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

[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.