Thoughts on everyday rituals
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Something I've thought about a lot lately is this seeming primal human
need and instinct for *ritual*: formal structures of symbolism and
action, through which we impose meaning and order on the meaningless and
chaotic world around us. Look to the canonical hours of prayer in Nicene
Christianity, Salat under Islam; look at the patterns of feast days and
fast days, deprivation and excess in a regular schedule.
People had a day for worship, a day for washing clothes, every week, where
women would come together to soak their household's clothes in urine, and
beat them against rocks in the river. There were seasons of harvest and
of planting, of work in the sun and work by the hearth. Life followed a
known rhythm: wake to the sound of animals baying outside, scrub yourself
clean with a rag and a water-jug, eat a quick meal, and with fresh linens
head off to the fields, or stay behind to tend the fire.
On some level, these patterns of life aren't the product just of God, or
of the passing seasons around you, but rather of the community itself.
People will, in living together, working together, dying and grieving
together, inevitably form shared norms. Common ideas of when to get up in
the morning, who and how to love, what is right and what is wrong.
And lest I sound too romantic about it, of course these norms can become
profoundly abusive. The hatred of queerness, of promiscuity from the
"wrong" sex, of public emotion --- of the Other, itself a ritualized ideas
--- it is unambiguously good to see these overthrown. But the force of
capitalist nouvelleition does not stop at breaking apart cultural
standards which are really unambiguously harmful.
The modern world is one that seeks to strip us of any roots at all. Any
practice that could ever threaten bourgeois hegemony is recuperated ---
stripped from its original context, any rough edges sanded off, and sold
to those who never shared or understood it to begin with. You will work
until they let you leave, then buy whatever, on a whim, out of sync with
everyone around you save through the lens of some marketing trend
(remember Stanley cups?). Mass culture is bound no longer by geographical
proximity, at least here in the imperial core, but by the faceless and
brainless systems of algorithmic recommendation.
I'm hardly exempt from this! The video which sent me thinking about it a
couple days ago, about the lives of medieval peasants[1], is from a
speaker I'd probably never have known about if he weren't recommended to
me, if I wasn't directed to his doorstep under the auspices of the
Machine. Probably I'm *more* atomized in this way than most of the people
reading this.
It's getting cold and cloudy again, but this time I've a tattered leather
jacket that still, mostly, fits.
Nonetheless, I did grow up deeply religious, and that background shaped me
in ways that can't ever really be undone. Absent the ritual structure of
the Divine Liturgy, of prayer, I find myself always, always missing it.
I'm planning to make a necklace with just plain wooden beads to replace my
old cross; it feels wrong to wear a rosary without believing in what it
represents, profane. Religiosity is impossible for me to reclaim. Too
atheist, borderline nihilist. What would I even do, count prayer beads
while reciting the mantra "I am valid, I love myself (hah!)"? Platitudes?
Attempts to do so are either too goofy, or too corporate --- I have such a
violent loathing for the paradigm of Liberal Mindfulness, divorced as it
is from actual Buddhist practice --- or too Robespierre, too reminiscent
of those early republican attempts to weave a State Religion from the
fibrous idolatry of nationalism: a religion *of the state*, not just
enforced by it. Contact with Max Stirner has left me as atheist about
State and Law and Justice and Righteousness as about God.
Meditation can, supposedly, be a secular practice, though the performance
and aesthetics of Western secular meditation coat my tongue in bile. Are
we to count beads and focus on the numbers, on the breath? Will I?
Probably not. Such things have always seemed a bit pointless.
But even without the ritualism, that doesn't mean you can't try and
replicate, as polycarbonate to glass, some of that structuring of life.
Maybe Friday can be a washing-day, a fixed pattern through the trudging
formlessness of life.
[1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRwwXxhXdHU
