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

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.