Investigating Liminal Spaces.
part one!!!!!!!!
INVESTIGATING THE LIMINAL
The Adult Red Book Barn is run by a trans lady in fuschia Mac lipstick. She’s wrinkled and tan, skinny and personable. She has a 2000’s Aguilera vibe. My friends and I used to joke that we were going to make a movie based on a dominatrix who works out of the erotic book sex store, all ominous on the side of the highway, sticking out like a sore thumb against the gray, autumn backdrop of Jersey sky and emptiness. There is a general stretch of emptiness on the drive from Philadelphia to the Jersey shore. It’s a particularly disorienting vastness, littered by beat down diners, farmers markets, and closed antique shops. It’s the kind of space that makes room for possibility.
I’ve always found it a little bit odd to articulate my fixation on liminality, not necessarily romanticizing ‘seedy’ things but being deeply curious about them. I have questions about motels, the mob, gambling, sex work, strip clubs - there is a certain charm to these things because they contain humanity in a raw form. They contain desperation - which contains nuance which contains narrative. I’m no journalist, and I’m only sometimes a poet, but I know a life source when I see one.
I recently taught a unit on liminality to my college freshmen. They fucking loved it. We talked about what qualifies an image as liminal, and why the feelings associated with liminal art or pictures are often that of a nostalgia tinged with sickness, an ache for a place which does not exist, either because it is a dilapidated remnant of childhood that is no longer tangible, or something that never existed in the first place. If you Google ‘liminal’ it is defined as - “a transitional or intermediate space, either physical or psychological, that exists between two states or stages. It can be a place where something is in-between, like a hallway connecting two rooms or a time of transition, such as the period between leaving one job and starting another.
Here's a more detailed explanation:
Physical Liminal Spaces:
These are literal spaces that bridge two areas, like stairwells, hallways, doorways, or even airports.
They often feel empty or devoid of purpose, contributing to an unsettling or dreamlike atmosphere” (AI overview).
A documentary titled “The Art of Liminal spaces” (2022) explains its mission as follows: “Liminal Spaces are the subject of a modern internet aesthetic portraying empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. Directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch had mastered the art of liminal spaces, long before it became an internet aesthetic. This documentary aims to explore and demystify the strangely familiar world of liminal spaces.”
Some of the liminal images we looked at were of dimly lit hallways, which we concluded were scary, largely because the viewer doesn’t know what is at the end of the corridor - or behind any of its doors. In perceiving a liminal space, we are typically completely consumed by the abstraction, destabilized by our inability to be situated in space, time or context. They have the unpredictable and intimidating surreality of a dream.
I asked my students to find their own liminal images, based on the definition of liminal as we understood it. Many of my students came up with pictures of abandoned buildings, empty malls, ball pits with pale filters over them, and completely empty public pools drained of water.
“And how does it make you feel?” was the question.
“Weird as hell,” was the answer, communal.
“Because it aches —”
And then it dawned on me that my fascination with these liminal images might have to do with the ‘unidentifiable ache’ that I always describe in my writing. To look at a liminal image is to hurt for something inexplicable. These pictures were the most articulate definition that I, a writer, have been able to find for the way a stomach feels when you are a bizarre concoction of depressed and terrified. It's more than that, though. The ache is frenetic and emotionally amorphous, yet it is agonizingly palpable. Like a stomach pit on steroids. It is a unique malaise which announces itself, yet never makes clear what it wants. It is hungry - the starving thing within. It is just like the hallway that never ends where the lights don’t work and it’s also just like the public pool full of balloons. The playground covered with snow. It is dreamy and feels wrong, a time capsule with ambiguous intentions.