◎ A Stable Diffusion reimagination of a photo of my housemate standing in a liminal space with cookware, but instead as Georges Seurat
One of the weird things about growing up and living between worlds is a shift in the focal point of your cultural awareness. There are some trends you catch on to much faster than others. And there are some things, particularly when they are tied to language, that you miss out on unless you have someone around you who is guiding you into those things. Examples of this are certain memes that are specific to a language, sometimes political things as long as they don’t have to do with the political juggernaut that is the United States, which seems to affect everything in its path. For better or for worse.
One of these for me was the concept of liminal spaces. There’s a wonderful professor-turned entrepreneur with whom I am closely associated. I originally wanted to do my graduate research with him, but he bailed on the entire concept of academia to do a startup, lest the university walk away with two thirds of his intellectual property[1]. Somehow he has been one of my key connections to the world of memes in the English language world.
This professor is someone whom I would describe as, like many of my readers, chronically online. This is not a bad thing. It’s just that the locus of his social world tends to be a little bit more online than most of the rest of the people around me[2]. He explained the concept of liminal spaces to me several years ago; he sent me photos.
I didn’t fully grasp it until I had a specific experience. Oh, I played “Superliminal”. I think that’s supposed to trigger feelings of being in liminal spaces. And I saw plenty of photos. But for some reason Reddit gets it totally wrong on so many counts; an abandoned Burger King in Alaska feels like a liminal space to Redditors. It counts… I guess. On a technicality.[3]
Back to my liminal space experience: I was in the States and dropped in on the place where I stay while I’m in the States. My housemate[4] was cooking something. I walked through the bedroom into the kitchen where I heard sounds of cooking, but instead of seeing my housemate, I saw nothing. I craned my head over and looked at the back door. The back door is a liminal space—not the door itself but the landing just inside. You don’t simply occupy that space. It’s not a final resting space for anything. But there he was—my housemate—standing next to the back door but not leaving on his way somewhere, but not actually moving. He was holding a pot of something. He wasn’t entering the kitchen, nor was he going downstairs. He was just standing there with the pot in hand, phone in his other hand. I blinked and stared at him. And then I blinked some more. What in the world was he doing?[5]
There was a visceral sense of something being distinctly wrong. He was standing in a place where people don’t just stand. He was in a liminal space, and that’s when I got the concept. some of the things in life are like that—experiential.
You can understand the theory or the concept mentally, but until you feel it, it’s not real to you.
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Ok, no, it doesn’t. You’re not merely in a transitionary state when at Burger King. You’re doing things in that space, even if it’s just inhaling High Fructose Corn Syrup fumes and getting fatter by the second.
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On some level it’s funny to call him a housemate sometimes. For years I would only see him for two weeks in the beginning of the year and two weeks at the end of the year. Then COVID came and I saw none of him because I stayed in Korea. But then there have also been swathes of time where I’ve been there for weeks at a time uninterrupted. Generally, these are few and far between and usually in the distant past. I tend to be extraordinarily mobile. So mobile that most people begin texts after a few weeks with “Which time zone are you in?”
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He was making ice cream. The stove was upstairs and the machine was downstairs.