Anyway, liminal spaces. It's uncomfortable, flirting with existential angst. One time when I was a little kid, I wondered how my Etch-A-Sketch worked, so I carefully and methodically used the two knobs to draw lines on the screen back and forth, working my way down the screen until it was a solid mass of lines, clearing it, and allowing the inner workings to be revealed. (Would a crazy person do that?? At least give me points for not smashing it with a hammer.) I saw the little cables and pulleys that enabled the XY grid, and while it was kind of disappointing, I understood! Truth to tell, it made me better at Etch-A-Sketch, but at the same time, it lost its magic.
I'm not exactly sure how that relates to liminal spaces, but it feels like it does. The infrastructure of our world, including the inner workings of the Etch-A-Sketch, I guess, sitting idle, vacant, we find unsettling, but I'm not sure why. Does it remind us how silly this all is? That without the walls and the levers and pulleys, we are . . . what?
This question is now the center of my world. It finally dawned on me that I've always drifted along doing what other people thought a good idea and rarely what I really wanted to do. The degrees I got, the jobs I had, the houses I lived in, the vacations I took, to some degree or other the life I led up to a very short time ago, all of it. Now that I'm both old and broke I only want to do what I want and am mostly doing only that. This is detrimental to my day to day income but to what extend do I care? Congrats on the tree, btw. One must clear space.
ReplyDeleteI hear you. There is something both kind of exciting, but also unsettling about seeing the curtain peeled back and the illusion removed.
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