Loud and Liminal:

An Exploration of a Nocturnal Urban Space

I close the door and slap the cab twice. Its 11:30pm, and its starting to snow. I didn't

dress for the weather but I cant go inside yet. Rituals. I see five faces I know, but only two seem

to have names. A handshake, two hugs, a nod, and a horrible story about sparkly shoes: this is

part of the cost of entry. All the faces know my name, but they dont all know each other. I only

know lots of people named brother. I dont smoke.

Hey, brother: can I bum a dart? Speaking the local dialect puts the faces at ease.

Brother flashes a half-dead smile around a half-dead cigarette, and pulls the second last

from his pack. He wouldn't give just anyone his second-last smoke, or at least thats what his

half-nod implies.

The dance begins before the music. There is a rhythm to movements, a tempo created by

how you flick the ash from a cigarette, a form of speech that is expected, and an uneasy stumble

if you step left when the tacit choreography says to move right.

I lean against the bare plywood of the building. Dundas is in the process of revamping

their curb appeal, and this bar has jumped onto the band wagon. I havent seen any progress in a

few weeks. There is currently no sign above the doorway. If there were, I know what it would

read:
 Lasciate ogne speranza, voi chintrate. (Canto III, Line 9)

After only a moment of this blissful isolation, the cold silence is punctuated with a slap to

my shoulder. Another face, another hug, and another conversation I wont bother remembering. I

excuse myself.

Up the stairs. The saccharine sweetness of sweat and smoke machines drifts down as I

ascend. The music slowly changes from muffled bass to full frequency. A small table supporting

a small money box guarded by Charon: an even smaller girl. A line waits to pay the boatman, but

she waves me across the Styx, through a low doorway, and into the cavernous Hades proper.

And just like the underworld, there are only shades here.

Stacks of speakers frame the stage, where a lone conductor manipulates an invisible

orchestra. Wash lights, lasers, and strobes reflect off swollen pupils; I imagine them as a herd,

eyes reflecting green in the sparse light of the moon, hiding each other in their own numbers.

Just as in De Certeaus City, these singularities create and mediate the spaces shape. The dance

floors only boundary is where the herd thins, and the only pathways through the room are where

the herd allow. The room is kept dark to afford the part-people within some semblance of

anonymity.

The bathroom stalls here have functioning locks, and the people standing against the wall

arent bothered by security unless their business cant be ignored. Water sales are not an

insignificant portion of the bars profits.

 A face buys me a drink, and we sit on a couch against the opposite wall from the snake-

oil-salesmen. Bar to our left, stage to our right, and a fantastic view of hell before us.

The strata in this rectangular underworld is an odd one. The recently dead stand in the

empty area that is both too far away from the bar at the back of the room for service, and too far

away from the stage to be considered a piece of the dancing-sweating-shouting whole; the more

adventurous new-comers wander forward, drink in hand, but are still too still to fit; those

working, not for the establishment, cling to the wall opposite us, sitting on stools that belong to

tables used only as receptacles for empty drinks; the most intoxicated and infatuated form a

gyrating mass in front of the DJ. As if by the pull of some celestial body, at times the entire

populous will rush forward, compacting itself, frothing against the rocks, before expanding

outward and calming again. The greater demons move freely, and the others ebb and flow in their

wake. They conduct the shades, pulling invisible strings, getting people to clap-jump-shout-

move in response to their unnoticed commands.

But from the stage, the world looks different. The lights that were blinding, expose

everyone. The anonymity that convinces people to move to intoxicating rhythm of the DJs

invisible orchestra is exposed as a farce. The photographer stands in the shadows, flipping

through the moments she has stolen which others hoped would drift away, unseen. As if a

looking-glass has been stepped through, this underworld becomes reversed. But as I move off the

stage and back into the mass, I too am enveloped in the fiction that I am unseen and my moments

will drift away.

I am convinced this space grew organically, like Lefebvres Old Town, and it remains

dynamic. Areas for conversation bloom as the crowd ebbs, the merchants shift their market to
wherever clients gather. These temporary structures are eroded as the mass flows back into the

void they collectively created. This underworld self-mediates. It isnt always the bouncers who

remove those who have eroded too much of their own half-souls. The more lively shades pull the

new-dead forward into the fold when they are seen to have just enough life left.

But for all the death, this place breathes new life out onto the cold streets. Preconceptions

melt away, and those who are not pulled toward the far wall by the sirens song enjoy a different

spell. The music is not so loud for the ears of those within, but for their hearts and hips. If two

people lay against each other long enough their hearts will beat in time, but the heart of the beast

that we are within has a more powerful pulse. Those around you are silenced by the sound; the

bass, rattling your bones, makes the twitching of a phone irrelevant; the lights are so blinding

that, as entrancing as they are, you have no choice but to close your eyes. In a sea of strangers,

you begin to feel alone. So many bodies bash against you that you become desensitized, and,

unlike the slap to the shoulder which broke the isolation without, within you are encased in your

surrounded-aloneness.

The people begin to blur, and in one beat of the beasts heart, the room becomes one

entity. A coalesced form, created from husks of what these people are in the day. Troubles

forgotten. This new form becomes something separate from the bar within which it exists; a

community onto its self; a collection of individuals congregate in this underworld, but like in

heroes of the epic tradition, rise from it changed without becoming a part of it.

The lights go up, as the music goes down.

People are again strangers.

But I feel invigorated. Recharged.

Like I might be able to put up with these faces after all.