“In the universe there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.”—W. Blake
“ . . . that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”—W. Wordsworth
Liminality is where secrets hide in plain sight.
This is what he concluded once he discovered the weird and nourishing landscape of liminality, and realized that the only way to figure anything out is to stop thinking.
Because trying to participate in the narcissistic, dishonest, banality-obsessed world had exhausted him—and the only hope he had for something better was hints and whispers, too airy to pursue, too essential to explain.
There was the Bread Truck Feeling—which must have named itself since he had no memory of naming it. That rare sensation that came over him in unpredictable and sly moments, in the coils of a typical task-consumed day in our crazed and oblivious world—everyone intent upon their errands, stopping and going, lights changing, airplane overhead, the bread truck going by, all of it like the workings of a cosmically absurd machine: a grand opera of exquisite futility—but beyond ego—no emotion, no judgment, no conclusions—only the naked is-ness of reality and no clothes. A feeling impossible to describe, because describing is translating, and it was untranslatable. No duality of “is” and “meaning.” As though one had come back from an unimaginably distant future into the unfolding of what had already happened—a restful, unexceptional transcendence where one feels at the heart of realness a thrilling unreality.
A feeling that could live nowhere but in between.
Where the hypnagogic visions lived:
Four people on a boat, first, catching a translucent marlin and, second, being the marlin, the sad and inevitable death—trying to turn around a big truck on a narrow unknown street—following a piece of decaying wood into the ground and ultimately into new life—crusaders on foot and horseback plodding toward the Holy Land—looking at bacteria through an electron microscope and seeing desperate faces—pulling a loaded trailer with one tire gone, only the rim, through the futility of a mudhole—two brothers talking to each other, “somebody wants to kill me”—bulbs reaching through the soil with roots and putting all their hope into sprouts—a man sensing something on the back of his chair, feeling and finding a fer-de-lance, his daughter finds his body, sees the snake, rushes into another room and closes the door, without her phone!—moving a heavy filing cabinet, pausing at the top of steep stairs—putting on a glove with a hole in the index finger—a black widow, exulting in her dark corner, sensing a threatening vibration—being the worker in the factory where the mechanical pencil in one’s hand is made—a risky in-person meeting with an Oriental woman with slightly “off” English he originally didn’t believe was real on the internet, at the airport, he’s hired two security guys, one of them feigning a conversation with a desk clerk as he clandestinely observes her emerging from the escalator—a head simultaneously disintegrating from one person and re-integrating into another via exchanging 3-D puzzle pieces, narrating an indecipherable manifold story—one trying to convince a skeptical other that he hasn’t suddenly come into existence—a young king replacing an old king, letting him live out his time in honor until he must experience what he doled out, he holds out his arms, “I am ready”—the entire time-lapse history of a railroad timber, a lonely bank teller—his mother trying to tell him something he can’t quite hear—kneeling, that moment of anticipation before being beheaded—
None of these have stepped over into reality—they are flashes of potential communicated as scenarios in the hypnagogic state, where nothing is realized.
* * *
Like any revelation, the sensation came with fears. One, that everything transcendent is trifling from another angle, and our mouse brains are behind all our realizations—little soap bubbles popping on earth—
Or that the vignettes might be prophetic, and one has to nullify or contaminate the bad ones to keep them from becoming real—and life descends into an ordeal of elaborate mental acrobatics of competing urges to thwart and nurture the elements of the world—
Or that imagination becomes so good one has no need of the real—and severed from reality is trapped in solipsistic isolation—the solitary confinement devised by what knows it best—
Or that hell is not a place but a rut—the inability to change states—
Life is a puzzle, and like any puzzle worth its salt, it holds out for a long time, and grudgingly, or shrewdly, concedes a piece at a time—most pieces corresponding to an era of one’s life. And the pieces are always found in liminal cracks.
Ruts before and ruts after. Depression won’t let your mind escape its ruts—it keeps you trapped in a paralyzing, self-defeating mindset until you can turn off thought. Everything about the universe, from the human perspective—that is, the perspective of stories—is deeply weird. Not weird at all from its own. Salvation is harmonizing with the universe’s own—even as we insist, through our habits and routines, on the primacy of our manufactured reality—which has only one motive: to stay in place.
Living a state-generated life is to live asleep. Whatever challenges the ruts may be good, may be bad, but is the only source of change. The minute something becomes doctrine it begins to die.
So, forward into the ruts where we live our stories—the ruts that breed the need for salvation.
Liminality is the source of inspiration: its power is its touch, not its grasp.