On the Ritual de lo Habitual
Contemplation 02. Proposition 02: Clementine is exploring the use, process, and meaning of Ritual in our daily lives.
I’m not a music writer. I can’t adequately or intelligently discuss Jane’s Addiction, their mystical pre-grunge west-coast punk alternative music, or their impact. As a sheltered high school girl from Long Island, coming from a home where James Taylor and Creedance were our common soundtrack, Jane’s guitar sounds and songs about love, loss, and heroine-fueled shamanic threesomes opened crazy, wild doors to worlds I could never have imagined. The album Ritual de lo Habitual came out in 1990 and was, to me, darkly hypnotic and Dorothy-in-Oz dreamlike.
Despite my inability to capture that moment in time adequately, I couldn’t let a prompt about “Ritual” pass without acknowledging the opening bass line from Three Days has been playing in my head for months. Every time Clementine talks about “Ritual,” I hear that bass line, Perry Farrell chanting about candles.
Other than a word, how does this relate to the idea of “Ritual”? I guess I could stretch and talk about the Ritual of music-making-–but I’d have to read someone else’s opinion about that or ask AI to write it. I could reach and describe the ritual of buying cassette tapes, the specific click-clack sounds of putting a tape in my old stereo, the force I’d need to press down on the play button. That whole process as part of a time-traveling, world-traveling ritual.
I wonder if it’s enough of a Ritual just to close my eyes and press play. Create the circumstances where the transportation of soul, spirit, or imagination, if it’s going to transport at all, happen. Maybe it’s enough to just listen, not expecting anything, and let meaning (if it’s going to happen) happen.
How do you use Ritual to create meaning in your life? Can you turn a habit into a Ritual? What are we pursuing when we embark on a Ritual? This proposition aims to explore the fantasy and reality of Ritual in our daily lives. How we use, and don’t use Ritual to create meaning for ourselves in big and small ways.
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