ritual Archives

In the Time of the Story

Rituals of nourishment.

Time had his moods, his sizes, colors, shapes, and volumes––depending on the story that held him. When he was out, Space and the other mothers and grandmothers had an expression. “Stories take no time,” they said while skipping over whole months, years. By this logic, a journey spanning continents and decades might happen in the span of a cup of coffee in the midafternoon, light slicing through the blinds across a table to rest on the crown of one or more children at breasts. One might begin here is a story where someone tells a story in which someone tells of someone telling what they heard from another, and so on. By this ritual, the storyteller was saving her life. By this ritual, they nursed the children until Time returned.

Trickster Rituals

Possibilities for movement.

Something that is was just here. It has significance but will not fit any storyline. There was a grotesque beauty reveling. And then, and then. Every soul has its way of coming to terms with its containment in space, contending with death. It crowds the psyche, back against a wall. It has no end, and isn’t going anyplace. It’s always going on. And then, and still. Unlike the notion of story––something that, as they say, happened. The order of movements is crucial.

Service Work

Artistic practice as an act of devotion.

Here is a riddle, one said.

And who do you think you are? asked another.

Only a servant. He was making films. The answer is unimportant.

Why ask, then?

There is a code in here somewhere. It is the mystery.

Which mystery?

The usual ones: possibilities of transcendence, rebirth, levels of existence. The role of ritual practice.

Such as?

Such as this one. Right now, I am filming a liturgical text. Contemplating the sacred frame by frame, but I am just beginning. He had been at it three decades.

Are you praying, then?

I call it excavation. I am a social worker with a background in archaeology.

But why?

The idea is to resuscitate the present. This is my devotion.

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Inspired by an interview I read this morning, in BOMB magazine, with the filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak.