ShinyAeon

Liminality is a special interest of mine.  Liminal, from the Latin limen, meaning "threshold," refers to the state of being between states, of being on the border, caught in transition between two things—not one thing or another.  

Stand in a doorway: you are liminal in the most basic, literal sense...you are neither inside nor outside.  The concept is related to that of "limbo," the name for the state of afterlife that is neither Heaven nor Hell in medieval European thought, and now the word is applied to any realm or state that is "on the edge," or suspended-between.  Psychologists talk of liminal mental states, being caught in the midst of some rite of passage, neither quite out of the old state nor quite all into the next.  (I myself could be said to be passing from one liminal state to another right now: from my long unemployment, itself a liminal state, to a state as a "temp to perm" contract worker: neither unemployed nor completely employed.  In fact, I'm also halfway between being a temp and a real employee, not quite being either...but I digress.)

Folklore has always been fascinated with liminality, with between-ness. Times and places seen as borders are given magical significance.  We carry brides across the threshold because the liminality is dangerous—the liminality of both her place (neither inside nor outside) and her personal state (neither single nor quite married—after the wedding but before the sex, in the old way of thinking, made you a married virgin, a contradiction in terms) combining to make her doubly in danger.  Various spirit-beings (themselves liminal) were believed to desire human wives and be willing to abduct them; next to babies, new wives were said to be the favorite prey of the Fair Folk.  Heroes who were blessed with magical protection always had a loophole of liminality whereby they could be killed.   Lleu Llaw Gyffes could be killed neither "during the day or night, nor indoors or outdoors, neither riding nor walking, not clothed and not naked," etc.  A murder attempt was made at dusk, under an open roof, when he had one foot on a cauldron and one on a goat, while wrapped in a fishing net, etc. etc.  

Twilight and dawn (neither day nor night) are the liminal times of day.  In the words of one of the eeriest-sounding of the classic Disney songs:

Halfway in day
And halfway in night
Lies a world half in shadow
And halfway in light...

That's why Rod Serling chose "The Twilight Zone" as the name of his show about weirdness and surreality—because it was one of those spooky, half-way, threshold times.

The Celtic days of Sowen (Samhain) and Beltane - Halloween and May Day - were borders of the year, the threshold between Summer and Winter, and therefore times when the spirit world was closer to the physical one.  This is why Halloween is scary; the world of the dead is closer to the world of the living.  The soltices and equinoxes, to the more astronomically-minded, were the liminal times when the sun changed direction or the daylight and darkness were evenly matched.  They were also considered dangerously liminal.  Telling ghost stories used to be a traditional Christmas game; that's why Charles Dickens wrote a ghost-filled Christmas story.

Which brings me to Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving occupies a strange place in the American consciousness: it lies halfway between Halloween and Christmas, and shares symbolism with both of them.  Pumpkins, gourds, and Indian corn?  Check.  Snowy weather and a big, turkey-based family dinner?  Check.  It's ostensibly a harvest festival, but held much too late in the year to actually be one.  (In its European homelands, Halloween was traditionally the last day of harvest, the day when anything left in the fields should be left to the spirits of the dead that roamed free that night...having been touched by the spirit world, it became "liminal food" of a sort, and dangerous to the living.)

In England, from which the bulk of our American culture descends, there's no Thanksgiving to get in the way; after Halloween, the Christmas season starts.  Retailers in the U.S. treat Thanksgiving as a little intruder in their Christmas advertising; they dedicate a little section to novelty turkey and Pilgrim items, but otherwise ignore it.  Thankgiving is too non-commercial a holiday for anyone (but grocery stores) to really profit from it, so it's little more than a little harvest-colored hiccup in the otherwise firmly red and green Christmas décor.

This used to bother me.  As a kid I (ike most young children) had an overdeveloped sense of propriety: things should only happen at the proper times and places, and people who violated the proper sequence of events ought to be ashamed.  "Christmas doesn't begin until after Thanksgiving.  They're not supposed to put up Christmas stuff until then!"

As I grew older I started to wonder: what was the deal with Thanksgiving?  The Pilgrims could not possibly have had their First Thanksgiving in November; it was way too cold then.  (It was held somewhen between September 21 and November 9, most likely in "very early October," according to mayflowerhistory.com; the Canadian Thankgiving, on the first Monday of October, reflects this more traditional timing.)  How the heck did this harvest festival get shunted so late in the year?  Why, to the dismay of family cooks with little time on their hands, is one huge-turkey-feast held only a month after another?

The answer, I discovered, had to do with those same Pilgrims who started the whole thing.  More generally, it was the Puritans.

You see, the Puritans wanted to celebrate Christmas without, you know, celebrating Christmas.  Christmas, back in those days, was less a family holiday and more a license to party: filled with drunken antics, lewd behavior, and general naughtiness, it was a time to cut loose and go wild.  It was really more like our modern New Years, minus the countdown; or like the American St. Patrick's day, minus the Irish symbolism. You got drunk, you danced, you gambled, and if you were lucky you got laid, or at least got to flirt outrageously and cop a few feels.  Christmas, before the Victorians got to it, was like one big frat party—and it lasted for twelve days.

Can you see the Puritans putting up with that in their new homeland?  Yeah, I didn't think so.  

Many Puritan communities banned Christmas outright.  As America grew larger, many people came over who were not Puritan and they brought Christmas and its extended party-time spirit over with them.  This created conflict, as non-Puritans wanted to celebrate and many lower-echelon Puritans began to think a little bit of merriment might be nice once in a while.

So what some Puritan folks did was try something a little sneaky: over to one side was this other holiday, this harvest festival born of one of the few peaceful interactions with the European settlers and the Native Americans: a harvest thanksgiving feast.  It expressed what they felt was the proper spirit for a holiday (a Holy Day): quiet and reverent gratitude toward God for His generosity.  You got to eat hearty and spend a day relaxing (well, the menfolk did, anyway) but the license to revel in debauchery could be discouraged.

So over the years, the Puritans made Thanksgiving into a kind of substitute Christmas.  They shoved it later in the year and made it their last-feast-before-the-deprivations-of-deep-winter celebration.  

That is why Thanksgiving is so late in the year.  That is why it draws from the symbols of both Harvest and Solstice celebrations, yet is not fully part of either.  It is a celebration that is all about the New World (including, of course, elements of Native American harvest festivals) yet is steeped in enough traditional rituals from the Old World to seem almost as ancient as them.  It is a time to relax and party, and has become nearly a secular celebration (something that would, of course, have appalled the Puritans), yet it has retained a Puritan sense of unadorned domesticity—it's a small and homelike celebration, not a society-wide mass festival.  It has resisted the lures of commercial or celebratory excess, and most of its traditions (except for the football) would probably please the Puritans' strait-laced little hearts.

Thanksgiving is, in fact, a kind of liminal holiday: neither one thing nor another.  It is a liminal time that resists all the eerie associations of most liminal times.  This has the odd effect of making it a liminal thing itself, by virtue of its very non-liminality.

Freaky, huh?  

That's the kind of contradiction that the Fair Folk and Rod Serling just loved to wallow in.  I can't help but think they both would have approved.

Had a dream last night that was no doubt due to my anxiety over an interview I had this morning with an employment agency.  

I dreamed I was working for Giovanni from Pokémon--yes, that's right, the boss of Team Rocket (anime version).  I was working at one of his "legitimate" enterprises, not for TR, and I was not supposed to know he was also the TR Boss - i.e., he had no idea that I knew who he "really" was.  It was some sort of situation where I was on a temp assignment or something and didn't know who was going to be my supervisor until I showed up at the job, and then it's freaking Giovanni, and I'm stuck.

It was a weird case of my dream-self being a "fan in the anime universe;" I was simultaneously aware of being a self-insert sort of character in the anime (not a trainer or anything, just someone who was qualified to take a clerical position at some company Giovanni owns) AND of having the knowledge the real me has from having seen the anime.  I was frantically trying to do my job (gather files, take notes, etc.) while simultaneously thinking "How can I possibly keep from giving myself away here?  I'm a lousy actress, if someone says 'Team Rocket' in my presence I'm gonna jump out of my skin, and then he'll know!  And he'll be like all, 'who are you and why did you come here?' cause he'll think I came here on purpose to spy or something and he'll never believe I'm just some ordinary dweeb who happens to have seen him on a cartoon and I'm not even gonna get rescued because I don't know any of the good guys and they don't know me!  I don't even have a Pokémon!  But I can't just leave or turn down this assignment because then the agency will want to know why, and what could I tell them?  'I can only work for bosses who aren't leaders of criminal organizations?'  They'll never send me out on an assignment again!  Plus, Giovanni will suspect why I left, and then I'm screwed!"

It's pretty clear where this dream came from - I'm simultaneously terrified that I won't get hired for anything, OR that I'll end up getting hired at what turns out to be some nightmare job that I won't be able to leave for some reason.  I just find it highly amusing that my subconscious translated it to Pokémon terms like this, putting me to work for Giovanni, despite the fact that I've never been a big fan of his (nor of any Rockets besides Jessie, James and Meowth).  

Oh, as for my real quasi-interview?  It went fine.  After coping with being Giovanni's temp, I found that talking to someone who isn't the leader of a criminal organization becomes much less intimidating.  

Yes, that's right.  Traditions are like Doctors...

Why do I say that?  I'll tell you in a minute.

See, I heard a thing on the radio the other night...a boy here in America whose family is from a culture with arranged marriage had a dilemma: accept his family's choice of bride, or admit to them that he had an American girlfriend (which he'd been keeping secret), tell them he wanted to make his own choice, and be (probably) disowned by them.  The DJ was asking people to call in.  

I didn't call in, but it made me think.  I've always been fond of traditions; so fond, in fact, that when I realized my family didn't have very many, I started to go out and collect traditions from other families...other cultures...other countries.   Yet there were some traditions my family had that I abandoned--I grew up Catholic, but eventually my beliefs changed, and a lot of the traditions from the Church no longer seemed right to me.  

Human beings are a tribal species; we are meant to be a part of a larger group, to share things with other people around us.  That's what "culture" is, and traditions are a huge part of culture.  We need traditions--they give us an anchor when we feel adrift, and a safe harbor from which we can venture out and return.

Yet there's no question that traditions can be harmful, too.  As a friend of mine often points out, the blood sacrifices of the Aztecs were traditions just as valid as giving gifts at Christmas or flying flags on Veterans' Day.  It was a valid part of a living culture, and yet it's one of the worst acts we can imagine.

That's when I decided that Hippocrates had the key.

Traditions are like doctors.  They can do great good - but only if they first do no harm.

Cherish your traditions.  But always be willing to ask--is this doing harm that cannot be healed?  Is it causing suffering or increasing the suffering of others?  Is it taking away the free will of someone else, or taking advantage of someon else, or destroying resources, or ruining something that can't be renewed, or destroying a species?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then I believe it's time to rethink a tradition.   Traditions change all the time--many myths are about why people changed the way they do things.  Culture, like language, has to grow and change, like any living thing.  

Now, any idea can go too far...even this one.  Doctors swear to cause no harm, but to operate on a person can mean inflicting major injury and a lot of suffering. Accupuncture is harm...but it's been shown to relieve pain sometimes, even in animals.  Anaesthetics also relieve pain...but their use can cause bad reactions, even death.  Sacrificing an animal is harm...but we kill animals for food all the time, sometimes far more cruelly, and most of us think little of it.  

Clearly, the possible harm a tradition does has to be examined with care - it's a complex issue, not a simple "Harm=Bad / No Harm=Good" equation. Just as with medicine, the pros and the cons have to weighed and considered carefully, patiently, and thoroughly.  

Some issues seem pretty simple to me; if your tradition does good for you, but harms someone else--if the harm is all on one side and the benefit is all on another (and ones with the benefits get to make the decisions), then to me that's a red flag saying "Something is wrong with this picture."   

If you wouldn't trade places with someone your tradition harms, then perhaps you should try finding out what their experiences are like.  To feel the pain of another is Compassion...and I can't think of any major religious or ethical system that considers compassion to be a source of evil.  

I'm just some person on deviantArt, it's true.  But I think there's something to the idea that we kind of know in our heart of hearts when what we do harms someone.  If we feel defensive when someone questions it, if we get angry at the very idea of questioning it...that's when we need to question it most.

So cherish your traditions...but try to look at them clearly, too.  See them from as many sides as you can imagine.  If you find harm, then try to find out why it's so.  Find out when and how and why this began (the myth AND the objective reality, as far as objective reality is possible to know).  Try asking, "how much is this part of it necessary?  That part of it?  What is the most essential part of it?  Is it the act itself, or is it the effect the act creates or encourages?  Is there another way to create or encourage that same effect?"

Traditions are like doctors.  The good they may do must be weighed against they harm they may do.   But in spite of it all, some of them create astounding moments of beauty and joy.  If we didn't have them at all, I think the world would truly be a bleak and terrible place.  

But first (as a wise man said many centuries ago) they should do no harm.

I just had my birthday, and for the first time in a long time, I had a good one.   It's amazingly clear why, too: I just finished a project for my household that's been kicking my butt for the last nine years.  Even better, it turns out that, with a decent space in which to work and away from constant distractions, I actually WILL accomplish things, even without being paid to do it (or having some threat or deadline hanging over my head).  

So, it turns out that it's not so much that (as I've been fearing for a while) I'm just lazy or have no self-discipline; it's that when the environment I'm using is difficult enough, it saps a lot of my primary initiative and doesn't leave enough to actually do the work.  So if I can solve the environmental problems, I can get a lot done.

There's nothing quite like having what you thought was a weakness of character actually turn out to be an external problem for making you feel good about yourself and optimistic about the future.  I highly recommend it.

Hey there!  Just a note from me.  I'm not dead, just tied up with real life doings.  *sigh*


Any way, I finally tried what they call "The Dark Side of the Rainbow."  That is, playing Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" over the first however many minutes of "The Wizard of Oz."  Plenty of people have already done the work; I just hopped on over to Youtube and checked it out.

Some of the synchronicity is really quite remarkable (there are oodles of sites that list the coincidences if you're curious) but other moments are jarring and not particularly apt ("Money" playing just as Dorothy steps out to the brilliant colors of Oz was the least fitting synch-up).

Did I mention that I've never listened to all of DSotM before?  I've heard most of it on radio and so forth...but now I have a new appreciation for it.

But the coolest/most disturbing thing about it to me was the way the opening instrumental piece ("Speak to Me") juxtaposed with the credits and the beginning of the movie...I mean, the sense of...slowly approaching menace that the music wrings from those old familiar sepia-tone images...it was all like heartbeat/ticking/stormclouds/machines and half-heard voices/looming darkness/doom approacheth...it sounded like some kind of Steampunk Apocalypse was coming and NOTHING could save us...any of us.  I find Tornadoes scary and creepy and nightmarish anyway (actually, probably because of childhood viewings of this movie....) and Pink Floyd's music really made me aware that the Kansas portions of the movie take place under a sky that is dark from the first minute.  Disaster is looming above, just waiting to boil down and smite the land in blind, insane fury.

Creeeeepy.  In a cool way.  A haunting, memorable, dreamlike way.