Liminality

Artemis, the Sea, and Airport Lounges

In Ancient Sparta, young men would travel to a sanctuary called Artemis Orthia, in the marshy land near the banks of the Eurotas River. There they would undergo initiation ceremonies as they transformed from boys to men. I remember learning about this as an undergraduate student. Since then, I’ve always been fascinated by liminal spaces like this.

Places where we, as humans, explore transitions. They are often places where we can find freedom, sometimes doom, and sometimes great possibility. They are places where we can explore mortality. They are places where we can be comfortable with the one constant in life - change.

Daniel Craig in speedos on a diving board, covered in blood.

On the edge. About to jump.

This frame in a film called ‘Love is the Devil’ has stayed with me since I first watched it when I was 18. It was given to me by one of my greatest teachers, someone who inspired me to write, and allowed me to explore my love of theatre. We often discussed the so-called ‘Pinter Pause’. Peter Hall once said “nobody after the pause is in the same state as when they went into it”; a pause on stage, on the written page, can be a liminal space. Daniel on the edge is the same, a moment of transition, of dread, of terror - all conjured up by a 30 second flash of this image on screen. Liminal spaces have an effect on us. They invite us to touch on our own mortality.

Often this touch burns at our skin, we step back - quickly returning down the hallway whence we came. Sometimes we like the sensation, we push on - through the door, off the diving board, into the elevator.

Those moments before we have either made a retreat or advanced, that is what liminality is, and I think it is those moments that we crave in life as for a split second we feel more alive than we have known.

Teetering on the edge.

There is a beach in a little village called Asini, near the first capital of Greece, Nafplio. I have spent hours looking out to sea there. The horizon is broken by a small island, shaped like a Matisse drawing, a curved body breaking the line between wine-dark sea and endless blue sky. That endless horizon is perhaps the most feared of liminal spaces, the infinity of it, a space just beyond, a space without constraints. When I was younger I could never understand why one would want a room with this view. Now I carry it in my mindseye everyday. It reminds me of the nothingness of it all. We are nothing in the face of such an expanse. But that isn’t daunting, or depressing. It’s uplifting.

I’m sitting in Logan International Airport. I’m showing a new friend something called a ‘my-take’. A presentation I made on my life and perspective in the first few weeks of business school to present to my class.

We are now almost 5 months on from when I first presented. Here I am in one of my favorite liminal spaces, observing someone I hardly know watch me talking on screen about my life so far. The experiences that formed me, and the changes that I hope to make while at business school.

I have moved across the Atlantic, and may not be back for a while. I have ripped the umbilical cord. I have to be me, I pushed on, through the door, off the diving board, into the gangway, and onto the plane.

We talked for hours on the plane.

I love planes, at least before they enabled WiFi on them. They are such an epic liminal space between realities. We couldn’t get the WiFi to work. So our space remained liminal.

For hours you are suspended in a world apart. We questioned each other incessantly, freed by the removal of our usual social constructs, yet constrained by proximity in economy class.

When we land we can extend the veil of liminality for the uber ride home, but then it's gone.

I’m not sure whether we have pushed forward or whether we have retreated to our previous lairs. Either way the experience in liminality changed me.

It pushed me here, to this page, weeks later.

To write.