peter nesteruk (home page:
contents and index)
A Question of
Being Human (12)
Ritual
The
‘Eternal Present’; reliable then, as the rising of the sun, predictable, always
there – till it ends (something the ‘I’ as I can, constitutionally, know
nothing about, can not experience, can only know in the place of another, as
third person experience). Yet the concrete outcomes of our lives are (with this
one exception) unpredictable…
Can we have a second person
experience of another’s death, I of yours (or you of mine)? It seems this is
something we must surmise from corporeal evidence. That sense of ‘another’ as
anyway an imaginary relation, assumed; in ‘you’, in there… And what a
difference it makes! Do we ‘kill’ the ‘you’ in the other every time we wish it
so, every time we forget them, every time I forget you, every time I do not
think of you? (So distracted, we are killers all). Communication, is it a mix
of second person ‘you’ before me in the eternal present, and third person
projections based on past experience of what ‘others’ (and specifically ‘he’ or
‘she’, ‘they’) do, or rather did? Remembrance then (ritual remembrance) is it
second or third person? Or both as we conjure up the dead. For those that in
the past we were intimate with (and perhaps this is only true for them), it is
a ritual that frames the continuing conversation with an absent you (in our
imaginations) leaving us again ‘face to face’ with the dead…
The
Eternal Present, in its diurnal everydayness, its eternal return, predictable;
in its specific outcomes, unpredictable. (Eternal… return? Yes, whilst we persist, or so it seems… in the midst of
this ’return’ our life’s rhythm, in our imaginations, an infinite extension,
and in our desire - even as we know our days are numbered).
(In this sense ritual as
born of repetition may be read as underpinning everything, from the identity of
objects and the meaning of words, to the identity of self and others, and the meanings
of collective life. Fruit of repetition and the sharing of our eternal
placement in community - so knotting together recognition and identity).
Everyday
time and its rituals depend upon the input of memory into the Eternal Present.
Memory reminds us that everyday time is made up of ‘return’s; the diurnal
‘eternal return’ with its sub-divisions and multiplications into cycles within
cycles. Within the day, we witness the punctuation occasioned by the
consumption of food, washing rituals and other events (related to given
patterns of work and leisure). As the arch sprung from night to night, an arc
spanning dawn to dusk, with its moods and habits, its set-times and cycle of
appropriate moments, follows the sun in its path across the sky. The succession
of days, of course, is shaped into the calendar appropriate to our geo-cultural
time zone. Whilst the succession of years is differentiated by the flavour of
historical change, as well as our place, rooted within a given generation. With
respect to the internal and external point of view (the former as the
remembering of the past mirrored by the projection of the future as such a
receding and approaching succession, and the later as an imagining of this
succession as a single line we look upon from without), there is no priority of
moral force (the former seems originary and the latter a creative derivation,
‘inauthentic’ only if requiring that the actual condition of enunciation be
‘real’). Both may be enabling or debilitating. The greater arc of birth to
death whether experienced from within or pictured from without, anyway has its
own rhythms, its own shape, and shaping force, based upon generation, a
horoscope fixed by a birth date and then following the fixed cycle of the human
seasons, the culminating stages of maturity and the planning of a life.
So the Eternal Present
itself is susceptible to division: the punctuation of its periods of presence,
our punctuated period of presence; and the subdividing of its uninterrupted
periods. The diurnal cycles that form other yet larger cycles, and the diurnal
cycle as a single unit, with its internal punctuations and overall shape…. All
subject to repetition.
(…and at night, perchance to dream…) Stuttered
nocturnal return of our day’s events, presences and anxieties. A stuttered
misremembered poem, shadowy, yet vivid in its estrangement, surreal, offering a
genre of art and mode of perception. Fading with the dawn of the eternal
present (in whose light they fade faster than other memories, other perceptions… melting away as mists do on the occasion of
the rising of the sun).
The
repetition of cycles: abstract/formal/quantitative; seconds, minutes, hours,
day, week (the week versus the weekend) months, years (decades) centuries and millennia.
Cultural/geophysical/qualitative: the four seasons, the patterns of leisure and
work life (education, work, holidays and retirement) the ‘tagging’ of decades,
the characterization of centuries, the conjuring of historico-cultural periods
and epochs. Transitions, hinges, beginnings, all oft marked by festivals…
ritual writ large across the face of our culture.
‘Long
Day’s Journey…’ The day and its shape; whose beginnings and endings, the
borderlands of the Eternal Present, frame the sucking into our skull of the
period evolution has rendered (under the influence of our planet and star) our
most fundamental division. As the sun is our witness. ‘As the day is long’. The
diurnal cycle; our most basic unit of being. And its sub-divisions; the ‘times’
of day (morning, noon, afternoon and evening, length and light dependant on
season and urban or other setting). Themselves subject to our pattern of eating
(and the recovery there from…). The longeurs
of the afternoon (for some a mid-way caesura; a mid-day nap, snooze or siesta).
For others (those of us who can not sleep during the day) just a short period
of day-dream or light reading. Evening as the last period of diurnal
sub-division, another (the third) short work shift (all punctuated by meal
times), or perhaps play, or reflection... To complete the journey; a return to
horizontal posture to complement the sun’s return to the horizon, the journey
’… into Night’ (now illuminated by electricity, a 24/7 culture, and the night
shift).
The ‘time of day’, which
when answered as if as a response to a question, is always ‘now’ ; to give
someone the time of day is to give them a privileged presence in the eternal
present. Gift of our time.
Vita.
The single pulse, wavelength, sudden illumination of the flare of biography.
Overall shape perceived. Our personal meta-set; which we can not know, not
directly, only ‘in medias res’ (but
then there is no shape, only current culmination, as every now.-moment in the Eternal
Present is a culmination of all that has gone before). Or only in the imagining
of self as (if) other, as resembling the life history of another (the act of
auto-biography), and it will do, it must, for there in no other guide, outside
astrology… Yet in a way under taboo, a taboo we must (in our re-imagining of
our selves) transgress every time we reflect… as impossible as the prohibition
on reference to a meta-set in axiomatised logic, a ‘level’ not permitted to
first person thought (whence we slip into the third…). From the point of view
of the Eternal Present, we are always divided into two, past and future, behind
and ahead, after birth and before death. In
medias res. Narrative, as we imagine it (he/she, third person) tracing the
single line from birth to death, the cycle of (a) life (child, adult, senior)
one line, story told, experienced only in the place of others (not our place,
from that place we ‘see’ only ‘in front’, ‘behind’, and the whole is anyway
only available after our demise), all available only as other, as self (in the
place of the self) not possible, as the end is the end of thought itself, of
thought and self (of itself only the ‘it’ is left). Visible -for a while- to
others.
Repetition of the same as
constituting form (empty time projected forwards, as ‘repetition backwards’; a
‘repetition’ of the different, ‘repetition forward’, as its actual content,
which always changes with context, whence the logic of ‘historicism’,
‘post-modernism’, ‘pastiche’, hybridity, et al. All hostage to the brute fact
of a new context (and every actual repetition takes place in a new context).
Repetition is difference (otherwise how would we recognize it…).
Repetition.
The key to quality and quantity; duration and intensity, time and feeling.
Repetition as basic form or ordering, marked by rituals as key repetitions of
identity formation and maintenance. Ritual as marked repetition; marking as
degrees of value, of making sacred, from self as value, place (of self) as
value, as giving the gift of value… Ritual as all is revalued, renewed, through
sacrifice, burnt offerings (even if only of time, precious gift from a finite
store as part of an appeal to eternity). Ritual, from the everyday, small, ‘emotional
charge’ – passing, but important for recognition; to the big national, annual
or larger ritual markings of the culmination of a cycle… a ‘re-charging’ where
the emotional (and other) expenditure may be high. Ritual as charged
repetition… from neutral (negative, if it misfires - mis-recognition) to an
event carrying an altogether higher charge (sacrifice, official and unofficial).
Also true in the case of recognition as based on object purchase, the truth of
recognition as individual value, as of cases that demand a bigger sacrifice to
identity (official and unofficial, festival and pogrom). ‘Exchangeability’ (our
predisposition to do this).
The
meanings of consciousness, like those of words (in the case of meaning as ‘last
word’), are made by their context – indeed it is the context of consciousness
that determines the meanings of words in use. The content of consciousness is
its context – the converse… the refusal of novelty, denial of difference. The
context of consciousness is its content – the converse… culture-shock!
Copyright
Peter Nesteruk, 2012