’s nowhere for me to go, nowhere that feels permanent, but I wouldn’t be truly liminal, because I wouldn’t have the freedom to go where I please without being noticed. I’d want to be liminal in a completely different way, in the sense of being hidden and self-contained. I’d want to be liminal in a way that nothing could find or hurt me, in a way that I could go anywhere without being noticed.
Because that’s the fantasy of pure liminality. You want to be ghostly. You want to detach from the ugly, physical things holding you down. You want to exist out of context. When you live in the world, people are always prodding at you, looking for you.
Pure liminality doesn’t exist in reality. Liminality in real life is not a perfect state. A lot of the time, being shunted between things can feel horrible. You might wish to be out in the sunlight with everyone else, or completely hidden, but the best you can get is a compromise of partial belonging, or of being partially concealed.
In Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station (translated by Morgan Giles), a ghost returns to the places where he spent his last days as a homeless man. There’s something so bleak about that. As a ghost, his existence is extremely liminal. He’s epehemeral, yes, but still stuck to all the unhappy, ugly things from his life.
In Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, a black man is accused of a crime he didn’t commit. The police brutally force a false confession from him. When he escapes, he wishes he could hide underground forever. Reading it, you feel his deep longing to stay safely hidden from a cruel world that wants to punish him for no reason.
What if you could be liminal forever? Well, you can’t. You’re shoved into this world’s web without being asked. Unfair.
Fictional characters can, though. Because they’re abstract. They have a flatness we’re denied. They can slip through.
Problem is, even fictional characters can’t ever be purely liminal. We put some of our ugliness into them. Our physicality, contexts, and attachments. It’s like how Alice wants to get through that tiny door, but can’t.
