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, 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.