In the grand tradition of the spooky story, it was a dark and stormy night. Well, to be truthful, it was a dark and stormy morning, and as it’s Wales – and we’re also on the periphery of an apocalyptic climate crisis – it always seems to be a dark and stormy night, especially in the day. Despite all this, Small and I throw ourselves into the morning routine, the drizzle clinging to every leaf and the wind blasting every flower. The world on days such as this seems to be a riot of unthethered petals and branches hanging overhead, determined to strike out: everything feels very green, and dark, Small’s chatter a bright line keeping me connected to this world.
This seems to have been the season of the missing season; present and yet not, existing in a state of potentia. This is an in-between place, a space between what should have been and what comes next. I’m not going to write too much about this as I’ve done a bit in previous posts – most particularly here and here. But our missing season, hidden amidst the damp, feels like an abandoned thing. Online, people talk about how sad and lonely they are finding this weather and how it makes them feel depressed and ill. Others ask whether anyone thinks the spring and, indeed, the summer will come at all. The rest of the world seems to be burning but here in my little enclave everything is wet. When I wander into town there are gaps where shops used to exist, nothing but darkness within. The high street is becoming a place that feels uncomfortable to be in. The liminal is spreading.
Of course, there is medieval precedence for these feelings, as there so often is. We may think of ourselves as being very distant from our predecessors but we aren’t, really. They had lots of profound things to say about the in-between spaces, and the seen and unseen things that might exist there.
In their introduction to Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture, Gertsman & Stevenson discuss a particular manuscript (Stadtbibliothek Nuremberg Cent. VII, 88 to assign its full designation), an ars moriendi which has particular resonance in a discussion on liminality. To go off piste slightly, an ars moriendi text is one which outlines the methods to achieve a good death. The longer version, the Tactatus (or Speculum) artis bene moriendi, had 6 chapters which covered everything from our need to not fear death, through to the seven questions to ask a dying man, which included things like ‘do you acknowledge you have not done as well as you might have done?’ (which sounds very much like the sort of thing my mother might ask me on my deathbed, along with ‘oh, you’re wearing that, are you?’). In this particular ars moriendi there is something called ‘A Mirror of the Sick and Dying’, on f.2r, and a treatise which has been obscured by a small woodcut glued to the left edge of the folio.
The crucified Christ, flanked by the Virgin and St John, bleeds profusely; sanguine drops trickle down his flesh onto the ground, graze Mary’s halo, and find visual echoes in the Virgin’s tunic and St John’s crimson mantle as well as in the red ink that enlivens the manuscript text. The insertion not only fostered the miscellany users’ meditations upon Christ’s Passion, but also offered them a participatory experience of lifting and lowering the image : a performative gesture that activated the nuns’ bodies, engaging them somatically…
Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture, Gertsman & Stevenson
The crucifix was there to remind the reader of its role in the funeral rites, but it was also there as a boundary; existing ‘between physical, devotional, and temporal loci; a liminal space between the material and the imaginary; a fluid stratum between the spoken, the written, the depicted, and the experienced; a bridge between the object and the female devotee, who is cast as the viewer-reader-spectator-performer’ [Gertsman & Stevenson, p.1]. This is an academic way of saying that the medieval scribe wanted to remind us that there are edges, there are spaces, within which things can happen. I can’t see that this manuscript has been digitised, but if anyone knows where it exists online I’d love to see it – it always feels like these liminal folio are omitted from digitisation strategies and I realise there are practical reasons for this, but the theorist in me always thinks it might be something creepier going on. After all, what happens if you digitise a liminal space?
Anyway, don’t mind me, you know how much I love to be weird. But the manuscripts dealing with liminal spaces, the idea of death and the soul and the afterlife? Feed them to me, they are SO fucking moreish. I could eat a bundle of them. Because sometimes we see these things, as with the woodcut; sometimes, we do not, as with MS 161, our Book of Hours with spaces left for later inclusion. But when nothing is included, when the space is left bare, what’s in there? Nothing? Something?
Here’s something that feels liminal to me: the opening chords to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. I wrote about this last summer, when I was going through something of a transitional time myself, the world around me ebbing and flowing into unexpected eddies. That scratchy opening music, meant to represent the past before moving into the clearer notes of the future, are a link between the nothing that comes before it, and the sound which comes after. It represent loss, not just in the lyrics but in the instruments missing from the score. Say what you will about both Gilmour and Waters but fuck me, did they know how to write a good song.
Purgatory is the ultimate liminal space – a transitional zone where we’re not supposed to stay. We’re supposed to move over to the Good Place or the Bad Place, depending on how well or not we’ve behaved in our lives (and, of course, in medieval times whether we’d had a good death). When I worked in hospitality, my group of friends and I used to have an oft-used toast when raising a glass: “The first one to Hell opens the bar”, which gives you some indication as to where we all thought we’d end up. For some souls, neither Heaven nor Hell seems appealing. Under those circumstances, what’s a spirit to do? You can’t stay in Purgatory forever, after all. In the case of Guy de Thurno, the best thing to do was to stay on this earthly plain and haunt your wife.
Guy de Thurno was a rich citizen of Verona who was clearly not happy with his demise and so, in a move which gives off an enormous whiff of entitled middle class white guy energy, he returns back to this earthly plain to continue his discussions in person. The wife, clearly feeling like she’d done her time with Guy, enlisted the help of a priest to return her husband back to where he belonged. In so doing, the priest entered into a dialogue with Guy’s ghost in which they discussed the nature of the afterlife.
What is absolutely fascinating is the image contained on f7. It is the only illustrated page in the manuscript, and shows the priest and Guy de Thurno’s widow (as well as other noble personages) congregating in what looks like a bedchamber. This is such a powerful example of the liminal space represented within a manuscript illustration, not least because you don’t immediately realise what’s going on and then, the sudden realisation hits you that in the circle between the concerned looking people is Guy’s spirit, unseen and yet present, dead and yet not dead, hovering on the plain between now and thereafter.
What’s even creepier still (to me at least) is f34v of the same manuscript. This is a full folio with only a brief bit of writing on it, and the rest of the page a blank expanse. What’s in this space? Does Guy’s spirit occupy other parts of the manuscript? Because once you open the door to the potential for something other, once you lift that piece of wood to see what’s below, you’re opening yourself up to possibility. This folio has something even more tantalising on its page – an area of mending, a hole which has been stitched by the manuscript’s creator. What happens if you look through that hole? Is it an eye on the hereafter?
The rain has returned, after a period of wonderful, life-affirming sunshine, and the world consequently becomes darker and more insular again, all thick strokes and heavy shading. If we are brave enough to take a glance through the embroidered circle on f34v perhaps we can see into the bedchamber of the Widow de Thurno who lies weeping, huddled in her bed alone, eyes screwed tight and a heavy blanket over her head, whilst in the darkness beyond the bed canopy comes a whispering, a chittering; incessant, angry, a litany of indignation getting angrier and angrier the longer it lasts.
And that’s the thing, you see. It lasts forever.
Dr Keri Thomas 