‘Twas a Liminal Christmas…

Ponderings on the "In Between"

Liminal: A word for the in-between. It describes states, times, spaces, etc., that exist at a point of change—a metaphorical threshold—as in "the liminal zone between sleep and wakefulness."

Early last holiday season, I read a Bluesky post from someone who expressed feeling completely "off"—trapped in an odd purgatory, drained by overwhelming inertia—like something else was happening they couldn't put their finger on. They felt like they weren't truly "here" or present, out of sorts, and wondering if anyone else was feeling the same way.

Many agreed with that initial post, as did I. That's exactly how I've been feeling, too: out of time yet prey to the timestream the world demands we work within and be "productive." The experience is untethered, ungrounded, out of sorts, unnerving, creepy, even.

The first thought that came to my mind was "the doldrums." It is an "Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone" that extends around five degrees north and five degrees south of the equator. NOAA tells us that "the 'doldrums' is a popular nautical term that refers to the belt around the Earth near the equator where sailing ships sometimes get stuck on windless waters." Here, trade winds converge in the northern and southern hemispheres, forcing warm, moist equatorial air to rise. This upward movement cools the air, causing persistent storms. And with air rising instead of moving horizontally, surface winds are weak, creating the doldrums.

I recall being horribly entranced as a child (a voracious reader of books beyond my age), absorbing some now-forgotten book about sailors going mad, stuck in those windless waters for days. Imagine being stuck on a ship with no land in sight, no horizon but the ocean, no anchor to the rest of the world or reality… drifting… no wind to fill your sails. It felt like the worst nightmare I could imagine – a paradoxical feeling of claustrophobia married to floating upon a vast, still sea with nothing to anchor to (*shudder*)!

"The Doldrums were a particularly serious problem for early explorers. At the start of his historic circumnavigation in 1519, Ferdinand Magellan had led his ships into 20 days of becalmed winds off the coast of Africa (Sierra Leone), in which they logged only 9 nautical miles, leading the navigator to cut his seamen's rations. During Thomas Cavendish's disastrous last voyage in 1591, the Englishman and his ships had spent almost a month in the Atlantic Doldrums. Any prolonged spell in the becalmed weather was a seaman's worst nightmare as water and provisions were exhausted and thirst, scurvy, and malnutrition began to affect the crew physically and psychologically. Walter Raleigh's 1617 expedition to Venezuela in search of El Dorado endured the doldrums for 40 days, many crewmen dying and others growing increasingly mutinous." [From https://bowcreektoanatahan.wordpress.com/the-sails-hang-dead-a-history-of-the-doldrums/2/]

The second thought – and another word- emerged when a different comment on that same Bluesky post expressed that they felt like they existed in "liminal space."

This immediately caused me to sit up to attention. My Gen Z daughter turned me on quite some time ago to the potent horror subgenre known as "liminal space," which she noticed emerging on YouTube videos and video games she interacted with. And of course, the "upside down" of Stranger Things comes racing into my consciousness.

This liminality appears to have initially emerged as an architectural aesthetic, but some also argue it's more of a vibe than an aesthetic. I'll let others work that out. For me, it's that creepy feeling of emptiness that feels like people should be there—there are "echoes." It's the space between things. It's not knowing where the beginning or end is. One of the most disturbing examples of it is man-made emptiness.

It's the abandoned shopping mall still echoing with presence, but the way natural light streams in from broken skylights and doors, no longer artificial light, creates a space of both knowing and familiarity yet haunted simultaneously. It's neither here nor there. You can take in Seph Lawless's beautiful yet disturbing photos and know you've been there—in those pictures he's showing—but you have never actually been there.

It's the dead theme park that feels like people should be there. You can almost smell the cotton candy and the musty smell in the haunted house, and hear the screams and clacking from the rollercoaster.

It's in that standard corporate office park aesthetic — the homogeneity — the repetitiveness of the layouts.

Imagine (I'm sure many of you can immediately call up the full sensory image in your minds) walking into an empty building filled with cubicles, with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, some off. There's the smell of chemicals off-gassing from carpets, paint, and ceiling tiles (perhaps masked in the past when bustling by the reek of Opium and Drakkar Noir). There's a feeling of something(s) there.

Then there's your standard hotel with The Shining carpeted hallways (the pattern making you wonder what sort of person comes up with these odd geometries and color palettes) … and all the room numbers are missing. What's behind them? Where does the hallway go?

An empty suburban street where all the houses look the same that goes on forever, including the roads that every single town has — McDonald's, Walmart, gas stations, and Dollar Stores.

You may not have been there, but you've "been" there.

It's the uncanny valley of physical spaces instead of "human" spaces.

It's a "feeling of being caught within a space between spaces," and you're stuck between points A and B. Added to this is an existential dread; a fear of never being able to go either back or forward.

This particular aesthetic began deepening into our consciousness during COVID-19, not surprisingly. My daughter mentioned Bo Burnham's Inside and his work speaking to Millennials and GenZ about this feeling. She shared, "[Burnham's] performance captured the feeling of being disconnected from reality and each other as human beings. All the things we were already feeling with the rise of social media finally caught up to us, and now we had time to sit and think about it during the lockdown. The Netflix special carried a sort of nihilistic fatigue with how things are while being able to laugh and sing about it. It echoed all the feelings of disconnect and being stuck in limbo with our existence in the middle of a weird transitional period where we knew nothing would be the same, and everything we had planned now felt useless - while also having no idea where we were going or if we'd ever go 'outside' again."

Our discussion about this excavated a memory of a similar state I have experienced before, one that I've moved beyond, thankfully, and tried to blot out of my mind. It's about the year formerly known as "The Worst Year of My Life."

In 2001: a one-two-three-four punch of my beloved cat getting mauled by dogs, then 9/11, then my mom suddenly dying, and just a few months after, my husband leaving me for a much younger woman, also abandoning his very young daughter, all in the space of one year. As I worked to heal and regain some equilibrium, I described the feeling of it thusly to others:

"It's like you've lived your life until now in a glass container with "reality" painted on the walls surrounding you. Cosmic 2x4s shatter the glass, and all you're left with is a lifeless landscape — all flat planes and nothing to break up the lifelessness of it all — nothing to grasp on or anchor yourself. The entrance to the place is nowhere to be found, and there's no exit. There's no meaning or purpose."

I realize now that this perfectly captures the liminal. Here I am again, with the addition of so many of us who have shared with me that they find themselves in the same "space."

I'd like to add one more word to make a perfect experiential word trifecta of these times: doldrums, liminal, and… derealization.

Derealization is characterized by feeling like you're in a dream. You have a distorted perception of time and experience it as distorted. The outside world seems lifeless, colorless, and unreal. You can even perceive other objects or people incorrectly, leading to a feeling of anxiousness about your consciousness and sanity.

According to Wikipedia, "Derealization is the experience of feeling detached or separate from your surroundings and experiences. It's normal to occasionally feel 'spaced out' or detached, but people who struggle with derealization have these episodes more frequently and find it hard to stop or control them. Dissociative symptoms can make it difficult to focus, interact with others, and function normally.

People who experience derealization often describe feeling more like an 'observer' of their life and surroundings than a participant. They are usually aware of where they are and what's happening around them, but their experience of reality feels unreal during dissociative episodes. They may report that the world seems foggy, artificial, or far away."

It's listed as a "disorder," but what if it's not? What if some folks are on to something?

This has sparked many diverging and converging thoughts I'd like to write more on in future posts, related to both the liminality/doldrums/derealization trifecta, as well as the concepts of the splitting of "reality timestreams" and what an emerging construct reality beyond this end-of-capitalism hellscape could be, and look/feel like.

I'd like to end on an experience I've had since 2008 -- a kind of peripheral vision thing (which I'm confident is not me going completely mad) -- in which I "see" out of the corner of my eye a kind of "breaking down" of tensile integrity of… well… reality. The best analogy I can offer is when the Holodeck, featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the series beyond, is on the fritz, and you don't see the programmed reality any longer; instead, the stark deck holding tank for the holomatrix.

Within the liminality, the doldrums, the derealization, it's distressing, terrifying, and unknowable…

…but I feel something wholly other is beginning to emerge. Even amidst the ugliness and chaos in our country, the world right now.

I'm paying attention. I'm scanning patterns. I still don't know shite, but it feels like the wind and the currents are beginning to stir and foment movement.

As I navigate it all, I'll share further thoughts in this, my new journal.

Many thanks to Hunter T. Clarkson for her support and input!