I don't often read advice columns. I am fascinated by people, and their problems, and their neuroses, and so reading advice columns seems like a natural thing for me to do, but I don't often do it. I find them inherently condescending, primarily, and that makes them difficult for me to read.
It's probably a good thing that I don't read them often; as was pointed out to me recently in disparaging tones, the last thing I need is to become further steeped in pop psychology and dime-store theories. All the good intentions and compassion in the world will be for naught if I start to believe too strongly in my own cleverness.
But sometimes, the tag line is too good, too close to home, too grabbing for me to ignore. Tag lines like "Must I Choose: My Muse or My Wife?" are more or less guaranteed to get me reading.
I'm not male, and my personality is not really set up for clear-cut dichotomies, but this is a thing that I have often struggled with. I require, for better or worse, a great deal of stimulation. I need people, different people, different perspectives, new ideas. I crave them. I crave the interaction that is exchanging thoughts with someone, and I crave variety in that enterprise.
My ex-husband had a less charitable view of this desire of mine; he told me that I required a lot of attention. That is probably true, although not, I think, entirely in the way he meant it. I am not someone that requires the full attention of another person at all times. I crave copious quantities of solitude as desperately as I crave new ideas and interactions. I need time to recharge and regroup, to integrate the sum total of those new ideas gleaned from new interactions into my cosmology and adjust as necessary. But I would be lying if I said I don't enjoy the attention of the people that I love, or admire, or respect. Who doesn't enjoy attention, honestly?
But the thrust of this man's problem is that while he very much wants to be a good husband to his wife, he finds he is consistently projecting desire onto other women and using the resultant emotional reactions as inspiration. He is creating muses for himself. And he is afraid he is hurting his wife in this process.
I very much want to be a good partner, but I require a lot of stimulation. No one person is ever going to be enough for me. And that can be hurtful. Jealousy is an ugly, wily, slippery thing, and it can rear its poisonous head and kill even the heartiest love dead.
Most of the columnist's advice I found unhelpful and unnessecarily downing. But there was one line, one line in the whole response, that sent the hamsters in my brain madly turning their wheels: "I also think it might be useful for you to read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Why do I think that? Not sure."
Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Don't know why, just do it. Perhaps the columnist knows more than he is telling, or perhaps he intuitively knows something he can't verbalize, or perhaps it was just a random stab in the dark because this guy really likes the concept of liminality. I don't know. But that was the best bit of advice I have ever seen in an advice column in my life.
Read the Wikipedia entry on liminality. Just do it.
A liminal moment is a threshhold, it is the state of being betwixt and between two concretely defined states. Liminal moments occur in all strata of human organization, from individuals to the world at large. The term was originally coined in 1909 by Arnold van Gennep in the classic anthropological tome Rites of Passage. I studied van Gennep; I remember being fascinated by the concept seven years ago.
Because the columnist did not see fit to elucidate his reasons for recommending reading about liminality, I can only guess what he was trying to impart. But I know, very clearly, what I got out of reminding myself about the concept of liminality.
I am spending my life searching out liminal moments. If I could, I would live entirely in the threshhold, in the state betwixt and between all definite things. It is in those moments, and that state, that creativity is most abundant. It is in those spaces where all stability and order have passed away and new orders and structures have not yet been erected that inspiration is clearest. I have spent my life, and I will continue to spend my life, seeking permanent liminality.
New people and new interactions and new ideas are merely vehicles for finding those things that force me into liminality, so that I do reorder my cosmology. All that attention is fodder for the productive use of my solitude.
Some part of me, the heedless, reckless, wild part wants to say that art is that which is a catalyst for liminal moments. Art is that which sends you careening into the space betwixt and between the ordinary structures of the world. Anything else is mere craft, no matter how well constructed.
And I want to create art. I want to live in the empty space between letters, in the pause of the comma and not in the words surrounding it.
But living in a perpetually liminal state essentially, necessarily diminishes the impact of that state. I mean -- it ceases to be a threshold if you don't cross it. It's just another place, right?
ReplyDeleteThis is not a fully-thought out, coherent argument. As a preamble.
ReplyDeleteThe defining characteristic of liminality is not the "threshhold" status so much as it the indeterminate nature of the moment, and the lack of structure in it. Liminal moments are those moments in between structures.
So, the idea is to live in that free-form place, where nothing is defined and everything is possible.
The struggle, of course, is that making choices in the (unformed, unstructured) liminal moment creates order and structure. Any choice does that. The trick becomes finding your way back to the liminal (or, perhaps more properly in academic jargon the liminoid, since we're talking about voluntary and not mandatory liminality) once you've made a choice, and so maintaining that unclouded and unfettered perspective.
It may not be possible. Certainly, I can't hold on to a state of liminality for more than a few moments. But that knowledge won't stop me from trying.
Unfortunately, the world of reality is a structure laden place. The only real perpetually liminal existence is found in dreams, and even then the structures of our subconscious often limit what is possible.
ReplyDeleteI don't think living in a liminal landscape, even if it were possible, would be desirable. Human beings crave structure at a very basic level. In fact, I think the tantalizing and terrifying thing about liminal moments is the anticipation of what the next structure will be.
I guess I'm not much of a human being, then. :)
ReplyDeleteHah.
ReplyDeleteAs a man, I'm with you on life's black-and-white dichotomies. I've learned to find shades of grey and subtleties in most things in life in the last twenty years. One's existence becomes more bearable. Even if it comes laden with more (self)analyses.
ReplyDeleteGreat post.
Greetings from London.
Thank you! London is one of my favorite cities in the world; I envy you its streets and bridges something fierce!
ReplyDeletethe space inside that comma is exhilarating, terrifying and too damn elusive.
ReplyDeleteNice writing.
Terribly, terribly elusive: that is the crux of the dilemma, isn't it? I'm glad to live the pause whenever it occurs, but I wish it would be more often.
ReplyDelete