May 2022
I recently attended a military ritual — it was a group of veterans honoring one particular veteran. The power of it, like the power of any ritual, came from the repetition of the same series of actions. Probably because it was a military ritual, the repetition was precise, and the people involved were concentrating as hard as they could on acting exactly according to form. They would do this the same way this time that they had before — and they’ve been repeating it monthly for over thirty years.
That’s the thing about repetition — or at least it’s a thing about repetition. The more it cycles around and repeats, the more significant each iteration can become. Not in every case, of course — but in the case of rituals, definitely.
Repetition is at the heart of the industrial society we inhabit as well. Every car tooling down the road is a schematic landscape of repetition, from the repeating actions of pistons to cams to innumerable gears and wheels. We don’t think about those in any particular way until, maybe, one specific auto reaches a milestone of repetition. Back in the day it used to be 100,000 miles, which was considered quite the accomplishment if you could maintain your car that long. Cars now are much better built, and 100,000 miles is nothing remarkable at all. If you have a Toyota or a Lexus it’s probably the minimum you’d expect, even with rudimentary maintenance. You have to reach a million miles to raise eyebrows now.
Religious rituals derive their power from long history. That military ceremony I attended was 30 years old. But some religious ceremonies are centuries old, or more. There’s something about repeating a ritual from the deep past that’s evocative. You never see a horror movie where at the central ritual the chief bad guy gloats “I just came up with this last Tuesday, so it must be the most powerful yet.” Everyone viscerally understands that an ancient ritual has (or at least might have) some kind of power.
But that’s exactly how we react to a lot of our modern world. I wouldn’t want to try to be productive with a computer from thirty years ago, no matter how much honored ritual was involved. There are electronic components that simply degrade, for one thing, and besides, you want your digital systems to communicate with all their silicon counterparts around the world. An old, out-of-date computer might be able to do that, if you had the technical skills to keep it working. A few people do, but most don’t see the point. There’s nothing the “old” can offer in that context — at least nothing we value. But the really old — the rites from a thousand or even thirty years ago — there’s something about those that can move us. Maybe it’s a defiance of time. Maybe it’s a way to say “this thing, this process, it’s fixed in amber and we can return to it. Returning to it, we can visualize time as a solid substance, and maybe we can transcend its strange power, constantly moving ahead yet leaving its roiled, confusing wake in our minds and memories.
And for how long. That’s the thing we most wonder. For how long. Or maybe for how deep, or how solid or how tangible. Because what is repetition, really, but turning the ephemeral tangible.
