On Liminality and Collected Realities

“During the worst episodes of psychosis, photography is a tool my sick self uses to believe in what exists. The photographs become tools for my well self to reexperience the loss...” [1]  

I picked up The Collected Schizophrenias mostly because the cover art and the title were enticing. I had no idea what it was about, beyond the title. This is a risky way to read books. Sometimes it leads to starting and finishing a book that’s not right for me, at this moment, or ever. But other times it means falling into unexpectedly illuminating perspectives that push you down rabbit holes you’d never venture down, even if they were chalk full of things you needed to reexperience. Things you needed to unpack, to sort through, to discard or to reexamine. 

“...They are a bridge, or a mizpah—a Hebrew noun referring to the emotional ties between people, and especially between people separated by distance or death-between one self and the other...” [1] 

I haven’t seen schizophrenia up close, the way I have seen dementia and bipolar disorder. I’ve seen the way these other states of being warp realities and change people you knew well, you still know well, but now live elsewhere, even when they’re right in front of you.  

How much control do we have over our realities? How much of them are objective and material, tied to hard points and constraints of the universe? How much of them are subjective and constructed inside our bodies? Assembled bit by bit, changing every day, to help us negotiate our survival with the material world we’re embedded in. A world where there are others who’ve constructed realities in which we are loved ones, in which we are negligible, in which we would be better off quieted, through abandonment, repression (or death).  

“...The well person has the job of translating the images that the sick person has left behind as evidence.”[1] 

If you’ve had a loved with a condition that causes realities to shift, drift, you know it’s difficult (impossible) to argue with them. To convince them something’s wrong with their perception of reality is a fruitless endeavor. And the irony of it is that you yourself are likely living in a fragilely constructed reality too. One that’s full of contradictions. One that abhors the brutality of capitalism, but contributes to it. One that abhors the injustices of colonial war mongering, but lives in the comfort of an imperial core, paying taxes and staying out of trouble.  

How do you argue with someone who’s convinced that these same powers are coming for them? Are they wrong in the abstract, in the long term? Are they simply unwilling to accept your lack of urgency? Because time itself is different in these realities. The pacing, the sequencing, the causalities, all the craft choices we make as we tell the stories of the realities around us.  

There are fixed hard points which all of us must concede to when confronted with them. Could I argue about the ways in which you construct reality when your home, your neighborhood, your child have been enveloped in curtains of white phosphorus? Could I tell you to listen to other perspectives, to reexamine your own, while the thick waxy air burns through layers of your skin, seeps into your blood stream, corrodes the inner walls of your heart?  

That this substance is sometimes used to hide troop movements from infrared detection births more unrealities. The masking of a reality, a violent smoke screen.  

Heat is an entire reality that for most of human history was beyond our sense of vision. It was something that was only real, only known, when we touched. But now it can be made real from great distances. Across rooms, across battlefields, across the Earth, across the solar system and beyond. 

In 2023, a team of researchers working with the James Webb Telescope, estimated for the first time the average surface temperature of a rocky exoplanet. TRAPPIST-1b is a little bigger (+11%) than the Earth, and more massive (+37%). It’s also 99% closer to its star, TRAPPIST-1, than the Earth is to the Sun, and 96% closer to than Mercury to the Sun. Its orbital period is only 1.5 days, meaning its year is 99.5% shorter than the Earth’s. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this in percentages. I guess it’s just how I construct my own reality.  

What I really came here to tell you is that at 41 light years away, the researchers were able to estimate its average starlit surface temperature is 230°C. Which means that life as we know it would be wildly unlikely. But I’d like to imagine what it might be like to live there anyways. I imagine, for no good reason, pockets of cooler shady spots on or inside the planet, pockets filled with the perfect mix of nitrogen and oxygen. Pockets where static electricity prickles my skin and fills the space with the subtle yet pungent odor of ozone. 

I wonder, if your sky’s view was filled entirely by the surface of a star, would it still be a sky? TRAPPIST-1 is a little red dwarf star, only slightly larger than Jupiter, but much more massive, much more dense, a hard point explaining why it lives its reality as a star and Jupiter lives its as a planet. Our sky tends to be such a hard point, that it sometimes becomes mundane. A thing with different, yet consistent states. So the sky can quickly become a thing of unreality when something unfamiliar enters its view. A comet, an asteroid, a UFO, or the hugging presence red dwarf star.  

I’ve gone off topic. I need a ribbon. 

“When a certain type of detachment occurs, I retrieve my ribbon; I tie it around my ankle.”[2] 

In “Beyond the Hedge,” Wang relays her experience consulting with a spiritual guide, a mystic of sorts, who recommends the use of a talismanic cord as a conduit, either to or from, liminal spaces. Wang ties a scented ribbon to her ankle as way to stay tethered to the material reality she shares with her partner, her friends, her family, to keep her from slipping away and getting lost into a reality that’s both here, but also somewhere else.  

Liminality is one of those words or concepts that seems to have resurged in the zeitgeist in the past decade, or perhaps my awareness has become attuned to it, in search of spaces unburdened by the constructs I’ve built to negotiate my survival in this material reality.  

One of my favorite genres of expressed liminality are Instagram accounts like @liminal.spacee that capture brightly colored, yet grainy, clean lined, abandoned places like shopping malls, water parks, office buildings. Abandoned might not even be the right word. It’s almost as if they’re places set up for a life that was never led. Set up for practice, an exploration of what life might be. A set.  

There are also YouTube accounts, like nobody, that play ambient abstract music over similar images of quiet abandoned spaces. While this subgenre of music and imagery is enticing and subtly unsettling, it’s all also just a mishmash of 1980’s American nostalgia porn, isn’t it?  

I’m curious, what is it about that 80s America that captures, for some of us, this feeling of liminality more so than the 70s or 90s? Are we looking for the spaces we occupied before we slipped into this meta-world of internet personas in the late 90s and into the 2000s? Are we searching for ourselves in the repressive cold war logics that we’ve continuously cozied back up to since 2001? I’m less curious about why we're trying to escape the present moment and more curious about why so many of us are trying to escape specifically to the 80s.  

Maybe the algorithms just know what this aging millennial will find most comfortable. It’s tempting to call these platforms, these galleries of liminal spaces, liminal themselves. But they feel less like spaces and more like liminal funnels, built to trap and drain my latent energies, drip by drip, into the ever-expanding material oceans of other people’s wealth. An ocean that will lap at my shores, wearing me away, while I'm trapped, busied within the funnel. 

“The line between insanity and mysticism is thin; the line between reality and unreality is thin. Liminality as a spiritual concept is all about the porousness of boundaries.”[2] 

I read Piranesi a few years after the lock down, (I rarely make it to books while they’re on the surface of news cycles (in fact I might actively avoid them when they’re there...). I immediately understood why its release was so miraculously timed and I’m glad I waited until my own life had returned to closer to my expected reality. I was able to enjoy the dizzying yaw of Piranesi’s attempts to construct a reality, without falling into the despair of helplessly watching people close to me attempt to do the same.  

If I remember right, Piranesi’s main talismanic cord was his own writings. His trail of breadcrumbs back to reality, like Wang’s photographs, were his journal pages, written snapshots of his former reality, lost in the cold marble galleries. Rediscovering them helped him rediscover who he was and how he ended up there. And while he could never be that same person again, it was an assurance that he was more than the lost entity lurking in a forgotten place. He could be someone else. There was more for him to become.  

During the 2024 WorldCon panel Religion and Godhood in Science Fiction, a panelist (I can’t remember who, I wish I could) mentioned the work of the early 20th century mystic novelist Dion Fortune, as an occult ancestor to Piranesi. Something about this called to me and I ended up slotting her book The Sea Priestess in between my readings on the history of Sufism.  

(I wanted to reread parts of the book for this post, but, perhaps appropriately, when I went to look for it, I couldn’t find the book anywhere. As if it slipped into my life, to briefly provide me access to its reality, and slipped away, leaving me only wisps of memories I’d constructed from spending time in priestess’ world.) 

The book’s protagonist Wilfred, is utterly spiritually helpless. He’s privileged, cared for and arguably spoiled by his mother and his sister. Yet he’s constantly annoyed with their presence. He wants more from life, but has no idea how to get there until it’s drawn out by the mysterious entrance of Vivien Le Fay Morgan (a gentle nod to King Arthur and yet another rabbit hole of constructed realities to go down...). Wilfred’s talismanic cord, that Vivien ultimately has to coax out of him, is his ability to paint brilliant, realistic, emotionally charged epic scenes. A skill he knows he has, but doesn’t make use of until Vivien motivates him, helps him understand the transcendence painting provides, transporting him to scenes from past worlds, where he and Vivien play roles, important roles, of spirituality and sacrifice.  

What are my own material or ritualistic hard points or talismanic cords, I wonder? 

“I don't know that I have any,” I say to myself. “I don’t know that I need one. It may be best I stay away from liminal spaces, peeking through the porous boundary occasionally, but returning to the comfort of my own constructed reality and its material hard points.” 

I say all this, but I write fictions.  

[1](“L'Appel du Vide”, by Esmé Weijun Wang) 

[2] (“Beyond the Hedge”, by Esmé Weijun Wang)