On Liminality and Anti-Structure
A retrospective
This retrospective is connected to Brendan Shusterman’s book
The Shopping Cart Serenade. Click on “Shopping Cart” and a new tab will open with a blurb written by Wouter Schrijft.
We all have periods in life when we don’t know where we are going. In the words of the infamous Aleister Crowley, every man must cut his own way through the jungle. No more is this true than when you meet someone who is experiencing their own sort of liminal period, what a psychiatrist might call a temporary psychotic episode, and what a shaman might call a rite of passage.
In the words of Victor Frankl, an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. Put a man in a straight jacket and into a locked room with white padded walls, and expect him to act normal in there! Our cures for madness are often not cures, but temporary or permanent holding cells. Our cures for sanity are often the same.
For me, my period of liminality was most of my teenage years, culminating in a period where I was wandering the streets of my hometown in a maddened state.
I showed up at my love interest’s work. She worked at a camera shop. On the way, I had picked up an energy drink that I found on the side of the road. Someone had pissed in the thing.
I dumped the can around the lid of a trashcan outside of her work. She came out and looked at me with a blank expression, like she’d been shot in the stomach. Then I grabbed a shopping cart. Talking to myself, I drove the thing home.
Keep in mind—I’d gone cold turkey off of a mood stabilizer and an anti-depressant. An abnormal situation altogether. On top of that, the girl in question was somewhat insane herself. There was a lot of build up to that outcome.
A week before, I’d wanted to fight another guy over her. I still remember them laughing on the phone, high as fuck. And me sitting there at a table, not really knowing what to do. I guess I needed help.
In that period of liminality, I brought my trombone out into a field to play to the wind. Later that week, I ran into a Mexican guy doing a similar thing with his trumpet. We played together, for a bit.
There was also this weird point in which the sidewalks were vandalized with swastikas by some other lunatics, and I remember thinking that Hell was coming to earth because some people crazier than me were mucking about on those streets. There was a bird that I saw, and it spoke to me. I sat down, and I guess because I was on another level, it let me pet it. Behind me, a girl in a ghostly white dress walked up.
“Oh my God!” She said “Look at that.”
I smiled. The bird flew away. The girl in the white dress smiled at me and walked away, like a metaphor for so many other things in my life at the time.
I never saw that girl again after that day, and I do not know who she was, where she was going, or where she came from, or if she was even real or just a figment of my imagination; but I can still see the gentle and anxious smile on her pretty face as we both had a liminal moment together. Just me, her, and a bird.
There’s something beautiful in it, there’s something so genuine that to apply beauty to it is to sully it. Because for a brief moment of less than two minutes, she treated me kinder than the woman who was driving me to walk those streets was treating me, and she acknowledged the humanity in me at a moment when I couldn’t even clearly see it for myself. So it was a simple moment of clarity amidst a sea of doubt and uncertainty and longing—though it might have taken me many years to understand its significance.
She walked away from me then as delicately as she approached, and I wish I could say the same for other people that I have known for much longer, but this is just how life is. If she exists now, then she must be running her own camera shop or something. I’d be curious as to what happened to her, what her name was, and whether or not she even existed at all.
The shopping cart sat at my house for a few days. I threw a myriad of objects into it, underwear, dolls, then some other random things that I had picked up off the street. I thought of it as a cauldron. I danced around it in the garage, as various objects seemed to magically appear around me. To this day I do not know if they were there before I started the dance or not, because in my mind I was performing some sort of elaborate cheat code on reality to conjure things by breaking the rules of the basic structure of things, and it felt as though it was working.
Long story short, I eventually got the help I needed.
But madness, brain fever, heartbreak, innocence lost, liminality, rites of passage…. all this shit is the sort of thing that can happen to pretty much anyone.
The really scary people out there are always the ones who think themselves perfectly sane, because those sorts of people rarely are.
