Another big word (like Saturnine) it just means being on the threshold, in between, neither in or out, home or away. I think I feel like this most of the time actually. But who can you tell these things to? ("Hi, how are you today? - Oh you know, feeling a bit liminal." Ha) Being Saturnine is being in the dark, under a heavy load, performing dutifully rather than freely. But being liminal can be worse, neither light nor dark, neither weighed down nor buoyed up, neither positive or negative. Dead time.
Yet more positively the liminal is the door to another world. In a Jean Cocteau film or an Aha video or maybe that turning you didn't take or window you didn't look through. It may be total illusion to believe in this - that these spaces can take you somewhere else, can move you forward to something deeper, can free up and open new space.
It can even be a door back into the past, as in Bernard Fallon's marvellous black and white pictures of Crosby and Liverpool in the 60s and 70s. The one of kids in the snow in Regent Road had an uncanny impact - you need to go to his website for it 13/29 in Liverpool: The Long Way Home portfolio http://www.bernardfallon.com/ - it's nothing to do with nostalgia funnily enough. More the feeling that I probably walked down that road that day, I was only a few minutes walk away when that picture was taken. The kid with the snowball in that frozen moment stands in for a me that used to be. But if I could go back and ask him how he might imagine himself in thirty years time, he would have as little idea as I would have had, fixed as he is in the sweet liminality of childhood.
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