Liminal Spaces

This is not just a place of water, it is a place of edges. Liminal.

We balance precariously between the water and the land. We inhabit the intersection between the very rich and the incredibly poor. We are surrounded by buildings of the past and the future; housing estates and high rises, cuts and canyons. We live in the cracks, human kintsugi, finding the gold, letting the light weave in and out.

Back when I thought I might be an academic, I wrote a postgraduate thesis on liminal spaces in the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald. I failed the thesis for many reasons; laziness, the realisation that I was on the wrong course, the more urgent realisation that I didn’t want to be an academic after all.

None of it was Penelope Fitzgerald’s fault. I think about her books often and I know that now, after thirty years, I could write that thesis properly, but I think I could live it better.

In this place I finally realise that I have no interest whatsoever in being in the middle of things anymore. I like being on the edges. I enjoy observing from the sidelines. I need to look at the world from an angle, it’s where things make sense to me. It is a physical relief to know that I am not centre stage, that I am nobody important.

I spent my day alone, exploring. I had a vague notion of walking to Bromley by Bow, mainly because I had never been there before and it was somewhere I could get to on foot. I love walking here. Every step connects me to some vast energy that pulses into me. It’s never about the destination. I walk the city and the city wakes me up to myself. In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin travels to Australia and follows the aboriginal people as they go Walkabout. They believe that they walk themselves into continued existence, and as I wander this city, I believe it too.

I barely spoke to anyone all day. When there was an interesting looking road, I walked down it. When there was something to look at, I looked at it. I walked through markets and a community garden where a group of people were packing up a picnic and making plans to come back the next day to make inroads into some weeds. A small black dog ran round and round them in ecstatic circles, wagging his entire body. I wandered through a park heady with the scent of some mad tree pollen that made me sneeze for a good ten minutes. I walked into a coffee shop because it had a plaque that said it was the ‘Home of Restless Beings.’ I walked out again without buying coffee because I was a restless being.

I watched a portly man in a string vest who seemed to be running a small furniture warehouse out of a shop that said it sold kebabs get so excited to see two young women of his acquaintance that he couldn’t stop hugging them. Every time he put them down he turned round and picked them up again.

I stopped and ate a sandwich in a cafe where two girls were discussing the works of Maggie Nelson with such fervour that they kept lifting the books up and flapping them like birds taking flight. I saw a relaxed man in a pair of Desmond and Dempsey tiger print pyjamas come in and order fancy coffee for him and his friend.

I wandered into an art gallery and looked at an exhibition because it was there and so was I. I walked past the Bryant and May match factory, which is now luxury flats protected by fancy gates. I walked past a bus garage that took up half a street and had so many buses in I couldn’t count them all and the vast space just swallowed them up.

I saw tiny patches of monkey faced pansies growing through the cracks in pavements, trees laden with unripe pears and figs drooping over garden walls, waiting for autumn. I saw brambles rioting by railway lines, rich with fruit and the dust of a thousand trains. I saw buddleia, dizzy with that dusky purple/green scent, pushing its way through the cracks in mortar and winding through used car lots and breakers yards. You see writ large at this time of year how easily nature would reclaim the city if humans disappeared for even a short time. Like me, nature reasserts itself in the cracks between lives.

I saw a fourteenth century church patch-worked together with every human intervention since the day it was finally finished. The church yard was another community garden and I stood under an arch of heady scented jasmine, watching a tramp fast asleep on a grave, using a baby’s car seat as a pillow. The church is now an island sliver in a sea of traffic but the man slumbered on as lorries roared passed him and exhaust fumes sat beneath the richness of the perfumed plants.

I saw so much and there is still so much to see as I slide by, making room for myself in the gaps left by other people and other lives.