The Things That Unsettle Us

There are few things as unsettling as the space in between: It is the gap connecting what once was and what will be, bridging the edges of what we know and the what we don’t know. The in between holds both the familiar and the strange and causes us to sit on the edge of our comfort before slipping into outright terror or relief. This knife edge of comfort/displeasure compels and repels us simultaneously, seating us on the borderline of emotional distress.

Hungarian philosopher Julia Kristeva in her essay Powers of Horror (1980) explained this experience of ambiguous danger as the result of the threat to the breakdown of meaning when distinctions between you and another object (or another person) break down. This leads to an embodied feeling of being in perpetual, ambiguous uncertainty as the object once seen as good, now feels foreign. Kristeva calls this feeling of uncertain foreignness, the space of the in between, or the abject.

The abject might be:
The usually sweet milk that has been left out in the warm and is to smell sour- should you drink it? If you try and it’s off, it might engage the gag reflex, or worse, your body might reject it with force. The milk is on the edge between foulness and sustenance.

The friend that didn’t look you in the eye when they made you a promise and you suspect they betrayed you; the relationship is now experienced as the in between. Are they still your friend? Or, are they your enemy? Who are they to you now and, who are you to them? How would you know? The relationship is teetering between the blurred edge of closeness and remoteness, trust and mistrust.

The dying lover who breathes their final breath leaving a stagnant, cooling corpse where your love once lay- is it still your partner, now turning cold? How close should you be wth the body? And how long should you be in its presence? The remains are the lover but not the lover any longer. When is the right time to discard it? The immediately lifeless body is on the borderline of living and death through memories still alive and decaying flesh.

The in between, or abject is the meeting place of what once was, but now is not, yet is becoming something else in process: the milk, the friend, the cherished body, all raising unsettling emotions from nervousness all the way to violent disgust due to the forward passage of time leading us to want to reject what is no longer obviously good. For some of us vomiting is within the scope of possibility when we contemplate these scenarios- our bodies want to physically reject what is on the edge of spoiling to ensure our ongoing wellbeing. The above scenarios are snapshots of good things going bad and the accompanying unsettling feelings as we choose how to be with the goodness of the object (nourishment, a friend, a lover) and the emerging new meanings which now point to the emergent badness of the object. The most intense feelings of this in betweenness lead to a feeling of revulsion and terrifying danger as we want to push away from us what is turning putrid. Kristeva’s idea of the abject says that when we can’t, we feel a kind of horror. Imagine being forced to drink the curdling milk, trust the untrusted friend and live with the body close to you indefinitely, as the badness becomes more apparent. That is the feeling of a creeping perpetual fear-dread of abjection that only pushing away the offending object from the self will resolve.

This state of abjection, or degradation of meaning of an object or person, attempts to explain the powerful emotional responses like intense fear and moral disgust that things on the borderline of meaning tend to elicit. The things that are abject are from the liminal space- the invisible interval of meaning between order and chaos, where clear sensing is not yet known. A common experience of the abject is being awake in the middle of the night, while the whole house and street outside is in silent darkness. You are lying still in the twilight zone of day and night- although it’s night, should you get up? Or should you continue lying still willing sleep to come? The mind races in those small hours as you embody wakefulness during the practice of being still as if asleep. Surely we have some of most fearful, obsessional and tricking thoughts at such dark hours on the borderline of yesterday and the coming new day.

Perhaps the most intriguing liminal spaces are the physical spaces found in between the known past and unknown future; the vacant houses that have been emptied of inhabitants, furniture and all signs of living, now silently purposeless. These unoccupied lived-in spaces are waiting for new owners to bring an updated purpose to the house, making it home for new narratives to unfold. Other transitional physical places are the overgrown abandoned theme parks, the now silent emptied office spaces, the forgotten cinemas left in stillness under a veil of dust, the once-enjoyed dilapidated playgrounds. The nature of the physical spaces found in between usefulness and subsequent meaning are paused, like the dead lover’s body on the borderline of meaning, lending an eery quality of undefined interpretation. These spaces when featured in film are frequently the contexts for horror and the paranormal to play out, inducing a distanced and therefore more benign form of fear in the audience. In reality, you have likely been in a space in transition and sensed the abject hush filling the some-where that feels familiar and is yet now intellectually and emotionally far away for reasons hard to pin down. The unsettling inner response that emerges within us is one of off-key silent emptiness- seeing what was, what has been left behind, and the space that now has no certain future. A haunting emptiness drifts and brushes against our skin as we stand within the meaning void.

These places, found in transition, include the impersonal and temporally untethered spaces of airports and aeroplanes in flight, suspended in time, devoid of timezones which correlate to the ground until the journey is completed. Passengers in these kinds of liminal, or in between spaces may experience an occupational vacancy; seated passengers are suspended in a kind of empty, forward-moving, timeless waiting. The flight in transit is often a journey to another kind of liminal space- the hotel, the beach, the foreign city, where regular life goes “on hold” and we enjoy our time off from the dictates of functional living and employment. It is in these times of being on hold when the pre-conscious material from our lives begins to surface and take shape in the form of distractions from our relaxing and adventures- the fights from back home re-ignite, the nagging sense of life dissatisfaction surfaces over breakfast overlooking the pool. In transit, we have come to expect there is a smorgasbord of distracting entertainment in the back of someone else’s seat ready to serve up alternate meanings to the vacant time at hand. And if there’s nothing grabbing our interest, we are likely to try drink or sleep the flight off, which is another kind of liminal space- conscious, but not awake to the world, alive but physically still, as if dead.

The physical spaces of the in-between are also a metaphor for the internal living spaces we occupy inside our minds. Like the overgrown abandoned theme park, these inner spaces are the unsettling experiences of the borderline: we are on the terrifying edge of falling in love, or we are silently slipping out of love, it is those few days after a loved family member passes when we don’t know how we will carry on, the mindlessness of forgetting the joy we once found in our chosen work; the a void of meaning now peaking through the veil of our seeing as we slip away from what was known to us. The abject is the inner landscape of being slowly deprived of our faith, or any event that addresses our shifting identity and now puts us on the threshold of what is to come and who we will need to be in response. The not-known space of the liminal inner experience can leave us breathless and spaced out as we grapple with what was and what is to emerge, but not yet. Suddenly, in these unsettling stretches of being, the narrative arc of meaning we weaved through our waking moments doesn’t fit the scene, the script of our lives has stopped moving in time the the score, the stage is empty of familiar props. And yet the final curtain hasn’t thus far dropped, the closing cue excusing our exit. In these times of in between we are found groundless in the old house of our lives. The lights are on, but no-one but us is home. The emptiness where meaning once lived, creeps.

The psyche’s liminal space is the uncomfortable gap between daydreaming of what life is and the reality of our lived experience and it is the feeling space that is most often neglected by our attention, but remains murmuring on the inside. Instead of going to the places that scare us to stand inside the rejected spaces of our unfelt, unknown, unnamed imaginings, we want to rush to the next action scene, skip to the final page. We want the square the circle creating a conclusive wholeness of form. To a mind that rightly searches for meaning so we can accurately orient ourselves in the world and stand a chance of producing a life of satisfaction, we search for reasons for living. If we have enough trust we might turn to others to help us through the I don’t know of life, to help us see more clearly and move us forward with confidence and decisive action.

But if in the past we have found that “hell is other people” as the famous line is Sartre’s 1944 play No Exit voices, it is because our self image is held in the judgements of others and those judgements are the apparatus we use to judge ourselves. Our self perceptions, located in the body of other people is prone to ever-shifting personal interpretations as we move in and through the in between via our interactions with other people. Once again, we are caught in the liminal space of the not quite known and the instability that brings. As we look at each other and recognise the returning gaze of perception of the other forms the way in which we view ourselves, we are confronted by one of the most unsettling aspects of being human: for better or worse, we all exist in some respects in the judgements held by others external to our influence. The problem is these perceptions may be distorted through the liminal space of inter-subjective seeing and personal interpretation of meaning, or a person may see us for what we really are and we come up lacking.

So, this hellish suffering Sartre is pointing to is the act of looking at another person, who can gaze right back at us through their subjective seeing. The other’s eyes will see us as a kind of object to be labelled and interacted with rather than a complex person to be understood. This living hell of Sartre’s is not an eternal fire for divine retribution in the next life, but is instead the living out of daily ambiguous intersections of relationships, which include the threat of undesired subjective response to our personhood which remains out of our control.

To overcome the fear of living through this liminal relational space of which there may be no exit in this life, I suggest that we deliberately choose to live in and through the immediate life that lives right here, which includes the feelings of our knowing in our bodies connecting us to the things that unsettle us the most. In regularly coming home to ourselves through mindfulness, art making, therapeutic relating, the unnamed pockets of our psyche that spook and threaten to disrupt our trust in our own better qualities and capacities find form and move into more conscious knowing as objects to be understood. In this life we cannot rid ourselves of the things that are on the edge of turning bad, the abject of our lives. The static background hum of depressive, anxious and nihilistic feelings may tell us we are powerless in our fight against the meaningless of difficult experience and that we are all alone in our attempts to overcome the void, things that unsettle us the most. We cannot fully cleanse ourselves of these feelings, but we can become friendly towards them, to strip them of their psychic power if we meet them in the presence of another who partners with us in our desire to make meaningful sense of our lives.

The things that unsettle us the most are things that remain on the edge of our knowing, never quite fully understood, but never fully disappearing. But in giving voice to the forgotten unspoken, we find a way to make room for the things that unsettle us to speak, so that their messages are heard, attended to with compassionate curiosity and offered room to be more fully known. Once we understand the meaning of the objects in our lives they can then put away, ordered in their rightful place, giving us more open space to do with as we choose.



Closing note:
This written piece has been hanging out in the liminal space of not yet but almost known for longer than has been comfortable. It seems the unthought knowns of the ideas outlined above wanted to move at their own pace and I was held in the discomfort of the in betweenness of waiting for clarity of meanings to emerge in a way that felt sensible and coherent to anyone reading. It’s a peculiar thing that something so apparently clear in my own mind (at some point at the start of the writing) found its way in a meandering stroll towards foreignness, in between the ordered and disordered. This process seemed to want to prove to me the purpose of writing the content. I had to stand in my own process of being with what is not yet available to order but one day, with work and trust, will be. To get this out and on to the page I had to be with the quietly disconcerting formlessness of meanings, ongoing, going over and reworking words until they gave way to clarity. This was a lesson in patience in sitting in the unknown to allow the words to speak in their own particular time. This happened through the language of my own daily living, away from the page . This was the only way forward towards creating something worth taking the time to articulate.