Liminal

As your body comes into focus, you are suddenly every effigy I have ever seen. Every icon, statue, scarecrow, mummy, rock cairn, fetish, mannequin, every vessel of sacrifice, every voodoo doll riven through with pins. The papier-mâché George Bush I watched set alight at the protest. The flaming Guy Fawkes figurines set alight on the fifth of November. The burning Judas hanging from trees across Mexico at Easter. Less than people but more than objects. Abject things caught somewhere in between.

I am standing in the doorway and can see, three steps away in bed, an object symbolizing a body, a body symbolizing a person, a person symbolizing my mother. 

But here, at last, there is meaning.

Here in this moment your body seems to contain every meaning. Contain the world. Contain me.

Liminal opens with an expository monologue: When the thirtyish Jordan went to check on his mother – who hasn't been well lately and who never sleeps in – he finds her laying in her bed so still that she is either fast asleep or dead. The entire book takes place in the few minutes that it takes for Jordan to decide to take the three steps forward and confirm his mother's status one way or the other, and in those minutes, he contemplates his life as the only child of this single mother, all while rehashing the philosophical question that has nagged him for years: what is it that separates a person from her body; what is the boundary between subject and object? Liminal reads like a memoir – and as the main character has the same name as the author, and has had some of the same verifiable experiences (author Jordan Tannahill and a former partner named Will did run an artspace called Videofag in Toronto for years; some other basic facts are easy to disprove) – the book has the “liminal” feel that its title suggests; hovering somewhere between memoir and fiction. This novelised memoir format makes Jordan's recounting of the philosophy books he's read feel organic to the story, and the whole comes off as a deep meditation on what his generation has lived through; where their activism has come from. I liked this very much.

And it's of course considered obscene, to transcend our bodies – whether through sex, drugs, or a suicide belt. For the self to consciously cleave itself apart from the body. There's a horror in having agency in the act. It destabilizes that which is thought to be fixed: that only God or the universe or fate can unfix these two parts of our being. That sacred union. Our body, the temple. And in that moment I understood “sacred” as belonging to a language of limits, a word which demarcated boundaries we were not prepared to cross for fear of destabilizing the accepted order, for fear of realizing how far our bodies could actually stretch, transform, how much pleasure they could hold, how extreme they could be made, how fluid and porous they really were, because to realize those potentials might have meant remaking all the containers – physical, social, political – that held the world in place.

Most of us would define “liminal” as an intermediate state or condition (as per Dictionary.com), and on the surface, the uncertain state of Jordan's mother would seem the point of this book's title. Because she was a computer engineer working on AI, there's a naturalness to Jordan remembering his mother explaining Schrödinger's Cat to him as a boy; to their discussions of the Singularity; to Jordan becoming a playwright fascinated by the use of cyborg actors. And because Jordan was deeply affected by images of 9/11 as a preteen, and especially video of people jumping from the Towers, he was early fascinated by the use of “people jumping” but “bodies falling” to describe the newsreel footage; at what point did those people become their bodies? This led to a naturalness in Jordan recalling the writings of Saint Augustine and Saint Teresa of Ávila (who were both fixated on the separation of the vile body from the pure spirit that is our true selves), and also the writings of Julia Kristeva (whose writing on “abjection” – the horror of discovering the separation between “self” and “other” – was totally fascinating to me). So while all of this up-front examination of liminal states is going on in Jordan's mind, the bigger picture has to do with the original anthropological definition of liminal, which is: The quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. And what could be more disorienting than feeling like a man-child and not knowing if your only parent has died, thrusting you, unprepared, into adulthood? It's this secondary meaning that made the whole feel elevated to me.

After describing throughout the book a life of shiftlessness and partying and not quite knowing what to do with his life yet, it is now late 2016 and Jordan's longtime friend explains how bizarre it was to have turned thirteen the year the Twin Towers came down, and now to be on the cusp of thirty and watching the election of Donald Trump:

Act one, scene one: cataclysm. Scene two: war of attrition, followed by the age of terror, the Great Recession, and then a false ending, the presumed conclusion, the first Black president, the dawn of a new Pax Americana. But our story was not a Disney film. It turned out it was just the latest installment in a tawdry, serialized drugstore thriller with embossed bold letters on the front cover. An installment which leaves off with a totally implausible cliffhanger.

Ana continues that Millenials find themselves waiting at the side of the road for the Boomers to hand the keys over, but it would seem that the older generation was “intent on driving the world into the ground before they do”. I don't use the term “Millenials” to dismissively group together those who came after me, but since Tannahill does use it, I'll take it that there are some who have lived through this dispiriting three act play in just this way; he may not be the voice of his generation, but he's obviously the voice of some, and it was an interesting perspective to me.

From a road trip to Burning Man, to an orgiastic Vatican-owned bathhouse in Rome, to a pub in London as the Brexit results are televised, Liminal is not just a book of ideas but also of character, plot, and setting. I loved that I didn't know what parts were autobiographical and which were fictional, and all of the philosophising felt natural to the story. Big picture, little picture; it all worked for me.