Limen

| By Elisabeth Deák |

Form is, in the end, death. Form-giving is movement, action. Form-giving is life.

– Paul Klee

Liminal: From the Latin limen, ‘threshold, cross-piece, sill.’ A state somewhere on the spectrum of presence and absence, operating between one stage – one solid shape – and another. An in-between. Unclear, transitional being. The yuck in the chrysalis as the former caterpillar melts to gel. In anthropology, liminality refers to the stage in a rite of passage where the participant has stepped away from the old and not yet entered the new. In psychology, this is applied to the life course itself, a state between two identities where the self’s edges hover and blur. 

I.

Invitations

Bare arse on the cold tile floor, wobbly full-length mirror leaning, tentative, against the bathroom wall, I’ve been picking at my skin for hours, caught in a cycle of whispered fantasies. Mind-movie scenes flash in and out, blurring with my face, reflecting huge in the mirror. The same scenarios, always: I reunite with an old lover; I’m understood by my family, by former friends; I become an accomplished something or other; I prove that I am worthy – worthy of success, of love; I have the kind of life that doesn’t involve spending entire nights revisiting the same scripts on the bathroom floor until I can’t keep my eyes open. I wake up, wounded face against the cool tile, fresh, greasy lesions covering my body. I try to get up; shame’s gravity pulls me back down. I lay there a while, cheek flat against the floor, skin red and blotchy, between dreaming and awake, everything liminal.

My fantasies are short, repetitive. They rarely reveal anything new or culminate in some sort of event or relief. I often start again mid-sentence, interrupted by another thought or forgetting I’m already midway. Story and picking rock me into a stupor, hypnotized by the looping sentences, the rhythmic words, the dull pain as I squeeze my skin again and again. With every pinch, I attempt to regain some sense of control over my existence, some form of agency over my body and narrative, long ripped away. The tales always start with the same line: ‘he/she/they reached out his/her/their hand’ – across the table or in the cold or to touch her (my) face, but usually to take her (my) hand, itself reaching tentatively. Always in the third person, like I can only be the main character if someone else tells my story. The hands touch only sometimes; I often start again before they can. I know these fictions, anyway. Always the same motif: a hand reaching, inviting me back in. Ghostly desires of derealisation. Too far away and too afraid to reach for the world myself, if tentatively.

Squeezing my pores isn’t just an attempt at regaining agency, nor does it stop at the symbolic gesture of eliminating toxins. I am picking at the border of my human body, at its apparent limit. The physical manifestation of what poet David Whyte calls ‘the frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you’ and the space where our reciprocity with the world is most activated – through what phenomenologists call the ‘double sensation’ – skin is the liminal organ. ‘Untouched, we disappear,’ writes Whyte. At a time when the touch of another (any other) is unbearable, to touch – to attack – my skin is to bring external contact to that border, contact that could potentially draw a new outline for my shape. Popping blackheads for endless hours as I recite my repetitive and impossible invitations to return, I focus on that frontier. Toeing the line between ‘me’ and ‘not me’, I experiment with the psychological border I developed in response to experience and illness – and experiment with breaching it.

II.

Tree-body

A brutal realisation. Body shaking. Drawings – and later sculptures – of knotted bulbs. Dreams of the nymph Daphne, chased by Apollo and turned to laurel tree, here staring at a spinning cocoon. Blur of memory melting into narrative. Knowing myself a Daphne in my invisible roots. Engulfed in a tree-body, shut away from the world of the senses and of unwanted attention, surrounded by layers of protection: from skin to bark, frozen in flight.

The transformation wasn’t instantaneous; gradually, gradually I became smaller. Trauma, sensitivity, and everyday ableism blasted me into a hyperawareness of the world ‘kick[ing] back’. My infant identity was crushed, leaving a wide-open space for everything to come in. ‘To have a sense of overwhelm is to meet the world that has its own imperatives’, says Bayo Akomolafe. When there’s not much left of you, overwhelm becomes the norm. Tinier and tinier I became, locking myself away: it was the only way I found to stay me. An existence of self-as-prey. The persistent dread of losing what was left of my insides to the world and its marks. Shrinking ever more to preserve a kind of ‘purity’ – a self unchanged, spinning in nothingness, out of the reach of hands and worlds and hearts. 

The realisation breaks through the thick fog of dissociation – of derealisation. After years, I whisper to myself: ‘Maybe the world is real’.

In my dreams, I break out of shells, of boxes, of cubicles, of basements. My claustrophobia reaches new highs. I make I make I make. Part-vegetal, part-organ, gnarly and bulbous, traces of my hands’ passage on clay or page, my Daphnes float or hang from a thread. The rest of the page is always left empty, no world around. I make compulsively, repetitively, externalising my budding awareness of the tree-body – of my anti-identity. Reproducing the form I inhabit outside of its confinements, I create a new body in the world. I give myself shape – I practice – out in the open, where I don’t exist.

I fashion bulbs out of different materials that I destroy: I burn laurel branches, melt wax, unravel thread, pierce through a corn-plastic bag filled with milk, let bread grow mouldy. To come into contact with the elements and the world, to unravel the Daphne state. The sculptures’ borders are my skin, my psycho-imaginal layer of bark. Yearning for an exit, anything to get out, to accelerate the moment the wall will break – though it terrifies me. But desiring. Desiring to return the bodymind to its material, earthy, hungry, sexual nature, to space and time. To allow the world’s touch once again. To affirm material form. To assert presence. To participate, in a body of juice and matter, interconnected, always in conversation. A bodymind in and of the world.

III.

Fold

What do I mean by ‘the world’? Many have leaned into this question; a review is not the purpose here. What I am talking about is the shared material dimension, the collective space where human and nonhuman, mobile and sessile, act and respond in what anthropologist Tim Ingold calls a ‘correspondence of voices’. To Ingold, the world is a plenum, ‘not a space filled up to capacity with things’, but ‘fulness itself’. In it, objects, landscapes, beings, actions ‘emerge as folds, ever forming by way of the turbulence of lively materials’, with ‘everything enfolding on everything’. The ‘very mode of our existence’ of the world-as-plenum ‘lies in the perpetual unfinishing of things, in the digestion of ends and their extrusion into pure beginning’. He continues, ‘at the threshold, turning endings into beginnings, easing the passage of things from the old life to the new, stands the figure of the designer, the maker, the artist’.

I embroider words onto linen, and later onto gauze. ‘Words are my matter’, like Ursula K. Le Guin. My words thread out into the world. I want to ‘matter’ my language – make it physical, material – and to honour how much the words we speak matter. Language: ever liminal, always between one thing and another, one person and another/others, always particular and yet universal, always evolving, never fixed. I dig deep into etymologies, unveiling connections between words and between words and the world. The slow, deliberate spacetime of embroidery quiets my bodymind. I watch the writing appear gradually on the cloth. Language takes on the rhythm of my hands dancing with the materials. The needle is a contradiction: it must tear to bring together, pierce to mend. To Louise Bourgeois, the needle ‘is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it’s not a pin.’ Unlike the pin, the needle is an object of continuity. Needle and thread tell of ongoingness, of potentiality.

Bourgeois speaks of the ‘magic power of the needle’ and there’s something of the spell in the making of these pieces. Spells of presence, of engagement. Spells to repair the border, to play at the threshold, ‘turning endings into beginnings’. Creating new folds in the plenum, weaving braids of gestures and words into the fabric of the world. I learn from Tim Ingold that making is a conversation between oneself and one’s materials, oneself and the world. I learn by doing, and by doing, I mend. I discover that I can be in and make in the world care-fully. To make – to craft – is an exchange, a practice of belonging. Making is not neutral: it reveals our impact in and on our world. It can sustain and maintain, but it can also harm. Returning to a life of exchange after an exile caused by violence, the decision is clear: to be in the world is to be porous, and the only way to survive that porosity is to choose care.

Porosity intimidates me. In come air and sound waves and light. Food and water, medicine and spit and tongues. Out come words, breath, sweat, defecation. In come language and images, ideas, voices. Out come my own ideas and images, my own voice. COVID-19 hits and the world freezes in place. I embroider words to stay connected, to remain in exchange. The fabric is my skin, the new site and medium of my liminal focus. Brandishing needle and thread, I pierce through the barrier between ‘what [I] think is [me]’ and ‘what [I] think is not [me]’. The needle passes through the cloth, pierces it again. The thread slithers away and reappears; a shape emerges: at the border, something created.

Like language, identity is never fixed. To live is to be changed, to surrender to the porosity and the marks. I spent most of my existence trying to force life not to change me. I wanted form without form-giving, life without living. My fear and fascination focused on physical and psychological liminality, but life was liminal in other ways: slowly, over many years, I went from the destruction of a blooming identity, to one developed to protect what little was salvaged, to one that built itself anew, in correspondence. This new identity, solid, durable, could only have developed with the world. I could not exist in a world that did not. To begin to exist again is to accept that I am of the world, despite its violence. I am flesh and bone and voice and fold. The cloth is my skin is my crease in the plenum. With every stitch and every word, I assert my place in the web of things.

IV.

Inside/Out

I slip under the linen cloth covered in innumerable petals. The fabric, suspended on all sides, plunges toward the ground. It looks rough but is soft against my bare skin. An earthy smell hovers, left over by the walnut shells used to dye it a light beige, mixing with the potpourri scent of dried plants. I move carefully at first, learning my way around this relational space. Every minor gesture throws the petals into motion, resounding like a crashing wave, tickling my brain. The weight of the petals encircles me, jumps away, comes tumbling back. Like a murmuration, they arrive together momentarily in colourful swarms, only to swerve again, collectively and alone, in one direction or many, toward and away. Beneath the mediating fabric, I feel my way around, thrusting my body in response to weight and shift and sound. The fabric-barrier caresses my skin as it negotiates our material interplay, transducing my gestures into the petals’ dance.

Needle and thread lead to movement and video. In the installation Tropos, I play with causality, reversing time or slowing it down. Expected actions become strange, uncanny, the petals’ swooping leap somehow forcing my body backward. Responding to each other, making contact or avoiding it, these bodies and I act out the clinamen, the swerve of atoms toward and away from one another. Even when I turn away, I am heading toward another potential point of contact; I am always heading toward something. As I move beneath the cloth, I swerve on the threshold of myself, at that ‘frontier between what [I] think is [me] and what [I] think is not [me]’. I taste the ‘longing for others’, a longing that reaches far outward and deep inside. ‘We become who we are in the company of other beings’, writes Deborah Bird Rose, and we are called to ‘turn toward self, turn toward others’. The petals, the fabric, and I echo into each other, swerve in response. In this dance with alterity, I become ‘newly strange’ to myself. Practicing material belonging with my petals and fabric, I explore the shape of otherness, as well as my own, and the shapes we make together. My ability to act in this ‘dance of animacy’, my agency, is born out of our ‘intra-actions’; it does not precede it. There is no action without otherness. Avoiding contact for so long was a way of extending the freeze of trauma: I was passive, unable to act, but on my own terms. Now, border fluid, I dance in relationship at the threshold, agency restored. 

This time, I leave the fabric-skin intact. Flexible, malleable, with every one of my movements, every shift of the petals, it grows and retracts, flows and curves. The frontier was never the problem, even in the tree-body. Through my experimentations in porosity and mending, through my making and my writing, I grew and grew until I reached the edge. From there, I had to learn to let the border be supple, fluid, porous, and to let myself swerve, ‘newly strange’ and yet totally familiar, turning away, sometimes, but also, always, turning toward.

The petals leap across my body one last time. I slow down and shuffle my way out from under the cloth. Naked body hot despite the winter cold, fabric and petals rocking with the echoes of my presence, I place my hands on the cool floor. I get up.

Works Cited

 1 Paul Klee, Notebooks, vol. 2: The Nature of Nature (London: Lund Humphries, 1973), 269.

2  David Whyte, ‘A Lyrical Bridge Between Past, Present and Future’. TED talk. Produced by TED. Recorded April 2017. Posted August 2017. TED. 01:13. https://www.ted.com/talks/david_whyte_a_lyrical_bridge_between_past_present_and_future

3 Whyte, Consolations: Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. (Langley: Many Rivers Press, 2015), 223.

4  Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 112.

5 Bayo Akomolafe, in Patrick Farnsworth, host, Last Born in the Wilderness, podcast, episode 260, ‘Monstrosity: The Trickster, an Invader & Fractures of Messianic Becomings w/ Bayo Akomolafe’, 2 July 2020, https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/bayo-akomolafe-3?rq=bayo

6 Tim Ingold, ‘Art and Anthropology for a Sustainable World’, in Modos de Fazer (Ways of Making), ed. Vitor Oliveira Jorge (Porto: CITCEM – Centro de Investigação Transdisciplinar Cultura, Espaço e Memória, 2020), 616.

7 Ingold, ‘Art and Anthropology for a Sustainable World’, 617.

8 Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Mind is Still’, poem, in Words Are My Matter (Boston: Mariner Books, Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2019), verse 5.

9 Louise Bourgeois quoted in Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2010), xix.

10 See Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture and Art (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2013).

11  Here the linen plays the role of ‘transducer’, which Tim Ingold describes as objects or materials that ‘convert the ductus—the kinetic quality of the gesture, its flow or movement—from one register of bodily kinaesthesia, to anotheper, of material flux’. He continues, ‘the transducer slides along the thread of time, like a toggle on a rope, ever present on the threshold of emergence of things… To correspond with the world, in short, is not to describe it, or to represlent it, but to answer to it. Thanks to the mediating work of transduction, it is to mix the movements of one’s own sentient awareness with the flows and currents of animate life’. Tim Ingold, Making, 115.

12 Deborah Bird Rose quoted in David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Posthumanities 50, 2019), 90.

13 ibid

14 ibid

15  Ingold, Making, 101.

16  Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 178.