Recently we moved. Our new home is a small Cape perched on the edge of a serene pond amidst pine, maple, and flowering dogwoods. Slightly uphill sits its detached garage. In between the house and the garage lies a border: the house dwells in one town while the garage lives in the neighboring town.
Every day, multiple times a day, we cross a border. Though rather insignificant to our daily lives, this border does have consequences–different town water/sewer services, separate real estate taxes, and different school systems. For some of these we can choose a side (schools, address), but for others we remain divided, cleaved, split in two (taxes, utilities, getting from the house to the car.)
Borders are ideologically definitive, and yet they exist precariously, unsettled, wavering in the physical world and our lived experience.
While pursuing a doctorate in anthropology, I found myself filling up my schedule with courses from other departments. The anthropology department was undergoing serious upheaval and could not offer enough electives, barely able to meet our requirements as it was. Slipping from compulsory to preferential, the courses I chose were most often in the art history and film departments. One of my film courses, taught by Bhaskar Sarkar, was titled “The National.” It was in this class that I fell in love with words like transgressive, hyphenated, and liminal for it felt to me this fluid, plastic, and hybrid language was more reflective of the realities I knew and had witnessed than the black-and-white instinct to divide all into camps, parts, sides, and pieces, divided by clear and agreed-upon borders. The class explored the ‘national’ and ‘nation’ as cultural imaginings, the role of media in generating and mediating between differing imaginations, and the agents, agency, and interactions that continually transform and evolve the nation and nation-state. We explored the nation as dialectic process and the practices that create and bound it as ongoing negotiation between actors. Borders were not only porous, they were negotiated. As Professor Sarkar writes in his article, “Plasticity and the Global”:
There is an ongoing truck between difference and sameness in the folds of cultural interaction that has to be accounted for by any theory of global culture. One way to attend to this complex traffic is to track the multiscalar and multipotent relationalities between local nodes that constitute the global. Channeling resonance and discord, inducing amplification and erasure, these spatial contacts lead to a range of outcomes–collaboration, competition, neutral indifference. And under certain conditions, the relationships might develop into genuine reciprocities: in normative anticipations of the global–for instance, in theories of cosmopolitical–mutualities are taken to be the ideal limit case.
Bhaskar Sarkar, “Plasticity and the Global,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 451-471. Published by: Drake Stutesman; Wayne State University Press
If the nation is, in fact, a mutable ideal and a dynamic space, its mutations not wholly dependent on state-sanctioned rules and regulations, then its borders mark areas of movement and interaction more than rigid division.
There used to be a bookstore chain called Borders. Started by two University of Michigan graduates and as a Michigan alum myself, it came instantly to mind as I thought about this topic. I wondered about the origin of the name, Borders. I imagined that perhaps it had to do with the metaphorical edges of a book and the way we cross those in our conversation with various texts. Or perhaps it had to do with the way we cross borders into the unknown when we read something new, expanding our mental horizons. Or maybe the name suggested the literal border of the store we enter in order to browse and ultimately choose to hear a new and provocative or old and well-known voice, the border of the store like that of a country, our entrance as a tourist, other times as a citizen. Or more specifically, the chain’s original classification system which aligned the different store’s product choices with the local community’s wants and needs, each store crossing and connecting borders with the surrounding neighborhood.
I was wrong on all fronts. The name of the bookstore was taken from the last name of the founders, brothers Louis and Tom Borders. New border, different journey. I now began to wonder what the origins of the surname, Borders, is. One source I consulted suggested an Anglo-Saxon origin with the meaning identifying someone who worked as a peasant farmer. Digging further into Middle English and Norse, the name came from the word bord meaning a piece of wood, more specifically a piece of wood from the side of a ship. In a water crossing, the boundary of the ship, the planks of wood themselves, may be the ultimate border: a border between a successful crossing–the potential exploration and conquering of new lands–and death.
Death itself lies on the other side of a border and it is this final line defining and bounding our lives about which we may have the most curiosity. Near death experiences fascinate, perhaps in large part due to the perception that that border has been traversed and yet someone has returned to tell the tale. What if you could safely leave the confines of your body? What if you could violate the laws of time and space? Would not these border crossings be, ironically, the consummate life experience?
With this and all borders, it depends where we locate our focus. At the front during the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell underwent a near-death experience. He was shot by a sniper in the neck and describes the event in Homage to Catalonia:
There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock – no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance.
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
The flash of light, the lack of pain, and the fading of present reality–all are common to near-death experiences. Though brief in time, near-death experiences (or NDEs) exhibit an intensity in memory and a transformational aspect that belie the decreased oxygen to the brain and lack of consciousness that so often accompany them. Their medical inexplicability confounds as their cross-cultural, diverse demographic range of members affirms their reality. In one study, more than three-quarters of those surveyed reported that their NDEs provoked moderate or large changes in their lives. Crossing this final boundary and returning hence seems not only to be life-altering but to establish a permanent residence in the liminality of borderline experience, marked by recognition that what lies beyond the other side of any border may be that which is most close to us.
I could not say whether Orwell’s NDE altered his view of life or death. So we turn to his writings. In Orwell’s 1984, the character Winston tells Julia:
I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
George Orwell, 1984
Within the context of the novel, Winston makes reference to existence under The Party and the futility of hope as a sort of living death. Beyond the borders of the novel, though, the statement alludes to the dance of life and death, the way that one does not exist without the other, the view from our side (life) into that of unimaginable difference (death) as terminally self/other. The power structures of borders tip the scales: death distorts the shared border-making, emphasizes the inclusion/exclusion, and renders the doubleness of borders powerless. If our focus shifts from the difference of what the border separates to the overlap of what is shared, the border is revealed to be…
binding and breachable because of the potential for strategically turning the spatial dynamics of identity-as-sameness (the exclusion of difference) into the temporal dynamics of difference-as-therevision/relocation of identity as diversity (the creation of solidarities).
Homi Bhabha, keynote for the Volkswagen Foundation conference, “Boundaries. Passages—Passages: Approaches in the Contested Fields of Inter- and Transcultural Communication.” 2006
What is the nature of borders? It’s not the crossing of borders that intrigues. We cross borders all the time: towns, states, countries; ecological, personal, psychological. In fact, psychology as a discipline can be defined as
a science of human liminal constructions, a science concerned with the dynamic relationships that exist between people and what surrounds them and with the constant border crossing that defines the arena within which all human development takes place.
J. Valsiner, G. Marsico, N. Chaudhary, T. Sato, and V. Dazzani (eds.),
Psychology as a Science of Human Being, Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 2015, pp. 327–336
It’s human instinct to create borders to define, delimit, and exclude–an ordering of the world has some kind of logic–but then we squeeze our ideologies, our identities, our political aspirations into limited and inadequate borders that create systemic inequality as much as flawed reasoning. We become our arbitrary borders, frozen in denial.
I live at the borders of my own life, fitting myself in around the edges tucked around my children, my work, and other responsibilities that consume much of my time. What is my own border when my children grew inside of me and yet are not of me? They exist inside my borders, cross my borders, and always remain outside of my borders: these, all at the same time and thereby, the parent-child dynamic dances in a space fluid and ever-changing. If we try to delineate this relationship, or any relationship, by its borders, its essence escapes our grasp.
Going back to books and Borders, or borders of books rather because the image is so literal and metaphorical all at once. A book has its words on pages bound and closed into the covers of the physical book itself, a clear item with edges and borders, distinct boundaries between itself and anything else. And yet…when we open said book and caress its pages, what of that? And when we inhale its newly printed or old musty smell imprinting the experience of reading and the specific memory of those words in our heads, what of that? And when we communicate with what’s written in the book itself, with the book or to others, with other books and ideas, what of that? Tell me, where does a book begin and end. Such beauty is there when borders dissolve.
There is a host of people who would happily discard borders. Certainly you have heard of Doctors Without Borders whose mission is to “provide aid around the world because wars, diseases, and disasters know no borders.” But have you heard of Libraries Without Borders? Soccer Without Borders? Adaptation Without Borders? Rabbis Without Borders? Neurodata Without Borders? Clowns Without Borders? Trust me, the list goes on and on. Borders are, on the whole, multiplying rather than decreasing so what would happen if we destabilized the mental classifying work that borders do?
The thing is, I like my borders just as much as the next guy. Most of us, I imagine, feel strongly about our own property, our own space in this chaotic world. But where exactly are the lines of that space?
In a famous 1946 case, United States v. Causby, that question was put before the Supreme Court. Thomas Lee Causby owned a commercial chicken farm which was, unfortunately, situated nearby to an airport regularly used by the US military. The immense noise of the planes, the glare of the headlights, and the regularity of both was startling and, in fact, unduly stressing the chickens. One runway, used by military bombers, led into a flightpath directly over Causby’s property, only 18 feet above the tallest tree. The chickens became so distressed that they would fly into the walls of their coop, killing between 6-10 chickens on one particular day and, according to Causby, 150 chickens overall. As production fell, Causby had to give up his chicken farming. His family too was affected as sleep deprivation incited anxiety and fear into their daily lives, exacerbating the stress of losing work.
Causby referenced common law which stated that land ownership extends to “the periphery of the universe” arguing that his property rights had been infringed upon by the invasion of planes above his home. The Supreme Court agreed with him, explaining in their decision that although the airspace above is part of the public domain,
it is obvious that if the landowner is to have full enjoyment of the land, he must have exclusive control of the immediate reaches of the enveloping atmosphere.
“United States v. Causby.” Legal Information Institute, www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/328/256. Accessed 7 Jul. 2022.
We can argue endlessly about borders and boundaries. Perhaps we should. The decision about where they are, where they shall be, and where they may be contested is forever ongoing and never settled. Yet we will continue to live with them.
Sitting here, within my own singular body, bound and unbound in innumerable ways, I challenge myself to press against boundaries. I challenge myself to stretch into and beyond my mental thresholds, to hold hands with you in the most simple and profound transgression into the margins of self/other, to ask always where and why borders exist where they do, to remember that the act of bordering is a man-made one, and to relish in the liminality of borderlands, in-between spaces, ill- or un-defined moments and selves, and ever-evolving selfhood. It is no surprise that we ache for the beyond, proverbially reaching for the stars, as borders do delineate but it is our ability to stretch over, out, beyond that makes the view from the precipice so utterly astonishing.
across between and beyond 