The Noumen on the Threshold

Open door, threshold, the limen is what is in between, neither one thing nor the other, the place of change and of encounter with the Noumen, with the radical other. On the threshold opens up the chasm, the depth, and the individual sinks into a cosmos without limits or measures. There, space and time relationships are suspended, we are in the territory of dark and uncertain borders, we are on the edge, any form is imaginal and virtual flow.

The liminal artist experiences himself at the limit of himself discovers areas that he did not know as his own, and checks how his/her individuality extends in Nature and the Cosmos. He or she opens the incurable wound within his/her community, to expose its members to the convulsion of its main values, a general convulsion of foundations that allows the subsequent growth and evolution. Limits are expanded, new experiences are included and the other, the different, the Noumen found on the threshold is assimilated. Liminality is not the only state of society, nor it is the most frequent, but it is in the condition of liminality that the appropriate scene is set for the emergence of the deepest values, whether in the form of dramas and sacred objects, or by the appearance of the most violent skepticisms about the values of the past.

In a liminal situation, the instincts, emotions, and intellect of a community trigger and crisscross their different pulses, producing a general convulsion, more or less strong, of all its values. The poet amplifies and focuses on himself the liminal situation of his community. Then, later, as a demiurge, he will reconfigure social reality in his work, establishing the new relationships of his members with each other and of these with Nature. Strictly liminal phenomena are more typical of tribal and agrarian societies, while highly structured societies (Mythico-Ritual Axes of the King-God and after) transform the liminal into liminoid through art and ritual. This type of society impose filters on the liminal, stripping it of much of its chaotic content, taming the liminal by locating it in a perfectly controlled space-time, in which the disruptive capacity of the liminal is minimized.

The liminal is what remains open, unfinished, and carries a burden of anomie. Control over this anomie is achieved through a strict rendering of myths in rituals, but above all through the transformation of rite into a show. The step from rite to drama is but a small one: it is enough to interrupt a ceremony to give it theatrical content. The step from the liminal to the liminoid occurs when we include in the ritual performance the new and the unexpected, but disarmed of all its anomic content by granting it a very precise space-time for its occurrence. This step historically began with the control of musical dramas that already took place in Athens, all of them coming from choral songs and dances of the dithyrambic type with strong liminal content, but in general, it is a process carried out by every society at some point on its way to non-tribal social organization.

Through the liminal work, new forms emerge from the virtual flow or the already existing ones dissolve in it. This unique two-way process always occurs on the edge of the present, or on an exact present, as Lorca said. What is the meaning of the word “present”, praes-ens”? It means to be before, that is, the notion of present entails, first of all, an obvious bodily dimension: presence is the location of two bodies in a known space and time, facing each other, one witness to the other. This notion of general presence is precisely used by Lorca with all its resonances in the “Cry for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”.

What do they say? A silence rests stinks.

We are with a present body that disappears,

with a clear shape that had nightingales and now

we see it filled with bottomless holes.

The expression used, present body, which normally serves to name a corpse to be taken to bury, introduces us to the problem of presence: it is a body that vanishes, something volatile and fleeting. Life is fleeting, and so is death. Ignacio's body vanishes, like a vague fog of stenches that goes away in silence. The mutable form of a corpse, pierced by death in its incessant activity, it was yesterday a hostel of nightingales, the abode of the vital principle. Today, however, it has become somewhat dry and incomprehensible for everyone, since it shows us that what animated the body is different from the body itself. The corpse is the object of contemplation and the poet shows it to us as a mystery: stone and corpse in mutual support, something no longer human, a body fused with the nature that gave it its birth and its death. The corpse shows the incessant activity of nature at the limit, the continuity of the vital cycles in the decomposition of the organism. The present body not only shows the continuity of what is natural in the human but is focusing all that activity of life in death itself, is intensifying it before us, because that body has just died has already moved away from the image we had of him.

The problem of the corporeality of presence, therefore, leads to the problem of its temporal dimension: presence is corporeality focused on the present, and more generally, the focusing or intensification of individual consciousness in the here and now, which transfigures it into a broader identity, already detached from any material projection like Principium Individuationis. The present contains the enigma of eternity, is the rose of the eternal rosebush, is something elusive measured with the imponderables instants. Individual consciousness is based on the opening to the nothingness of the moment, whose roots are sighs, that is, air. The moment is what dies and is born continuously, but it is also the door, the threshold to what has not yet been realized, where something different can happen. The opening of the moment is the basis of the opening of presence, and that is why speaking of presence is analogous to speaking of absence: everything that is coming into presence is leaving it at the same time.

We could then define the notion of presence as the instantaneous focusing of individual consciousness that expands it beyond its limits. This is the equivalent to an intensification of the process that leads from the limited to the Unlimited, the process from form to the virtual flow.

Absences and individual presences are but veils that mitigate or cover the terrifying encounter with the focus of consciousness on the corporeality of nature, the processes of generation and destruction in front of which our individuality seems to disappear, the encounter with the Sublime. Such encounter with the Sublime is the lifting of the veil of existence, the encounter with the Absolute, it is more than anyone can bear, and it can only be experienced as terror. Like in the Dionysian experience. The terrible presence is the presence that has reached maximum focus. The terrible presence intensifies before the poet the dynamics of formation and dissolution; the contrast between the limitation of the individuality of the poet and the limitless extension of nature. The experience produces pain as well as an irresistible attraction. The action that derives from the encounter with the terrible presence is the complaint, an authentic bridge stretched over the abyss that unites the poet with the virtual flow over the generations and destructions of individual forms, as we read in Arjun’s encounter with Brahman in The Bhagavad Gita.