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I’ve been thinking about liminal spaces quite a lot lately. In part it’s because I have a story idea tumbling around in my head that has nothing to do with what I’m actually writing. In fact, it couldn’t be further from the Cosy Crime world of the Rina Martin book I’m finishing. I don’t have time to deal with this idea just now and it’s not even formed enough to shape if I did, but it seems to have been inspired by doorways and thresholds. More precisely, I think it may also have to do with the changing year and that obsession that seems to dominate social media of New Year New You…
What if this really was a liminal moment, a time when we could divide ourselves from ourselves and become something entirely else? What if we could create a doorway – not a portal; that feels wrong. I’m thinking about an actual, physical door that we could choose to step through and become another version of ourselves. How many would choose to become that social media version of self? What level of thought and planning would have to go into the process- or should it be a simple leap of faith? Would it be possible to cross back again? If so, would this be like a visit to the land of the Fey – or the universe of Joe Haldeman’s Forever War – we would return changed, time having passed and everything unrecognisable.
I recognise that this is not an original idea (but then, what really is?), but one that people have mulled over in one way or another probably forever. You step over the line, through the door, step off the path and either you or the world changes, or they both change. If we’re going to be really fanciful, the reality is I suppose that we do it all the time and perhaps never notice the choices made.
The Greeks and Romans had gods of thresholds and doorways, almost as though stepping from one room to the next or from the outside space into the domestic, or vice versa, was a liminal journey that required guardianship and assistance. Limentinus, household god of the threshold and Forculus, household god of doors and, of course, two headed Janus, particularly relevant in these cold and damp January days.

And while we’re thinking about doors and thresholds and other semi- domesticated liminal spaces, do you ever run up the stairs intending to do something or go purposefully into another room and then forget completely what you went there for?
Well, there might well be a reason for that
A team or researchers at the University of Notre Dame – Gabriel Radvansky, Sabine Krawietz and Andrea Tamplin – found that we really do forget what we are doing when we cross a threshold. That our memories become worse when we pass through a doorway than if we walked the same distance within the same room.
Their explanation for this, they think, is that we tend to fix memory within the context of the original idea. You stand in your bedroom and think that you might like a cup of coffee. You walk downstairs and can’t recall what you were going to do because the context for the initial thought is no longer there.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51117912_Walking_through_Doorways_Causes_Forgetting_Further_Explorations
I’ve recently been rereading Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory and thinking about the techniques used to train mnemonic memory using real or imagined landscapes or memory palaces. This tendency to forget, when the context in which the memory is formed is changed seems somehow to be the obverse of that.
I’ve always been intrigued by the way that the notion of place is used as an analogue for our thoughts and feelings and emotional responses and how we might talk about being in a bad place or a good place. How, in storytelling, we might use the familiar and transform it into something ‘other’, just by changing a detail or two. Well it seems as though location, and the detail within that location might be having a more profound effect on our thought processes and our perceptions that we ever realized. The storyteller in me rather likes that but there is also something quite vertiginous about the idea. Perhaps we really do need the services of the guardians of thresholds and doorways.
And when we step out of our own places, when we cross the threshold into the outside world and travel down a particular road, what we might not think about is that we are traveling along what is essentially another liminal space. Roads are neither one thing or another. They are not a destination or a fixed location. We can stop. We can create a location on a road, we can fix it for a time, but to paraphrase Tolkien, the road goes on even when we no longer can.
Unless, of course, we choose to step through a different door.