I used to have the same problem. And it wasn’t just light bulbs, it was anything electronic.
It seems to have abated somewhat now.
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I suspect those LED & CF bulbs are nowhere near as long-lived as advertised. To add to that, we have problems with LED bulbs in older ceiling fixtures – I think the heat builds up and burns the bulbs out.
Now, back on topic, a room where there’s a bulb out – before you notice that’s the reason it’s dim, it seems very odd.
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I’m realizing that one of the reasons that I like No Country For Old Men (and various Lynch films etc) is how it captured the liminal.
edit: and the ending of Heat–they go into the no-man’s-land near the airport with those little pink cube buildings and they’re both silent so the other can’t find them. Michael Mann could get you to liminal. Even Miami Vice had those moments sometimes, like the James Brown episode.
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Side of highway with thumb out and stupid grin on face, not because happy about anything but just because been out there for an hour and not really supposed to be there and why not
Abandoned post office
Super spooky darkened soundproofed catwalk around edge of abandoned post office
Various other abandoned or unoccupied buildings
Downtown Madras during full eclipse
Am I doing this right?
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How do they work?
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Being jarred awake from dozing because it seems someone has touched or pushed me. But I’m alone.
Waking from what turns out to be (sometimes years later) a premonition dream. In the dream I was in unknown spaces, such as offices, surrounded by people I didn’t know but having and hearing conversation and banter.
Walking into somewhere I’ve never been but somehow knowing every detail - where things are, decorations, etc.
@MissyPants: I’m like you with lightbulbs, except with watches. From young childhood, every watch I’ve tried to wear has gone haywire. Analogue, digital, wound, battery-operated, old, new. They all bugger up in one way or another sooner rather than later. I also seem to gather/have a lot of static electricity in me, which I suspect ties in to not being able to wear watches for very long.
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This reminded me of something. There is a road, a big cross-town street in a city of about 150,000 people. I first drove down it more than 20 years ago. But every single time, I get turned around and my sense of direction goes haywire and I lose track of whether I’m going north or south. Like every time. It’s this one stretch of about 2 miles that does it. About 10 years ago I realized that it’s right around a major evangelical university whose politics I despise. I still lose track of where I am and which direction I’m going, while driving straight. It’s the only place that happens so consistently.
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many years ago, after reading one too many tedious essays on Phallogocentrism I toyed with finding its antithesis. I’ve forgotten the other components, but came up with cthono-something-liminalism… And once you have the word, it’s quite easy to find examples of it– or should I say her?
mystery cults digging temples within the barrows of the earth, cultures based on the chaotic, even lawless border regions far from the metropolitans,
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driving to work on densely foggy mornings.
i leave my house around 6 a.m. so it’s almost always dark unless there is a full moon setting. once i get on the highway there are few lights except for near the exits and some of them are pretty dark at that time of the day. i’m driving a little slower than i normally do and the landmarks that break up my drive aren’t visible, like i’m traveling in some void. reaching my exit is always a surprise. once or twice i’ve sped past it without realizing i was there until i wasn’t.
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When I was in school I used to semi-regularly drive a pretty long stretch of two-lane highway through the middle of nowhere. On a moonless night, when all you can see is what’s illuminated by your headlights, it’s easy to imagine that what you can’t see doesn’t exist. It sometimes felt more like I was flying a small spaceship through the void than driving a car in physical contact with the earth.
I don’t know if that counts as a liminal space, but I once had a quasi-religious experience on one such drive, while smoking brick-weed and listening for the first time to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid in it’s entirety.
\m/ \m/
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Small town train stations. And parts of the biggest train stations. Mid-sized ones less so.
Timeless but never quite right. The same benches, signs, clocks, billboards, tracks endlessly recombined. In every decade there are a few elements, but if Theseus’s ship is rebuilt slowly enough, then it feels more eternal than anything unchanging ever could. And it always is a decayed and half-forgotten version of something it probably never was.
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Echo-gnomics?
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Now I will share with you one of the most beautiful and surreal moments of my life. I was in my senior year of high school. I drove home on the rural Alabama country road I’d travelled many times before. It was late at night - dark, and the road was free of other traffic. I drove fast and with ease down the familiar road.
I had the radio on.
The signal for the railroad crossing began to flash and the bar went down. I sat alone in the dark.
As the train rounded the bend into view, The City of New Orleans came on the radio.
The train passed.
The song ended.
The bar lifted.
I returned to my journey home.
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I can’t find a reference, but “magnets in the blood” used to be a way to tell aliens from Earthlings in ~1930s science fiction. It got spoofed on a 1970s TV show I once saw – one wag suggests everyone walk through the kitchen, and whoever sticks to the stove must be an alien.
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The actualisation of the sexual self can happen at the same time that degrees of fear, repulsion and uncertainty – as well as excitement and intrigue – are present on both sides. In these moments, allowing ourselves to engage in intense personal vulnerability can make space for the production of liminal trust. This trust is based not on consent, but on a shared commitment to embrace the fact that sexual pleasure and danger often occupy the same space. Although sexual liminality encompasses the risk that conduct can cross over into the realm of bad sex, it can also be empowering because it acknowledges the potential for sexual encounters to change us, to recreate us, in unplanned ways.
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Drug stores when I’m feeling like disappearing in public. I can prowl the aisles forever. Costs very little and is somehow comforting. Just me?
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Your car, after a week or so of backpacking/canoeing. All of a sudden you are moving forward without expending any energy. It doesn’t feel quite real, like a dream of a magic carpet.
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Walking, especially anywhere unfamiliar, after driving for 12 hours. It’s the mirror of what you describe, where it feels extra weird to NOT be hurtling down the road, and it feels like you have sea legs or something. I’ve heard it described as the feeling of one’s soul not having caught up with one’s body.
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A few days ago I went shopping, and had a particularly bad shopping cart that constantly and STRONGLY pulled to the right.
When I got into my car, it took me a few minutes for my brain to process the idea that my car wasn’t also being pulled to the right.
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