Pop 89: The Mystery of In-Between
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
I just finished reading “Thin Places” by Jordan Kisner. Subtitled “Essays from In-Between,” it’s a fitting read as we transit into the new year. According to the Celts, thin places are those places where the veil between worlds is thin, and heaven and earth are only three feet apart. And sometimes they are even closer than that. Living on the prairie, I sense the veil lift every dusk, reminding me of the French Canadian description of the moment as “entre chien et loup,” “between dog and wolf.”
Laurie Anderson, the performer-musician, described the allure of the in-between when she pondered the act of walking, how during the moment between lifting a foot and dropping it down, we hang between falling and flying.
A lifelong love of the “in-between” is partly what draws me to books with titles such as Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge” and the writings of mystics such as the Upanishads, from whom Maugham took his title. “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over,” the Hindu saying goes, “thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”
And what of that word: “Salvation”? I am interested in the subtle and enormous differences between words. Do we wish to be “saved” or to be “freed,” and what is the difference? A mystic will tell you they are one and the same. A fundamentalist might tell you neither is possible if you don’t sign up to their club. (Membership has its privileges, after all.)
And here is a delicious etymological fact: the word “betwixt,” an earlier version of the word “between” is a combination of “bi,” meaning “two,” and the suffix “-ish,” meaning approximately. So to be “between” is to be “two-ish” or “both.” Rarely do we hang out or hover “in-between”; usually, we are in transition. I am interested in transitional moments, be it my own aging or the decline of empires, a time I address in a project I am working about the prairie in the late 1800s - a time of accelerated change, thanks mostly to industry, trains and the introduction of newspapers. The end of the nineteenth century flooded the world with papers. Where once the news of one’s little town was all one heard about, suddenly the world and all its shenanigans were at humanity’s fingertips. For good and ill, the old reality that extended only as far as one could see, smell, hear and touch was invaded with information about other people and places. And with it, a new hierarchy of what was considered important. An embodied, sensual, local, empirical understanding of the world took a backseat to a worldly, data-driven understanding. And who was - is - the wiser?
The Gilded Age - as Mark Twain called the end of the 19th century - was a time of immigration to the North American West. Nomadic life was being edged out by colonial settlement. And neither Natives nor Newcomers had a real grasp on what the Powers That Be were up to. The cowboy illustrator Charles Russell had a foot in both worlds. “Before the country was strung with wire and the nesters took all the water,” he wrote, “my home was big.” And it wasn’t “anywhere I lay my hat, but where I spread my blankets.” Russell and the Indigenous before him travelled along the veil between worlds.
English historian Phyllis Rose writes: “The history of nineteenth-century thought is the record of various people’s efforts to find substitute sources of authority.” God was losing his punitive power over citizens; science was ascending: in whom and where could people place their trust?
Thin places are often referred to as thresholds or liminal spaces. They are on the edges of cliffs and entrances to caves. In the book I am writing, my protagonist has an accident aboard a ship just as she is going through a sea change - where she moves from being closer to her past home in England and is suddenly closer to her new home in Canada. She is observed by a man who happens to be one of the world’s first war correspondents. He understands, more than most, how quickly things can change, how thin and fragile is the place between life and death. The two voyagers become fast friends. She calls him a transitional numen - one of the “In A Twinkling of An Eye Gods.” In Greek mythology, they are the gods who watch over transitions, including weddings, funerals and births. In India, the elephant-headed Ganesh is the sentinel god of doorways. In the religion I was raised in, I was assured of my guardian angel watching over me as I drifted off to sleep.
In her book, Kisner examines the cross-over zones of: debutante balls, borderlines, conversion experiences, falling in love. She also describes, to my great thrill, the music of Lhasa de Sela. A musician about whom I made a documentary entitled “She Moves Between Worlds.” De Sela moved easily between languages and countries and, unfortunately died young. Her song “Soon This Space Will Be Too Small” is about her belief that dying is just like being born.
The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron would agree. She writes that life is one “continuous flow of transitions,” and if we learn how to navigate them, we will be beautifully prepared for our death. Meanwhile, I think I’ll try a little bibliomancy. I reach for the closest book on the shelf, a series of lectures by Ted Loder called “The Haunt of Grace.” Imagine my surprise when I randomly open it, and my eyes fall on: “There is in Celtic mythology the notion of thin places in the universe, where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity.” Wow. The worlds are thin, indeed. “All of us can name thin places,” he writes, “suffering is one, joy is another, mystery yet another….” The list is endless. If we are open.