The walls of the Hancock Public Library’s gallery space are hung with photographs and excerpts of text peppered with illustration, collage, and poetry. Cornelius Bull, a Peterborough-born artist, has been working for 20 years to fill not only the 300+ pages of his book, “Ganesha’s Mouse — An Illuminated Pilgrimage Into Betweenness,” but also the margins of those pages, with rumination on a single topic: liminality.
Liminality, or “betweenness,” is the space between two points, the indispensable middle ground in which anything can happen. Doorways are exemplar liminal spaces; they stand as both barriers and portals between inside and outside. They are not of themselves inside or outside, but their own distinct third place, born of the relationship between the other two. That is the essence of “betweenness.”
“This is an esoteric topic to begin with, liminality,” Bull said, when asked how he chose the excerpts on display. “The concept is kind of still a strange one for Westerners. People have talked about it, but it’s a very wide-ranging topic, and so what I had to do was choose parts of the book that were autobiographical, or that were easily accessible.” To communicate effectively about betweenness, Bull employs his own life experience; 15 years ago, he made the nearly 500-mile-long Santiago pilgrimage in Spain. All journeys are liminal periods, so Bull frequently uses the pilgrimage, alongside Hindu symbolism, in his prose and poetry.
There are many liminal spaces around us. Aside from doorways, people’s relationships, people’s religions, and people’s growth and change over time are all liminal; life is a liminal space between birth and death. Betweenness is an infinite theme. Bull sees it everywhere, and with it he connects Hindu belief to Judeo-Christian tradition, to more contemporary philosophy, to love and life and death and James and the Giant Peach.
“It goes on and on and on,” he said several times, leaning forward, punctuating his explanation with hand gestures and compounding connection upon connection as he tried to reconcile the magnitude of the topic at hand with the limited amount of time and space afforded him.
Despite the importance and abundance of liminal spaces, Bull says that they are often overlooked and undervalued. People rush from objective to objective, without giving thought to what lies in the middle. He has made it his life’s work to call attention to liminal spaces, which is why he created “Ganesha’s Mouse,” the first of several volumes in his broad-reaching, insightful, decades-long and ongoing exploration of the between.
Caroline Riffle lives in Peterborough.