I was intensely aware it was September 1st today. In part that was because pretty much everyone I spoke to at work today mentioned it at some point in the conversation. But even if that hadn’t been the case, it’s the sort of threshold that I notice. I’ve always had an imaginary fixation on thresholds, seizing on those points where it feels like one period has ended and another one has begun. If we treat the seasons in calendar terms then today was the first day of autumn. It’s also the point where academic life suddenly starts to speed up again, with returning rhythms so familiar that I can’t help but realise how long I’ve now been doing this for.
It’s curious therefore that I started autumn preoccupied by how viscerally I now resist thinking in transitions. Not in the sense that I’ve entirely stopped doing it, after all I’m writing this blog post, rather in that I’ve loosened their hold on me to some extent. I happened to come across this line from Rilke on Sunday while reading on a balcony during one of the most dramatic storms I ever remember encountering.
if you are asked to achieve an ending somehow, this also means that you are receiving an order to begin anew; a new beginning is always possible—who should refuse it?
The promise of a threshold is a new beginning. It suggests a clean slate. A point at which you can move forward and leave things behind. The problem with this is that, psychoanalytically speaking, we never really leave the past behind but only change our relationship to it. What renders the threshold seductive in the imaginary is the prospect that you can move through something which leaves you fundamentally different. It attempts to escape what Ian Craib once described as the mess of life. We can see the past in this sense as the accumulated existential baggage which will always make itself known in some way. The fantasy of the threshold is like spring cleaning your home and imagining it will never get messy again.
What I think Rilke points to is how beginnings and endings are intimately connected. If we see the threshold as the beginning of something, it is always also the ending. It’s the same thing Eliot makes clear in one of my favourite lines in the Four Quartets: the end is where we start from. There is a risk this observation merely reproduces the fantasy of the threshold. The pain of endings is recast as the drama of beginnings. Indeed I belatedly realised on that balcony that this is exactly how I read the Four Quartets for a long time. Whereas Eliot (and I think Rilke) are pointing to something more subtle: the manner in which beginnings and endings are tangled up in cyclical ways that complicate sequence.
We don’t make an ending, we make and end. It’s something we’re doing to organise the cycle into a sequence. But the endings are always beginnings. The beginnings are always endings. The notion that we might “begin anew” desperately imposes an order on this cycle which simply isn’t there. It’s interesting that Rilke talks about this as an order (this is after all the man who wrote You Must Change Your Life) which I think seeks to acknowledge how the fantasy of the threshold often rests on a felt need for change. It’s a way of seeking contact with what Bollas calls the transformational object. The sense of an injunction, the need to end, is also a need to begin. In relativising the request, I don’t think Rilke is dismissing it as much as simply trying to recover the murky undercurrent which the imaginary of the threshold works to obscure.
The ending is never just an ending, the beginning is never just a beginning. The underlying messiness of life so easily gets lost if we embrace thresholds too wholeheartedly. The problem is that if we abandon thresholds then we lose touch with the energies that Rilke is responding to, the injunction for change and movement that leads us to pursue the transformational object. The balance comes I think in recognising thresholds, acknowledging them but not asking much of them. To treat them as occasions for reflection rather than occasions for transformation. What we imagine taking place through a threshold in fact represents a slow accretion which acts through this unavoidable interplay of beginnings and endings. Instead of rejecting thresholds they can instead sponsor the recognition of this change, as well as the curious insufficiency of the reflexivity which imagined it was driving the whole thing.
I just had a very good year. I suspect the year ahead might be better still. But that’s not something I need to ask of it.
Mark Carrigan 