sportello / door / threshold

[Daniel Cape]

> “The threshold is the ground-beam that bears the doorway as a whole. It
> sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside,
> penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between. What goes out
> and goes in, in the between, is joined in the between’s dependability.
> The dependability of the middle must never yield either way. The
> settling of the between needs something that can endure, and is in this
> sense hard. The threshold, as the settlement of the between, is hard
> because pain has petrified it. But the pain that became appropriated to
> stone did not harden into the threshold to congeal there. The pain
> presences unflagging in the threshold, as pain.”

V. interesting. I leapfrog to two thots:

'To be human, for Voegelin, is to occupy a middle ground between the
poles of raw, undifferentiated natural process and perfectly refined
spirituality... Voegelin refers to these extremes, respectively as
apeiron ("the indeterminate") and nous (i.e., "divine intellection"),
while the middle ground is the metaxy, the In-Between.' From: Dwight
Eddins, /The Gnostic Pynchon/ (Indiana U P: 1990).

and

One of the icons of film, Janus, "the god of gates, doors, doorways,
beginnings and endings. Patron of concrete and abstract beginnings… of
the world and the human life, of new historical ages. [He] symbolizes
change and transitions such as the progression of past to future, of
one condition to another, of one vision to another, the growing up of
young people, and of one universe to another. He was also known as the
figure representing time because he could see into the past with one
face and into the future with the other." [Wikipedia cribbage]