Richard Beck :
0:00
There is going to be a real rush to get back to normal and the lessons that we're gathering during this season are going to be quickly forgotten. And so I think that is something for the artists to do, that is something for us to do collectively is to remember what we're learning right now. And I just kind of go back to that Old Testament idea of memory and that being such a moral resource for us and so to me, what we need to be doing right now is capturing the experience.
Rina Atienza :
0:37
There's a fire, there's a flood, much will be lost, much will be found. What should we file? What do we keep? What must we remember when we wake from this sleep? Welcome to Noah's Arkhive podcast, apocalyptic memories for the new future. Episode two, the liminal memory.
Alex Owusu :
1:05
"I find myself running but I don't know why I run anyway because that's all I know. I'm forced to stop but this causes me grief. I'm asked to reflect but what does this mean? I'm shown my old illusions, but want them to return. I'm given a new path, but don't know where it leads. I'm asked to trust, but don't know in whom. I'm showing the endpoint, but don't know the way. How can I navigate in a world that I can't see, when no one has ever brought light around me."
Andre Radmall :
1:44
So I first came across the idea of liminality, about 30 years ago, when I was studying medical anthropology as part of my drama therapy degree and in that context, liminality was very much connected to the works of people like Victor Turner and theories around rites of passage. So, it was essentially referring to the threshold moment in a transition between one state of being and another. And that was often linked to the rites of passage of a young person becoming an adult, going off into the forest into a dangerous situation to cope with the new environment and then come out changed, transformed and occupying a new space in the cultural life of the community. And I think that liminality certainly has that big aspect, which is that is something about transitional state or going through a threshold state that has implications for the wider community, not just for the individual.
Paul Milbank :
3:07
And I don't know if it's right to think about things in this way, but I sort of have been feeling as though the land or the earth as having its own sort of will in this time. So I don't know how, that might be a crazy idea, but one of my friends described this moment as an enforced Sabbath of grief. We haven't let the earth rest and therefore the earth is sort of exercised its desire to rest upon us, you know, it's sort of taken control - 'you haven't let me have that Sabbath period' - doing for us what we can't seem capable of doing for ourselves.
Andre Radmall :
3:56
In other aspects, I guess I've thought of liminality as a point of change in personal transformation, and I see that very much as a therapist, that people have these moments which I'd say are liminal moments where something happens whereby the old way of being is pivoted into something different, a new perspective, a new way of seeing self, the world and others. I think what makes the conditions for liminality is quite complicated and hard to define. But it seems to always be something to do with stepping outside of the known zone into the unknown, disorientating space that is often rather feared and and avoided. I also think in terms of biblical narratives of the crossing of the desert from Egypt into the provinced land, I see the desert as a pretty good metaphor for liminal spaces. It's not where we've been, it's not where we're going, it's somewhere in between, it's betwixt and between. And by definition, these spaces are disorientating and they have very limited roadmaps, if any, at all.
Jana Beck :
5:28
Hi, this is Jana Beck and I am from Abilene, Texas. It is July 2020, which is a very strange time in the world. There was kind of the world before COVID and now the world sort of in the middle of COVID and we're all wondering what the world after COVID or with COVID is going to look like. I am a middle school and high school theatre teacher. And right at the end of the school year, the pandemic hit America. And we lost our spring production that we were in rehearsal for and it was one of the most disappointing things I've ever experienced as a teacher watching my students grieve and mourn the loss of the performance of that show, especially those students who are about to graduate. My heart ached for the fact that I wasn't going to be able to let their work be seen and let them feel proud of what they had created and that was back in May. We've had a few months to adjust to losing the production at first thoughts were, well, maybe we can still do it, maybe we can still do it and try to think of all the ways that maybe we could still do it. But now we're just kind of settling into the fact that it was just lost. And we're getting used to losing things now and I think there's a lot of health in not expecting or anticipating things that we think are going to happen. I'm anxious about how I'm going to be able to connect with my students. In the coming school year, if we are not able to do performances this year, it's going to be unusual to find ways to make a difference in their lives because performances was really the vehicle that I used, but I trust I'm going to be able to think outside the box. A phrase that I used a lot at the beginning of all of this was, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It seemed everything that anyone wondered, my answer was, I don't know and I had a lot of fear and anxiety and trepidation centred around that phrase, but I've noticed that lately, a few months into this, I frequently am saying, I don't know and that's okay. I don't know and that's okay. It's very unusual for me and I think it's good. I think it's good. I'm settling into the fact that I don't control everything, and I don't control my future and the irony of it is, I didn't before, but I just understand it now. And that's okay.
Andre Radmall :
8:37
I think from a political social point of view, liminality also provides the kind of space in which the usual structures and particularly power structures are loosened. And there is more space for play, more space for experimentation in that sense it's a rather countercultural but also kind of, I don't know, risky kind of place to be, in a sense, transgressive place to be.
Paul Hargreaves :
9:14
I'm particularly grateful for number one, the interruption, i'm talking kind of business world here. There's a lot of businesses that have been interrupted, obviously. We we had a huge interruption, we had our own crisis in 2014, which completely changed me as a person and completely changed our business. So I'm very grateful that more businesses, although it will be painful, are being interrupted and will come out of this in a different way because they've had everything they believe and trusted in completely stripped away. I've been told off three times this week for being too optimistic about the future of business. I'm happy to be told off about that.
Andre Radmall :
10:03
As an actor, I always saw liminality as the rehearsal room. It was, again, the space between my normal persona and the character that I was transforming into. I wasn't that character yet, but I was becoming. And I was on that rather chaotic sometimes journey between my regular persona and this character that I was playing. So, there is something alchemic and mysterious about liminality but I do feel that we're in a liminal position at the moment in terms of our culture and the worldwide socio economic, political position. And in liminal spaces like this, there is always a strong impetus usually to go back to the way things were or to try to reassert the established order even more strongly, but the liminal space does keep open the possibility for something new and maybe as yet unknown, to emerge and create a new future.
Azariah France Williams :
11:16
Just a quick thing that I remember the book I read some years ago called 'Guard the Chaos'. It's written by feminist theologians Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wilde. And there's a whole section in there about liminality, which I found really helpful and simply said that the liminal space can be seen as marginal, so you can feel like you're on the outside of the centre and you're trying to break in somehow. Or it can be seen as a threshold; that actually you turn around and realise that there's this whole big, bigger, wider vista for you to enjoy and to call others out to and so we have that opportunity, whether we try to break back into something which we've already said he's already spent, or whether we see it as threshold. And how can we encourage/motivate people to get out of their kind of lizard brains as it were the sort of amygdala stuff, fight or flight to realise that actually we're on a threshold? How can we get enough of us to move forward? That's what I'm thinking but those two theologians really helped me with some of that thinking.
Rina Atienza :
12:27
My name is Rina and I've written this letter 30 minutes to midnight on the seventh of may 2020. This is my letter for today, that could exist tomorrow, or perhaps a longer future. Who knows? Hello, I'm okay. I'm fine. Is that all right? To reveal that while this is clearly not fine, i'm rather okay with the events that are unfolding currently. If there's a keeper meme fom a scrapbook of history, it will be the artist KC Green's cartoon called 'On Fire'. This multipurpose visual summarises the problems of our times, you know the image of a dog sitting with a cup of coffee or a tea surrounded by flames. It's not fine at all. To be fine means a state of being unblemished, pure and free of impurities. I can draw up a list of everything wrong with this profane world. We consume as a way of living, we burn resources to sustain us. You could say this is the abnormal state of our existence, just as the sun burns we do too, except it's here on Earth. If Hell is other people, would this mean that we are the hell for this planet and other species. If everything is burning, then surely man has indeed fallen. For can we even remember when we were all in some state of grace? This, these post lapsarian times. So what's new? Well, fine also comes from finere, meaning to finish and if it's not fine that perhaps this isn't finished. If it's not the end, could it mean a beginning? I had a dream a few weeks ago, some might call it a nightmare, since it resembled some War of the Worlds plot, with giant tentacled alien creature was attacking and eliminating us. I was running in the scene, and then remembered I had this mobile device on me. In that moment, I chose to make a last phone call to a man who I could have married once upon a time, but didn't. "I just call to say I love you" I mean it from the bottom of my heart. And I said a deep thank you that I was glad he was happy with his wife and new son. I woke up with a sense of peace. I could always have and want more. More is more. There I was, and here I am still, at peace with what is, grateful enough for all that has been - everything else is a bonus at this stage. Yet I continue to breathe. I'm fine in a world filled with 'it's not fine'. There's work yet to be done it seems. It might feel like a game over but there's hearts left in the ticker. The beat goes on. So I press continue to play on where the soul meets body.
Elysia Willis :
16:02
This episode has been created by the conversational and contemplative contributions of Andre Radmall, Richard Beck. Rina Atienza, Alex Owusu, Paul Milbank, Jana Beck, Paul Hargreaves and Azariah France Williams. And finally, special thanks to David Benjamin Blower for weaving his audio wizardry into this podcast. The next musical track you'll hear has been uniquely created for this episode by Andreaz Heden, and is entitled 'Liminality'. Here is Andreaz to tell us more.
Andreaz Heden :
16:40
It's difficult to know how and when to stop and break cycles of disruptive patterns in our life. It's also scary to unsettle from what's become a normal without knowing what the alternative looks like. Sometimes, the crisis like our present throws us by force into a liminal space between the now and the not yet. Most of us have a hard time staying on the threshold, that liminal space, long enough to discern where we need to go in order to avoid walking in circles. I believe music and art can help us stop the tyranny of time and open up a space within time where we can quiet and open our hearts for the not yet. The truth is that we do need this time and space in order for the seeds of transformation to grow in us. My piece the liminal spaces does not articulate or propose any particular road forward. It was It's important for me that the music had a transitional character, no clear beginning or end, no set pulse or like clear contours and no fixed score for the new song. Not yet.
0:00
There is going to be a real rush to get back to normal and the lessons that we're gathering during this season are going to be quickly forgotten. And so I think that is something for the artists to do, that is something for us to do collectively is to remember what we're learning right now. And I just kind of go back to that Old Testament idea of memory and that being such a moral resource for us and so to me, what we need to be doing right now is capturing the experience.
Rina Atienza :
0:37
There's a fire, there's a flood, much will be lost, much will be found. What should we file? What do we keep? What must we remember when we wake from this sleep? Welcome to Noah's Arkhive podcast, apocalyptic memories for the new future. Episode two, the liminal memory.
Alex Owusu :
1:05
"I find myself running but I don't know why I run anyway because that's all I know. I'm forced to stop but this causes me grief. I'm asked to reflect but what does this mean? I'm shown my old illusions, but want them to return. I'm given a new path, but don't know where it leads. I'm asked to trust, but don't know in whom. I'm showing the endpoint, but don't know the way. How can I navigate in a world that I can't see, when no one has ever brought light around me."
Andre Radmall :
1:44
So I first came across the idea of liminality, about 30 years ago, when I was studying medical anthropology as part of my drama therapy degree and in that context, liminality was very much connected to the works of people like Victor Turner and theories around rites of passage. So, it was essentially referring to the threshold moment in a transition between one state of being and another. And that was often linked to the rites of passage of a young person becoming an adult, going off into the forest into a dangerous situation to cope with the new environment and then come out changed, transformed and occupying a new space in the cultural life of the community. And I think that liminality certainly has that big aspect, which is that is something about transitional state or going through a threshold state that has implications for the wider community, not just for the individual.
Paul Milbank :
3:07
And I don't know if it's right to think about things in this way, but I sort of have been feeling as though the land or the earth as having its own sort of will in this time. So I don't know how, that might be a crazy idea, but one of my friends described this moment as an enforced Sabbath of grief. We haven't let the earth rest and therefore the earth is sort of exercised its desire to rest upon us, you know, it's sort of taken control - 'you haven't let me have that Sabbath period' - doing for us what we can't seem capable of doing for ourselves.
Andre Radmall :
3:56
In other aspects, I guess I've thought of liminality as a point of change in personal transformation, and I see that very much as a therapist, that people have these moments which I'd say are liminal moments where something happens whereby the old way of being is pivoted into something different, a new perspective, a new way of seeing self, the world and others. I think what makes the conditions for liminality is quite complicated and hard to define. But it seems to always be something to do with stepping outside of the known zone into the unknown, disorientating space that is often rather feared and and avoided. I also think in terms of biblical narratives of the crossing of the desert from Egypt into the provinced land, I see the desert as a pretty good metaphor for liminal spaces. It's not where we've been, it's not where we're going, it's somewhere in between, it's betwixt and between. And by definition, these spaces are disorientating and they have very limited roadmaps, if any, at all.
Jana Beck :
5:28
Hi, this is Jana Beck and I am from Abilene, Texas. It is July 2020, which is a very strange time in the world. There was kind of the world before COVID and now the world sort of in the middle of COVID and we're all wondering what the world after COVID or with COVID is going to look like. I am a middle school and high school theatre teacher. And right at the end of the school year, the pandemic hit America. And we lost our spring production that we were in rehearsal for and it was one of the most disappointing things I've ever experienced as a teacher watching my students grieve and mourn the loss of the performance of that show, especially those students who are about to graduate. My heart ached for the fact that I wasn't going to be able to let their work be seen and let them feel proud of what they had created and that was back in May. We've had a few months to adjust to losing the production at first thoughts were, well, maybe we can still do it, maybe we can still do it and try to think of all the ways that maybe we could still do it. But now we're just kind of settling into the fact that it was just lost. And we're getting used to losing things now and I think there's a lot of health in not expecting or anticipating things that we think are going to happen. I'm anxious about how I'm going to be able to connect with my students. In the coming school year, if we are not able to do performances this year, it's going to be unusual to find ways to make a difference in their lives because performances was really the vehicle that I used, but I trust I'm going to be able to think outside the box. A phrase that I used a lot at the beginning of all of this was, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It seemed everything that anyone wondered, my answer was, I don't know and I had a lot of fear and anxiety and trepidation centred around that phrase, but I've noticed that lately, a few months into this, I frequently am saying, I don't know and that's okay. I don't know and that's okay. It's very unusual for me and I think it's good. I think it's good. I'm settling into the fact that I don't control everything, and I don't control my future and the irony of it is, I didn't before, but I just understand it now. And that's okay.
Andre Radmall :
8:37
I think from a political social point of view, liminality also provides the kind of space in which the usual structures and particularly power structures are loosened. And there is more space for play, more space for experimentation in that sense it's a rather countercultural but also kind of, I don't know, risky kind of place to be, in a sense, transgressive place to be.
Paul Hargreaves :
9:14
I'm particularly grateful for number one, the interruption, i'm talking kind of business world here. There's a lot of businesses that have been interrupted, obviously. We we had a huge interruption, we had our own crisis in 2014, which completely changed me as a person and completely changed our business. So I'm very grateful that more businesses, although it will be painful, are being interrupted and will come out of this in a different way because they've had everything they believe and trusted in completely stripped away. I've been told off three times this week for being too optimistic about the future of business. I'm happy to be told off about that.
Andre Radmall :
10:03
As an actor, I always saw liminality as the rehearsal room. It was, again, the space between my normal persona and the character that I was transforming into. I wasn't that character yet, but I was becoming. And I was on that rather chaotic sometimes journey between my regular persona and this character that I was playing. So, there is something alchemic and mysterious about liminality but I do feel that we're in a liminal position at the moment in terms of our culture and the worldwide socio economic, political position. And in liminal spaces like this, there is always a strong impetus usually to go back to the way things were or to try to reassert the established order even more strongly, but the liminal space does keep open the possibility for something new and maybe as yet unknown, to emerge and create a new future.
Azariah France Williams :
11:16
Just a quick thing that I remember the book I read some years ago called 'Guard the Chaos'. It's written by feminist theologians Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wilde. And there's a whole section in there about liminality, which I found really helpful and simply said that the liminal space can be seen as marginal, so you can feel like you're on the outside of the centre and you're trying to break in somehow. Or it can be seen as a threshold; that actually you turn around and realise that there's this whole big, bigger, wider vista for you to enjoy and to call others out to and so we have that opportunity, whether we try to break back into something which we've already said he's already spent, or whether we see it as threshold. And how can we encourage/motivate people to get out of their kind of lizard brains as it were the sort of amygdala stuff, fight or flight to realise that actually we're on a threshold? How can we get enough of us to move forward? That's what I'm thinking but those two theologians really helped me with some of that thinking.
Rina Atienza :
12:27
My name is Rina and I've written this letter 30 minutes to midnight on the seventh of may 2020. This is my letter for today, that could exist tomorrow, or perhaps a longer future. Who knows? Hello, I'm okay. I'm fine. Is that all right? To reveal that while this is clearly not fine, i'm rather okay with the events that are unfolding currently. If there's a keeper meme fom a scrapbook of history, it will be the artist KC Green's cartoon called 'On Fire'. This multipurpose visual summarises the problems of our times, you know the image of a dog sitting with a cup of coffee or a tea surrounded by flames. It's not fine at all. To be fine means a state of being unblemished, pure and free of impurities. I can draw up a list of everything wrong with this profane world. We consume as a way of living, we burn resources to sustain us. You could say this is the abnormal state of our existence, just as the sun burns we do too, except it's here on Earth. If Hell is other people, would this mean that we are the hell for this planet and other species. If everything is burning, then surely man has indeed fallen. For can we even remember when we were all in some state of grace? This, these post lapsarian times. So what's new? Well, fine also comes from finere, meaning to finish and if it's not fine that perhaps this isn't finished. If it's not the end, could it mean a beginning? I had a dream a few weeks ago, some might call it a nightmare, since it resembled some War of the Worlds plot, with giant tentacled alien creature was attacking and eliminating us. I was running in the scene, and then remembered I had this mobile device on me. In that moment, I chose to make a last phone call to a man who I could have married once upon a time, but didn't. "I just call to say I love you" I mean it from the bottom of my heart. And I said a deep thank you that I was glad he was happy with his wife and new son. I woke up with a sense of peace. I could always have and want more. More is more. There I was, and here I am still, at peace with what is, grateful enough for all that has been - everything else is a bonus at this stage. Yet I continue to breathe. I'm fine in a world filled with 'it's not fine'. There's work yet to be done it seems. It might feel like a game over but there's hearts left in the ticker. The beat goes on. So I press continue to play on where the soul meets body.
Elysia Willis :
16:02
This episode has been created by the conversational and contemplative contributions of Andre Radmall, Richard Beck. Rina Atienza, Alex Owusu, Paul Milbank, Jana Beck, Paul Hargreaves and Azariah France Williams. And finally, special thanks to David Benjamin Blower for weaving his audio wizardry into this podcast. The next musical track you'll hear has been uniquely created for this episode by Andreaz Heden, and is entitled 'Liminality'. Here is Andreaz to tell us more.
Andreaz Heden :
16:40
It's difficult to know how and when to stop and break cycles of disruptive patterns in our life. It's also scary to unsettle from what's become a normal without knowing what the alternative looks like. Sometimes, the crisis like our present throws us by force into a liminal space between the now and the not yet. Most of us have a hard time staying on the threshold, that liminal space, long enough to discern where we need to go in order to avoid walking in circles. I believe music and art can help us stop the tyranny of time and open up a space within time where we can quiet and open our hearts for the not yet. The truth is that we do need this time and space in order for the seeds of transformation to grow in us. My piece the liminal spaces does not articulate or propose any particular road forward. It was It's important for me that the music had a transitional character, no clear beginning or end, no set pulse or like clear contours and no fixed score for the new song. Not yet.
