Liminal/Liminality

One day someone drops a word in your path. You recognize it but you want to make sure you really understand it, its denotation and connotations. You poke at it from a variety of angles: Google, Wikipedia, the OED. You form a pretty reasonable notion of what it is, where it came from, and what it "means" ("signifies" might not yet be appropriate here). The next thing you know, it is everywhere around you, as though it was always already there just waiting for you to notice. But it is not always the word that is physically manifest before your eyes; it is more often an exemplar of one of the many connotations around which you managed to wrap your mind.

Is it cropping up because you are now more attuned to it, to its presence? Or, is it one of those serendipitous confluences of events which seem to hammer home a point you've been missing all along?

Consider, for example, "liminal" and "liminality." The root, "limen," originated in psychology in the late 19th Century in relation to response to stimulus. It referred to the threshold below which "a given stimulus ceases to be perceptible" (OED). It has been appropriated and fetishized by a variety of disciplines and turned into an adjective describing (as in unwriting?) the threshold or initial stages of a process. And that process could be read to be any in which the actant undergoes some sort of transformation, for example a change in character or attitude or state of being. "Liminality," while not yet having made its way into the OED, has meaning for certain critics of culture: (as Wikipedia says)

Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective, conscious state of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes, as defined in neurological psychology (a "liminal state") and in the anthropological theories of ritual by such writers as Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, and others. In the anthropological theories, a ritual, especially a rite of passage, involves some change to the participants, especially their social status.

The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives.

People, places, or things may not complete a transition, or a transition between two states may not be fully possible. Those who remain in a state between two other states may become permanently liminal.

Those of you familiar with any text that manifests itself as a Bildungsroman or a "quest" story (e.g., Siddhartha (or for that matter most all of Hesse's works), "The Secret Sharer," Great Expectations, "The Man Who Would Be King") will recognize liminal moments in those texts. A friend is working with one such text, in terms of its structure and how that structure reinforces the the "quest" motif in terms of helpers and heros and obstructions which must be overcome to achieve the desired goal. He is the one who whispered the word to me in an email. One can see how liminality figures in this space as a juggling of opportunities and consequences at some threshold.

Think about the thresholds, tangible or not, you cross each day, the decisions you make before doing so--whether conscious or not. What does crossing that threshold say about you? What did the Rubicon mean for Caesar as a liminal moment? Where/when is your Rubicon?