If you're not familiar with the word liminal, it mostly just means in-between. In my dissertation, I wrote about the late feminist philosopher Maria Lugones and her discussion of the liminal. In her essay “On Complex Communication” she has a beautiful description of what it means for those who live on the margins to meet in liminal spaces and learn to communicate there. I really love when she writes:
Complex communication thrives on recognition of opacity and on reading opacity, not through assimilating the text of others to our own. Rather, it is enacted through a change in one’s own vocabulary, one’s sense of self, one’s way of living, in the extension of one’s collective memory, through developing forms of communication that signal disruption of the reduction attempted by the oppressor. Complex communication is creative.
YES. I feel this in my bones just like that Taylor Swift lyric. The message feels like:
We can be complex.
We can be opaque.
We can be messy.
We can be confusing.
We can be creative.
Refusing to be reduced to one thing is a radical act.
Refusing to reduce ourselves to one thing is an inner revolution.
You're as expansive as the sky and as deep as the ocean, babe.
I bow down to your opacity and revel in your power to transform.
