I feel caged. Like a beast forgotten in a corner of a laboratory. I am fearsome and feral, disheveled and wounded.
Sometimes it’s okay here, sometimes someone watches, watches me roam my enclosure. I love being watched. Can you see me? My visitor is mesmerized. I show my belly, give my undivided devotion. I perform for them solely. The new character I am unfurls, a riveting performance. But I grow bored, my visitor is now part of my lifelong sentence, as boring and common as the ground beneath me.
They won’t release me, they can’t release me. They won’t come back one day, always always always goodbye.
So on these days, no audience, no performer. Me in this cage, anxiety pooling in my guts and my breath coming out in puffs.
Who am I now? Who was I ever? What role will I take on next? Feel volatile. My hackles are raised and I patrol my lonesome enclosure, looking for something – anything – to escape. What am I? Who am I?
The answer’s aren’t here. I feel dangerous, bored, What will I do once I’m free? Who will I be? I wonder, I wonder and I fear at what I wonder.
I can’t stay still. I’m walking on a razor-sharp edge, cutting my feet to the bone. Directionless, wandering, unseen.
Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I scream and scream and scream, sobs wrecking my body. A guttural yell, lifetimes of anger and agony, a bottomless well.
I feel fragile, lonely, despair.
I yearn to be out of my body. I ache. I ache. I ache.
the fear of abandonment the need for reassurance the hunger for intimacy
a tendency to cower away at the first sight of detachment scrap everything and run destory the connection you worked so hard to build
a tendency to become destructive wanting things to work out ruining everything in the process regretting what was said, what was not oh, what could’ve been
and to think it all stems from an ethereal spirit bursting in warmth and comfort made of abandonment, trauma, and anger they are no longer around just in the empty thoughts that always seem to linger
she pitched her tent in the liminal, waited; this was the meaty transition, the oppressive now; to vanish everything within sight, just because; ignoring the gifts of the senses, all around; one day these things won’t be here, really; returned to her breathing, the tidal instant; she would no longer be there, as well; dwelling on her own absence, feeling it; not the ideas of and about everything, but actually; to see it all gone except for soil and shade, yes; calmed downward to the remaining pieces, clean: to disavow it all except the bones that will outlast you
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Peter Gutierrez is a writer and artist from New Jersey. 2020 poetry and fiction publications include Cavity, Gone Lawn, Ligeia, Misery Tourism, The Dark, Rejection Letters, Grody Mag, and Expat Press. You can find him on Twitter @suddenlyquiet.
The first thing to be said about liminality regards its preliminary concern for authenticity. Authenticity can be said to be an anti-reflexive bilateral movement—a psychic movement towards the separation of imaginary consciousness from its assimilated linguistic structure, as well as a corporeal movement attuned to the liminal unconscious. The point is to open up the self for radically other arrangements of being-in-the-world. This state of authenticity (which is an authenticity of phenomenological receptiveness, in opposition to the normative “authentic I” of symbolic Law) should be regarded as necessary for the emanation of what could be deemed liminal aesthetics. Authenticity is not ‘free,’ unmediated expression—nor is it the product of a primordial creative drive. An authentic aesthetic transmission is like a prolonged orgasm, that feeling of falling, the inundation of the death drive, the guerrilla chain at a Lightning Bolt show, of losing yourself. What is being transmitted is in fact this elusive, shared experience. It’s not just you losing autonomy of mind/body. It’s as if one’s own autonomy becomes superimposed by the intensity of a transgressive enjoyment, a jouissance. It is all “you,” more “you” than you can be at any other moment.
The aesthetic experience of ritual liminality is not triggered by a single object (thus there is no basis for classification of a “liminal art”) but rather functions as a return to a proto-symbolic sublation of phenomena—the innocent sanctification of flows of existence as altogether an undeciphered whole, the religious experience, the erotic encounter, psychedelic synesthesia. With these experiences we can delineate a common thread: a confrontation with the limits of language, as in Benjamin’s “aura” or Lyotard’s “sublime,” a holistic experience that resists comprehension and escapes linguistic distinctions. A ritual opens up this space; it standardizes collective experiences through/as repetition (of both conceptual flows and corporeal stimulation) and creates new boundaries for the sacred. And yet there is no contingent object for aesthetic transmission; rather, aesthetic liminality is produced as an excess of ritual engagement.
Ritual engagement can assume many forms, beliefs, and methods, but it necessarily involves the aesthetic transmission of shared experience, or the “experience” of shared experience. Repetition, worship, prayer, sacrifice, meditation, idolatry, sex, transgression, drugs, fantasy—:—the places we go to escape are the spaces where we encounter liminality. A liminal aesthetics must attach itself within and beyond the symbols, icons, and signs of the muse. It must find itself as a perpetual movement, a forlorn return, an impression. We cannot approach it as language-within-language, but more closely as experience-within-sign. The transmission of such experience does not take the form of the sign, therefore it does not contain the properties of the sign. Where meaning is concerned, liminal experience is simultaneously encased and lost. The encounter with the liminal, as product of ritual engagement, must therefore be based on an active recognition of shared experience, a shared lack, the shared human condition.
Lxminxl seeks to celebrate this virtual recognition.
I always find myself reaching for words. The thesaurus has become my best friend. In a world where often too much is said, a lack of things to say is taken to be an affront to the normative functioning of social existence. Because not saying something is more volatile than saying something; the absence of words retains a symbolic surplus—an externally contingent indication of my boredom, rudeness, hatefulness, spite, depression, contemplative state, respect, insanity. At least when something is said, meaning can be transposed onto specific words, tones, voices, and registers—even if the intended meaning is misunderstood, there still remains a collectively understood code through which meaning can be constructed. When nothing is said, all that is left to interpret is me, or the silent performance of myself.
I wonder if people hide behind their words for this reason. Do I really have nothing to say? Surely something must be there.
I am writing to you humbly, frankly, Husserly. Now I can ask you who you are so that you don’t feel socially obliged to come up with a suitable answer. I mean that seriously. I am laying here on the verge of tears, forcing myself to feel myself from the inside. What a perverted feeling this is. I want to go to a party—I want to lick the linoleum. Yet here I am: a nexus of desire, contemplating itself. Have you decided whether your essential compulsion is based on lack or imminence? Have you been reading too many french thinkers?
God i can feel their stares radiating onto me.
God i can’t escape my psyche, my body.
Am I writing this because I want your pity? On the contrary, I want my hedonism to be witnessed. More precisely, I want to be witnessed witnessing. To be crystal-meth clear: my secrets are mine to keep, but I invite others to know I keep them. I can’t help but relish in this voyeur dilemma—to admire the sadomasochist but to keep an artificial distance nonetheless. Are we to perpetually tease ourselves like this until we kiss the anthropocene? As if the convictions of Law and transgression don’t have each other in mind. As if the best time of my life wasn’t when I had uncontrollable hard-ons. Who knew that this masculine faggot, this muscular suture, would become such a thumb-sore. Belonging? I don’t want to be man’s belonging.
I think I’d rather belong to God, or rather to play at a distance, to encircle His grace. God::what a beautiful movement. Creation can be a spontaneously transcendental thing; symbiotic, semiotic veins between us and the absolute. Where one can’t exist without the other. Where the guarantee of mortality is the guarantee of Redemption. I can feel my arms going limb. I can feel the stickiness in my blinks. I can feel that familiar weight behind my eyes. I can feel the crying yelps and yelping cries of Diamanda Galas tickle my prostrate. I can feel my family’s happy laughter. I can feel that the friendships that I value the most are those in which my friend has depression. Are these the things that haunt me or give me sustenance?
LXMINXL 