the innocence of ceremony is drown'd

[jazzfish]

When I was in fourth grade, Dad was assigned to a battalion in the 320th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment [you read that right; they drop very large guns out of airplanes]. That fall, for reasons that remain murky, the parts of the 320th that were under the 82nd Airborne Division were changed over to be part of the 319 AFAR.

This necessitated a big formal ceremony in the middle of the afternoon, with lots of marching and speechmaking and all. Dad, as an officer, had to be there. Mom, as an officer's wife, had to be there. I have no idea why I had to be there. I got pulled out of school and taken over to sit on a metal chair under a green camo tarp in the hot sun, read my library copy of Howard Pyle's Robin Hood, and wonder why anyone cared.

I'd been dragged in early enough to see a rehearsal, before the actual ceremony. It looked pretty good; these guys were professionals, after all.

Shortly after the ceremony proper started, I thought, "Why are they doing this? They did the ceremony already. This is just for show. It's totally meaningless to the people involved." The act of the ceremony meant nothing in terms of the process, so why bother with it? The answer "Because the people watching want to see it" felt wrong: they want to be fooled into thinking they're witnessing something valid and momentous?

I've never been able to shake that sense that ritual and ceremony have no inherent meaning. Over time that's metastasized into a general distaste for all over-rehearsed, over-formal celebrations. I want no part of mouthing the words, of going through the motions. Of faking it.

Weddings are the worst offenders. Not only do you rehearse rehearse rehearse, you're following a script that's so overdone as to have had all the meaning sucked out of it. Often it's religious, and I think I've been to perhaps one wedding where that meant anything to either the bride or the groom. And if I never hear 1 Corinthians 13 again it will be too soon.

When my sister got married the first time, I didn't escape the church fast enough, so they dragged me in for Family Pictures. This meant I got to hang around watching the wedding photographer restage the entire ceremony, with pauses so he could snap pictures. This did very little to bolster my sense of the authenticity of weddings. But hey. I'm sure it looked good.

Comments

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

Well, during the actual ceremony you cross the actual boundary between "unmarried and married," or "320th and 319th." I think that's pretty cool.

[jazzfish]

Right, but it's an intangible boundary. The ceremony (or "this iteration of the ceremony") is only important because people say it is. There's nothing inherent to the ceremony itelf, and I want there to be. I want my traditions to /mean/ something, beyond "we've always done it that way." (Looking to the Army or the Church for this is likely a mistake.)

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

The ceremony (or "this iteration of the ceremony") is only important because people say it is.

Exactly! It is by the intention and agreement of the people that this moment is the moment of transformation. That's the magical thing about social constructs! But it would be silly and sad to just get together and have someone say, "Three... two... one... okay, now you're married," so I think a ceremony is a nice way of framing the moment.

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

Actually, on second thought, if a ceremony were to consist of, "Three... two... one... okay, now you're married," it might be pretty awesome and funny.

[lilac-breeze.livejournal.com]

You really are amazing. I agree wholeheartedly with everything here. You're very, very good at putting words to things that have been bumbling around in my own head for years. How do you do it? XD

[jazzfish]

aw, thanks. :) In this case, it's 'have this thing that i've been chewing over for months if not years, then have a flash of memory as to where it's likely to have come from, and then get inspired to write it all up as a response to a comment and have it balloon all out of proportion until it takes up its own entry.'

[jsciv.livejournal.com]

Many ceremonies are relics from another time. Some still have use, and some are just for show, but for many people there is indeed a need to do something for show. Marriages are a good example: nowadays you can just do the paperwork and have the judge make it official and there's a record somewhere legal that says "yes, these two are married." But in past times, the ceremony WAS the legal force: the fact that it was done where people could witness it was important, so that there was an oral- and memory- record of the event, and so that the community agreed that it had happened. Today, the ceremony is a lot less functional, but the function of signifying to the community still seems to resonate with many people.

As you might recall, I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to witness the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. If you want to talk about useless ceremony, THAT is one. It only happens once per day even though the individual guards serve only four hour shifts, it's enormously gaudy and costly, blocking traffic as well as involving somewhere near a hundred people for something that, when you get down to it, takes about 20 seconds. The rest is really just the British Empire puffing its chest for the crowd. Now, I personally did enjoy the ceremony, but more as performance than as anything with meaning...

[jazzfish]

Yeah, I feel like 'tradition' is a horrible reason to do anything, particularly something that's going to take up lots of time, energy, and (in the case of weddings) money.

I think I'm also running up against my own sense of isolation from any given community, and not feeling a need to signify anything for them. Which I freely admit is my own quirk.

Ceremony as performance works for me. It's ceremony as going-through-the-motions that grates, when the performance is bad (or simply dull and drawn-out) and the meaning's not there either.

I can totally agree with you

[stormking.livejournal.com]

On a distaste for meaningless fluffery. My personal preference is to try and suck as much fluffery out and try and stick to the essentials. But we shall see how well I accomplish that.

[rbandrews]

"It would be easy to be cynical. After all, Merrill was only a man, His Imperial Majesty was only a man. They put their trousers on one leg at a time. . . . Yet when all the conflicting demands were heard, when all the advice was pondered, someone had to act in the name of mankind. . . . No, the ceremonial entrance wasn't exaggerated. Men who have that kind of power should be reminded of it."

--The Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Ceremonies are an example of Speech As Action.

The ceremony is the thing which makes the change.

Two people are not married. Then two people are married.

It is the ceremony that does it.

The question is: are intangible things real?

Are "the 82nd Airborne", "the 319 AFAR", and "marriage" real things?

If they are real, then things need to be done to put things in and out of statuses with respect to them.

There are people who don't think that marriage, for instance, is real. They think that living together with commitment, and being married, are fundamentally the same thing -- that the legal status afforded to marriage is stupid and pointless; they may get married to benefit from those legal recognitions, but the actual ceremony and status is meaningless to them.

And, in that case, the status IS meaningless to them.

But, for me, there was a genuine status change when I got married. My wife and I had been living together for years before that point. And we've lived together for ten years after that point.

But on that day, and through that ceremony, something changed. The ceremony did something.

It doesn't for everyone. It did for us.

well, you could always emulate Shawn & Janna...

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Um... Ok, we actually did rehearse our wedding twice, though neither time was a full walk-through, but the second time was about 10 minutes before the actual thing, with most of the audience sitting there, because we'd only just met the officiant and I insisted on having her rehearse the music cues. And our reading was one of my best friends starting the whole thing off with a poem I wrote because I was supposed to be writing vows instead, and a list of promises wasn't actually what I had to say.

Most of our wedding planning discussion was actually about the whole tradition and ritual thing (and we were fortunate enough that neither of us was particularly steeped in "this is what a Real Wedding should be like") and which bits actually made it a wedding for us. Our conclusions, I think, were that there must be vows, friends & relations, and cake but not sheet cake. And little sausages on sticks. (Ok, that was from the back of the Cinderella book in The Jolly Postman, actually...) Everything else was pretty much optional.

I think on the whole that the point of ceremony is to make your boundaries between states look bigger. How much that matters depends on how the parties crossing the boundary feel, and what anyone else concerned thinks they ought to feel. Some people throw huge celebrations for New Year's, and some people (despite already living together etc) make a huge insanely expensive thing of getting married. And so forth. If it doesn't matter much to those crossing the boundary, it is awfully silly to make a fuss about it.

[callendrethe.livejournal.com]

The real trick is that the ceremony is not for the people in it. It is for the people watching... a landmark for family and friends to place into their heads something that the people involved have already known. With the exception of some weddings that have been organized by Remington or Mossberg, the couple involved have been married in all but name for some time. The wedding is for mothers and aunts, fathers and brothers to remember the past, and affix in their heads that John and Jane are now John And Jane.

[ancientsong.livejournal.com]

When grimclown and I were handfasted, we rehearsed walking in and who would do what when. But, we didn't go through the doing/saying of all that would be done/said because we wanted that to happen under the full moon at dusk the following day (we chose the date we were to be married for that reason). In addition, I wrote our wedding ceremony/handfasting and it was about as personal to me/us as it could be.

Also, we were married by our community. Certainly, we had a high priestess who actually said the "you're now handfasted" words. But, two good friends who were a couple welcomed Air and two good friends who were a couple welcomed Fire, etc. One of my best friends welcomed the Goddess. One of grimclown's oldest friends (whom we didn't know was pagan until years later) welcomed the God and all of that was part of the ceremony (and I loved loved loved how people personalized what they were saying/doing. JCooper, for example, was part of the couple who welcomed Fire. Once anigma_i had said the words to welcome Fire, he lit up some flash paper [which rocked]. It was personal. It was poignant and it meant so very much to us that everyone took part and helped us begin to walk this new path.

Ritual is important to me; it always has been. Ritual doesn't have to be big or ornate, but it does have to have meaning for those participating and it can be infused with a lot of meaning, reverence, and often laughter. Certainly, that's what I strive for when I officiate at weddings, and other rites of passage, etc.

The same rote wedding words/actions didn't have meaning for us (especially because neither of us is christian) so we changed them to something that would. Ultimately, that was what mattered.