![]() ![]() In religious matters, whenever inerrancy is asserted, whenever we say that God’s nature can be fully expressed by an idea or a law, then ambiguity becomes a threat, a thing to stamp out. To quantify an ambiguous thing, after all, is inherently a struggle. I appreciate the way this term has come to model the ambiguous qualities it defines. But in the case of liminality I make an exception. Among life’s reasoning creatures, those who fail to match an assigned identity or who refute a category into which they find themselves placed, may live for years, if not a lifetime, as liminal beings.Īs a writer, I like my definitions precise. One thinks of the genus Ambulocetus, the “walking whales,” or the feathered dinosaur, a creature known as an Archaeopteryx. Through the lens of hindsight, the long march of life itself appears punctuated with liminal slithers and galumphs. Places can be liminal - airports or hospitals, a road in the wilderness, Earth’s borderlines where thunderheads flatten or rocks melt, where the sea gives up its light. It has since widened its meaning to include just about anything that suggests a transitional state. In its short life, liminal has departed its anthropologically precise definition. He drew on the Latin word limen, or threshold, to signify the middle phase of a ritual, that strange moment after one has given up a familiar way of being but has not yet come into a new identity. You’d think the word had been around since antiquity, but it’s a recent coinage, made up about a century ago by a French writer and folklorist, Arnold van Gennep. In the tropics there is such a moment in late afternoon, heat’s contrition, when the sea turns from silver to gold and the ordinary things of a day become totems of divine wisdom - the dust, the market shadows, the trash in canals - all of it at peace with the faraway sound of dying.Ī popular term for such evocations is liminal. The days, too, offer up such moments, in the blue dawn before dawn or in the browns of the second dusk when soil turns to light and looks down at itself in the broken glass of rivers. Who has not glimpsed these in-between and anonymous times that envelop us with a sense of life’s deeper trajectories? They are at once moments and states of being though they occur in time, our clock hands cannot touch them. Melville notes it in the opening of Moby Dick. It’s hard for what’s possible to find anywhere to hide.Īs in March, I find a similar season on the other side of winter, in November. The backsides of things revolve into view and shyly show their surfaces. As I walk along I become a center whose modest passing lifts entire trees into the stars and slowly turns their branches. All up the block the hardwoods appear ornamented with extra air and even the flattened grasses add depth to the sky. In this curious moment, this nameless season, the walls of order drift apart and more space is breathed into the world. I am relieved to feel myself somehow amid the calculated arcs of Earth’s orbit, touched everywhere by immeasurable emptiness, by a chance to walk awhile in the luxurious vacancy of a shattered category. Technically, of course, it is either winter or spring, but what moves me to be out is not measured by technical precision. Winter has gone, though spring has not yet come. I begin my walk, about forty minutes up the street, through Acorn Park, then back. At half past four in the morning, the stars are still out. After a few exploratory taps, I ease the blade into the lock then turn to face the sky. But the dead husk comes to life as a Ghost-type Pokémon, with a halo above its head to signify its odd existence.I HUNCH IN THE PORCH SHADOWS, feeling for the rough side of my key. Finally, Shedinja adds an etherial element to the family. It still keeps the cicada theme by being a shed insect husk, and the ninja theme by acting like the dummy left behind by escaping ninja for distraction. ![]() Its evolution Ninjask is a fully matured cicada that also carries the ninja theme, presumably due to its blinding speed. This could have to do with the way Nincada buries itself underground and rarely comes out, hiding like a ninja. Nincada doesn't really challenge this stereotype, but its evolutions do provide some fun ways to surprise opponents in battle. Bugs are early game Pokémon through and through, designed to evolve fast and peak early. While the type has come a long way since first generation, it's still known for being intentionally weak. Are you a fan of Bug-type Pokémon? Well good on you for sticking with one of the notoriously weaker Pokémon types. ![]()
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