Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
"Liminality" is a word that gets thrown around a lot as in academia, although its now most associated with the "back rooms" genre of photography which doesn't really pertain to its actual meaning of "between domains". The ultimate example of a liminal space is Purgatory: a disorientating and timeless place situated between life and death where you must wait.
Life is pulled towards liminal zones, they are often the most liveable places. As land creatures we live on the boundary between the ground and the sky. We need both domains to survive: the sky to breath and the ground to stand on, but could not survive in completely within one domain. In the case of land we exist just above the ground, only tangentially touching the sky. The reverse state in when we swim where we exist just under the water, but cannot go far from the boundary because we must breath in the sky.
The vast majority of creatures live in this liminal space, almost all life on Earth being constricted to the areas immediately above and below the divide; walk through the country and you'll see the sky is wide and the horizon thin. But there are two sets of creatures that don't fit: the extremophilic and the transitional creatures. The extremophiles live fully within a domain, without needing the other to survive. Deep sea monsters that need no sunlight or air like kraken or jellyfish, or on the flip side martlets: birds that cannot land. Martlets, such as swallows or swifts, spend their entire lives aerially; feeding, mating and sleeping. The only reason they must ever land is to lay eggs.
Then there are transitional creatures: those that can travel between the domains are are not dependant on living on the divide. Frogs, seals and crabs all travel between the land and the water and live quite comfortably in either space. Herons, gannets and kingfishers go between the sky and water: living in the sky but diving into the water to obtain food. And finally burrowing animals like rabbits and badgers and most of all moles spend time both above and below the ground. In a way these "transitional creatures" are super-liminal: living a life that constantly passes through the divide obtaining what they need from both sides.
These creatures are not the norm however, most are stuck to the thin line beneath the sky. Why is this? There are two possibilities: one precedent and one succedent. The precedent story is that life is drawn to liminal spaces, they are naturally more suited for life because they allow access to the benefits of both domains. The succedent story is that we have just defined the domains as such to place us between them, if man named the world then of course he divided in along himself, just as things above us are "up" and thing below us are "down", they are only that way relative to us. So if we existed in some other place we would also define ourselves to be "between worlds".
The answer is certainly the former in this case: no divide on earth is more clear than that between land and air, but for other cases the latter may be so. For example where we stand in time. The present is a liminal time: behind us lies the past full of glory and guilt. Before us lies the future full of hope and fear. But we never move past the "present", we cannot reach a time where we can truthfully say "this is the future". So in this case the domains of time are relative, man of two centuries ago called his moment the present, and ours the future. Whether or not one can be chronologically extremophilic or transitional is another story.
