Ritual & Enormity

a poem about newsreels

“Auto Wreck

Its quick soft silver bell beating, beating,
And down the dark one ruby flare
Pulsing out red light like an artery.
The ambulance at top speed floating down
Past beacons and illuminated clocks
Wings in a heavy curve, dips down,
And brakes speed, entering the crowd.
The doors leap open, emptying light,
Stretchers are laid out, the mangled lifted
And stowed into the little hospital.
Then the bell, breaking the hush, tolls once,
And the ambulance with its terrible cargo
Rocking, slightly rocking, moves away,
As the doors, an afterthought, are closed.

We are deranged, walking among the cops
Who sweep glass and are large and composed.
One is still making notes under the light.
One with a bucket douches ponds of blood
Into the street and gutter.
One hangs lanterns on the wrecks that cling,
Empty husks of locusts, to iron poles.

Our throats were tight as tourniquets,
Our feet were bound with splints, but now,
Like convalescents intimate and gauche,
We speak through sickly smiles and warn
With the stubborn saw of common sense,
The grim joke and the banal resolution.
The traffic moves around with care,
But we remain, touching a wound
That opens to our richest horror.
Already old, the question Who shall die?
Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?

For death in war is done by hands;
Suicide has cause and stillbirth, logic;
And cancer, simple as a flower, blooms.
But this invites the occult mind,
Cancels our physics with a sneer,
And spatters all we knew of denouement
Across the expedient and wicked stones.”

—Karl Shapiro, 1941

On the first day of the war, a school is targeted. Everyone in it dies. One side gets points, the other side loses them.

Games have been blinding us so long, it’s hard to remember what we would have done instead. What we had before was ritual.

“...ritual is permissable only to the extent that it is genuine as a kiss.” —Wittgenstein

I saw a duck in our pool today. I didn’t think they were coming back. It must have been over a year since I had seen one. There were a couple who, in their long migration, kept returning to our backyard swimming pool over several years. Green-headed mallards, I think they were. I moved slowly in their presence & we seemed to coexist. All they ever did was drink (a quick duck & then shake), float around awhile, & then decamp (when no one was looking). But one time I was in too much of a hurry & must have scared them. The following year: nothing. I grieved. I felt cast out of some delicate compact…

“If there is a possibility for failure, then the ritual is meaningful.” —Lyda Morehouse

In the early morning coolness & sunny sky, it feels travelling weather. But where to go?

“[Clifford Geertz:] If it rains, the ritual of course is a great success. But it is a success rather more like a successful painting is a success, or a successful production of a play is a success. ...The idea is to form the whole. When everything comes together, when you dance and you make all those long preparations that lead up to it, and then in the end it rains, what is reinforced is your conviction that you really understand what the cosmos is like and that indeed you understand your place and part in it. ...the ritual activity is not conceived as instrumental in the first place.” --Jonathan Miller, States of Mind (1983)

Zero-sum within the family is nonsense; & what is there, but the family of Earth? Injury, unfairness, mishap, the fruits of folly—we have to make room for these in our stories. They are hardly a story without them. But the mass production of stories (which, I hate to tell you, nobody asked for), in some blind Fordist mania, got gamified along the way. It was just too easy (& nothing must be done if it is not easy) to take that cartoon Manichaean outcome & make it the template for everything that happens. Someone wins (who deserves to), someone loses…

Thus was tragedy, with the Great Coral Reef, put paid to.

“A real myth solves an unanswerable problem with a string of images, that together create a story which implies its answerability. A world mythologized is not a world with infinite anxieties, though its meaningfulness give no satisfaction to the inquiring intellect. Science is an attempt to create a myth that is also an explanation. To the extent that it succeeds as one, it inevitably fails as the other.” —The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism

If we hunger sometimes for the old names, the old patterns, in our stories, it is this power we would invoke, not the handed-down masks of the actors.

“The virtue of storying our lives is that, since there are only story-consolations, our sorrows become amenable as they fit the outlines of story-sorrows. The depths of grief yield but to death: it is necessary, except for very tranquil interludes, to live on the surface—a facade of artificial continuity. Artists must know this, & also heed it. Where they give up storying, they come face to face with uItimate destruction. (Keats sonnet.)”

—ibid

I say: games are for children. Ritual is for grown-ups. Let us try to imagine, not a society that is a thousand entangled games (some of whose participants get to be “NPC”—what fun!) & which chooses its leadership through games, makes its policy-decisions through other games, & forces everyone to take up the great game of capitalism because life is impossible without it—not that society, so obviously dying, but instead the kind of society that starts with final purposes (continuing survival of the ecosphere & its denizens, sustainable husbandry rather than the exploitation that refuses to stop short of annihilation, & the cherishing of each individual) & inaugurates routines & rituals to make this possible.

“If you make a reckoning, you will find

Everywhere shipwreck.”

—Petronius