User:Ssstephen/Reading/Bare Facts of Ritual
The scholar lives in the void (sic) that the poet, Borges, has described.
My brain misread this because someone gave me "a void" as a christmas present. It should say "world". This plays fun with the Kafka references later though. The world as a void, a random group of events, things, actions, rules occuring with apparent meaning.
The temple serves as a focusing lens, marking and revealing significance.
epiphantic: of or having the character of an epiphany
The ordinary becomes significant, becomes sacred, simply by being there.
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signals and noise: musical intervals BitSuite Some old questions: Which intervals are musical and which are noise? Is there a line between consnance and dissonance?
ritual is an exercise in the strategy of choice
The coffee ritual: I need my coffee to start the day right. I use ritual tools like a moka pot and specially prepared beans to ground myself before the daily grind. It is a personal ritual where I ignore the coffee farms of Colombia and the aluminium manufacturing in Brescia. I make coffee for me. The beans are already roasted mystically and the focus is on extracting.
the religious symbolism of hunting is that of overcoming the beast who frequently represents either chaos or death.
nature in rituals: nature as chaos
the Fate of Bones:
Bones endure; they are the source of rebirth after death. The bones are a reservoir of life; they require only to be refleshed.
Further reading The Rings of Saturn W. G. Sebald
And we will be required, if society is held to have any sanity at all, to explain it all away.
Or maybe society does not have any sanity at all and that is the explanation? What is sanity? Some sort of objective relationship between thought and the external world, a "correct" way of perceiving nature?
some means of overcoming [the] contradition between 'word and deed.' This, I believe, is one major function of ritual.
Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things.
It provides the means for demonstrating that we know what ought to have been done.
These pages are making me think about art (mostly graphic/plastic arts but also performance and music, even writing I suppose) and how they often involve "representations" not of the world as it is but as it could be. For example Malevitch, the idea that pure artistic expression or geometric shapes are somehow more ideal than representation of reality. There's that old ideal/real dualism thing again that keeps getting everyone in trouble. Schoenberg once said "I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years". There seems to be an idea that the world of thought is more ideal than the external world. I have thought this idea myself from time to time, or at least my mind has. I wonder what Spinoza would have thought of serialism?
The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things...God’s power of thinking is equal to God’s power of acting.
Spinoza , Ethics II. Pr.7
So if the ritual or art "demonstrates" it is through acting what ought to be the case, acting in the sense of performing, creating, or simply bringing into being. There is no thinking without acting and a ritual is an obvious case of acting according to our thoughts.
Ritual gains its force where incongruency is perceived.
But this article is about the difference between the action of the ritual and actions at other times.
I would also assume that, at some point, he reflects on the difference between his actual killing and the perfection represented by the ceremonial killing.
Why assume that the hunter reflects? Do we reflect on our rituals? Do football fans discuss applying the social relations represented in the match to their own lives as they sit around in the pub afterwards? Do classical music lovers go home from a concert with Beethoven stuck in their head and also the question of why 17th century upper class European music is so globally loved hundreds of years later? People a long time ago were probably just as dumb as people are today.
Further reading James George Frazer (mythology, comparative religion)
The ceremony performed before undertaking an actual hunt demonstrates that the hunter knows full well what ought to transpire if he were in control; the fact that the ceremony is held is eloquent testimony that the hunter knows full well that it will not transpire, that he is not in control.
The phrase "focusing lens" works best for me from this text, the ritual is a perfected version of what will actually happen, an idealised representation of our aspirations for the reality of human life.