The Daily Beast featured recently a bitter-sweet and thought-provoking interview and profile of a blogger who is passionately documented the death-knells of a great metropolis. New York City is being summarily and quickly terraformed into a suburban-idyll, a playground acceptable to American Mid-Western standards and values and is being turned away from its eclectic identity.
Derived from the same Latin root as the Roman Limes—the border of the frontier and furthest reaches of the empire, a liminal being is one that is on the perimeter and stays back and forth between more comfortable and familiar categories, and defies easy classification. Limen—or liminal points—are the terms for the threshold of mental or physical sensation, those disappearingly small perceptions that are just on the edge of the senses or awareness and a gauge for dismissing what one may have just imagined. Such beings partake of two, usually opposed, states and are stock-characters of folklore and fantasy, from chimera and hybrid creatures, part human, part beast, to vampires, zombies and other ghouls, neither alive nor dead—even to cyborgs and thinking-machines and the uncanniness that surrounds them.
Equally curious is the repulsion and attraction that normal humans have to them, whether classic and reputable or new and novel. Wolfssegener, Wolf Charmers, are ancient professionals—probably dating back to prehistory—and were quite respected in villages, like the figure of a shaman or witch-doctor, for keeping themselves and livestock safe from wolf-raids. Once Europe was taken by the mania of witch-trials in the late Middle Ages, however, Wolf-Charmers were persecuted as werewolves themselves. Such hysteria is a cyclical occurrence and happens in all cultures, and for all the attention that this chapter has received, it may not even be the most wide-spread maker of monsters (NDSAP propagandists in 1930s and 1940s framed the historic witch-hunts as a conspiracy to destroy Aryan womanhood, and even the early and revival witch-trials differed significantly in character—the former more concerned with practitioners currying unfair advantage over their neighbours with magic and the latter having more to do with social-order and the anarchy caused by being in league with the Devil). As in Medieval Europe, coping with the stresses of societal change—those forces which push the limits of what we perceive as normal and normative, which included the dawn of the Age of Exploration, the Reformation and counter-movements, seem to compel populations to create, designate liminal status.
Searching for something else (because a query on a specific illness raises all sort of alarms from the health authorities that mine deeply into such thing for the sake of public health and tracking the drift of disease), I came across an interesting training module, from April of 2009, which curiously captured the sentiment and official disposition of an exercise in outbreaks a few years hence.
Continuing my want for accompaniment and stares in stopped traffic—of which there is a good deal of and part of my motivation, although it’s getting harder and harder to tell blathering to one’s self from blathering to someone far distance or shouting orders at one’s communication devices but perhaps the call and response pace of a foreign language audio-textbook looks less than natural, during my commute—which sometimes can take a significant amount of time, I try to recite at least the introductory lessons of the library’s collection.
I am preparing for our next vacation and always figure it is worth risking a little confusion or letting something learnt expire in the meantime due to disuse to exercise the mouth. I think American English especially is not a very enunciative one and the work-out and exaggeration are necessary for any progress—whatever might stick during these sessions, since I am paying more attention to the road. I knew the German interjection Doch! for really or uh-huh, but while listening to the parallel structured lessons, I learned that the come-back phrase is really a formal and polite contradiction of a question framed in the negative, akin to yes indeed.
The French equivalent is si as opposed to the usually oui, which I never appreciated before. Both languages have two ways of saying yes and one word (form) for no. English, it turns out, once utilized four forms that followed this pattern and were appropriate responses, depending on how the question was posed—yes/no for negative questions and yea/nay for positive ones:
Will she not stay? Yes, she will.
Will he not go? No, he will not.
Will she stay? Yea, she will.
Will he go? Nay, he will not.
The Times of India has a tantalizing little article to re-calibrate the direction of environmental research, turning it back towards carbon-sequestration through a study on ant colonies. Of course, forests and coral reefs perform the same function on a much larger scale than one teeny-tiny bite of breath at a time—trapping whole bucket-fulls of greenhouse gases at once, if left alone.
Careful atmospheric measurements and observation suggests that the creatures make a mortar of limestone to shore up their tunnels and nests. Such examination of ant farms is really a foil to one of the greatest contributing factors to environmental change—behind industrial pollutants and ecological destruction: through mechanised and deep ploughing and tilling, layers of carbon-dioxide that would otherwise mellow underground is released by the acre. I do not believe that the ill-effects of modern cultivation is just the undoing the carefully coordinated work of ants and other chthonic beings.
In as much as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and wife in Sarajevo was not the sole catalyst and cause of the outbreak of World War, I appreciated the message of a documentary produced a few years ago that conveyed that those preceding years were not just a prelude, the eve of war. Aside from advances in mechanization, transportation and the migration of populations from rural to urban-areas, a singular event did lead to the diversion of much of that new and untempered energy towards the build-up of navies and military power: shortly after the invention of the airplane and the science of aerodynamics, French inventor and aeronaut Louis Blรฉriot successfully flew across the English Channel (La Manche) in the summer of 1909.
I can remember driving around the countryside in the mid-nineties, long before the days of content-on-demand and in a region whose FM stations did not match my tastes in music exactly with a lot of Country-Western and white-people Gospel, and discovering the wilds of AM radio, who devoted swaths of the programming-day to conservative then liberal tirades—sometimes confusing liberal with libertine.
I found it formative to be exposed to all sorts of alternative points of view—that sometimes retreated to conspiracy-mongering. Everything was open to dissent, however, and like a canon of nostalgic music to draw on, I wondered really what it means nowadays to have entertainment on demand for material that one has not been exposed to before—since we are getting worse, I think, at being very original or anything but derivative. Regardless of how dogmatic or admitting of disagreement these shows really were, I do remember how they characterised the opposition, especially avid followers of one figure in particular—as Ditto Heads. That seemed particularly fitting, and though of course the phenomena still exists, that term has fallen out of favour—because, perhaps, that's what the Medium (another term those shows used for the monolithic main-stream) has become, a media-echo of re-blogging and without much endurance to keep up a rally and when there's only flitting narcissism and everything true becomes a nice back-drop to frame it in.
