The Proper Pleasure of Ritual

On rituals, habits, & routines

Good morning, readers.

Last week I read the book The Anthropologists, by Ayşegül Savaş. I really liked it. It’s a quiet book, not very long, thoughtful and observant. It’s narrated by a documentarian living as a “foreigner” in Paris with her husband, with whom she’s trying to buy a new apartment¹. The prose reminds me of Mavis Gallant, though the expat-in-Paris element might be coloring my view.

At several points in the book, Savaş uses the word ritual. A ritual of coffee, or drinks, or smoking a joint in bed, or collecting nice stones. The narrator remarks on the small rituals she keeps with her husband, of the sort of ebb and flow of friendships in the city, of the people they meet and how they observe and intersect with one another’s routines. The narrator is working on a documentary, centered on a favorite park in her neighborhood, where she interviews other park-goers about their relationship with the park: how often they go, why they go, and if they have any “park rituals.” After seeing it repeated a few times, I couldn’t stop thinking about the word itself.

None of the rituals in The Anthropologists are big, spiritual to-dos. They’re explicitly the opposite, a way to honor the importance of “small things.”

While he ate breakfast, I made a pot of coffee and sat at the table with him in pajamas. It was a ritual of sorts, sitting across from each other, face-to-face. There were few rituals to our lives, certainly none that carried any history, at least not the history of traditions, of nations and faiths. So these small things mattered. I would make sure to sit with him at the table. ²

I too go to my local park fairly often. I even follow the same route through it and around the duck pond, most of the time. Yet never would I call these habits a ritual; I would be almost embarrassed to do so, I thought, and then I had to ask myself why. Do I even have rituals, I journaled in some alarm, suddenly worried about lacking a quality I hadn’t given any conscious thought to a week ago. The rituals I do remember from childhood were mostly religious, and left behind years ago. Of course my wedding was a ritual, likely the biggest of my life, even with a bunch of sub-rituals scrubbed from it in our search for a more equitable/secular/subdued practice. In a few weeks I’ll have a birthday, which will bring a few small rituals (a specific cake, a list, a letter). My cat like many cats has a specific routine, starting with breakfast at 7 and a special round of pets before I go to bed. In everyday life my husband makes coffee for us when we’re both home, something that maybe doesn’t count because I’m not the one doing it, but which I love; it maybe wouldn’t have more meaning if I called it a ritual, but maybe using the word would be a better way to honor what it means in my life. I spent a few short days early this month at the beach, and I find being by and in the water clarifying to a spiritual degree. I even attended my first baseball game in years, after hundreds of games in my childhood; what is baseball if not ritual? I’m not a sports person but the language came back immediately, the comfortable pleasure of knowing the words to the song. Particularly small-town baseball, where the stands are dotted with neighbors and families and the sponsors, pizza parlors and clam shacks, have likely been the same for seasons if not decades.

Later in The Anthropologists, Savaş’s narrator remembers an anthropology class she took in college:

She asked us to notice that just life-writing papers, going to parties, applying to jobs-could always be mapped out following the structures we learned about in class. Friday night blackouts and graduations and hockey games, the cigarettes we bummed off one another outside the library. All these were the unspoken foundations of our society, whose rules we had perfected, so as not to think of them as rules but as the smooth tracks of life. From time to time, the professor would ask us to imagine an anthropologist observing the everyday routines with which we had set up our lives. They might be arbitrary or essential, but they were rules to a game nonetheless, one which gave an illusory sense of harmony and permanence.³

Here she is reflecting on routine, not ritual, but the sense of importance is the same: Aristotle’s we are what we repeatedly do meets a sort of humanist Calvinism.

Writers and aspiring writers talk a lot about routines. They’re usually called routines, or schedules, or processes, sometimes rules, but really we treat them with the reverence of ritual. Every so often Ursula K. Le Guin’s daily routine makes its rounds on my social media; fairly often so will Hunter S. Thomson’s, or Didion’s, and so on— the iterations are as endless as our fascination with the process of creativity, of the idea that being creative is like a recipe for a cake, a series of science-backed steps that, if followed perfectly, are sure to turn out a dessert exactly like the one on the box. (Also, speaking for myself, humans are just nosy.) I am not the first aspiring writer and I won’t be the last who buys a specific fountain pen or notebook or typewriter because one of their favorite books was written on that kind of paper with that kind of ink; ineffable processes bring out the superstitious in people. It’s affiliate link culture, aspirational mimesis, a quest to emulate those we admire through their trappings.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing schedule, from a 1988 interview

R.O. Kwon (author of Exhibit) has spoken explicitly about her writing process as ritual:

If I didn’t have a writing ritual involving a giant silk shawl, I’m not sure how I’d have finished Exhibit. If I have the shawl around my shoulders, or even just in sight, I won’t do anything but work on my novel. No messages, social media, any of it; nobody’s allowed to talk to me. The idea is to create a holy space reserved for writing—and, to be clear, I also count reading, stretching, and lying in bed while thinking as writing time.⁴

Kwon has said that she took inspiration from her friend, the writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras, who wrote about her “self-mesmerization” and “chromatic conditioning” writing process which grew from a need to manage her PTSD:

I began to wonder whether such trances could be of use to me, whether they would induce that floating sensation I needed in order to quiet the disturbances of trauma and dedicate myself to writing. And so I began to develop a ritual — a way of hypnotizing myself. This love of ritual has metastasized into a way of life….It began with a color, a muted ultramarine blue that is warmer than navy and bright like royal blue. I found it while scanning the racks for a slip in a hue I did not much wear, one I intended to wear exclusively for writing. Each day, in preparation for my work, I put on the slip and actively imagined for 10 minutes that the color was a place in which intrusive thoughts might not enter. Then I forced myself to sit and write. When I wore the slip, I felt overtaken on a cellular level by a serene form of concentration. Under the spell of chromatic conditioning, I began to accumulate pages and finish my projects… The operational chatter of my mind grows quiet before it grinds to a halt. I transition into the territory of concentration. I don’t have to think about what I will do next: After doing it thousands of times, I’ve turned writing into muscle memory.⁵

I admire the spirit of Kwon and Contreras’s practices, to the point of finding them aspirational; I would like to be the kind of person (the kind of full-time writer, perhaps) that maintains such a thoughful routine and nurtures creativity in this way. More practically, however, I’ve realized (at least for now) that I prefer to de-ritualize the writing process, to make it as easy to slip into the work as possible; perhaps the price paid is that it’s easier to slip out, as well, but the point of entry is crucial. I am a creature of habit in many ways, but the minute a habit relies on something fallible— an hour of the day that can be slept through, a shawl that can (and will) get lost, a type of snack I will love for three weeks and then get sick of— then the whole enterprise is in peril. As E.B. White, famous dachshund owner said, “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.⁶” I wouldn’t classify what Kwon or Contreras is doing as “waiting” for ideal conditions (I would say rather that they intentionally create them, an active state) but for me, overwhelmed by preliminaries, the effect is the same.

I have my habits, my comforts, consistencies I find soothing: I have a notebook and nice pens (and computer, too) that I really love, so that even the physical sensation of writing is pleasurable. When I finish reading a book I log it in a notebook, something I can do despite being completely unable to maintain a Goodreads account. If I’m sitting down with dedicated time to write (instead of catching a moment around work), I always start with reading something for a few minutes. If I feel stuck, I sometimes pull an Oblique Strategy⁷. If I feel really stuck, I read or go for a walk instead. I don’t usually listen to music & never anything with lyrics but I sometimes like something instrumental (often the Gone Girl soundtrack, which I just remembered I stole from Kelsey McKinney’s practice (though I’m not brave enough for sour straws). Nothing I feel comfortable calling ritual, maybe out of a sense of self-preservation; if I don’t trust myself to honor a ritual, then refraining from applying the word to an action protects it from failure in some way. What I wonder after considering this for a week or so is if that self-preservation is right. Is it smart, practical self-awareness, or self-deprivation? Do I actually want to be a person with more rituals in my life, or do I really just want to be someone I’m not?

Tell me about your rituals, if you have them. (& happy Virgo season.)

Court

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Some things I’m reading lately:

• Ta-Nehisi Coates in Vanity Fair on Palestine and Palestinian Americans & the DNC.

• Jamelle Bouie on how J.D. Vance is misreading The Lord of the Rings, a book that I love with all my heart but whose moral you have to be pretty blisteringly stupid (or evil (or both)) to miss. (His column on Biden’s Supreme Court reform, which is the bare minimum a decent government requires short of allowing me to fight Cla*r*ence Th*ma*s in hand to hand combat, is also worth a read.)

• Samantha Imbler, in Defector: “Is It Ethical to be a Billionaire in Neopets?”

  I fashioned myself a member of the Neo-elite. I had not yet learned the word "capitalism" when I started playing Neopets, but I had already become a neoliberal—a Neo-liberal, if you will.

• Paurl Sehgal in the New Yorker on Sarah Manguso’s Liars in the context of the “divorce novel” trend. I didn’t like the excerpt I read of Liars basically for the reasons Sehgal describes, but I also really didn’t like Splinters by Leslie Jamison for what I would say are similar reasons, even though Sehgal includes that (and others) as a more successful example of the genre. I’m not quite sure why I’m lacking a distinction where Sehgal sees one but if anyone has read both I’m curious to know your thoughts!

• Hattie Jean Hayes
  in HAD on being a horse girl. (I was not a horse girl at all despite going to school with a few (farm horse girls, not equestrian horse girls, which I suspect are slightly different) and was maybe only moderately more a dolphin girl due to the bmore aquarium, but at the end of the day I was just a book girl and didn’t really pretend different.)

• I finished reading The Morningside, by Téa Obreht. I took a while to warm up to it but I think I liked it a lot by the end; it seems more of a return to form of her first book The Tiger’s Wife compared to the intermediary Inland (both of which I liked). They’re quite different books but it made me want to reread Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility from last year; climate fiction depresses the hell out of me but I imagine those two will end up on an interesting syllabus together.

• I also read Veronica, my first Mary Gaitskill, on the beach and loved it. The use of perspective and self-awareness in the narration (& lack thereof) was so compelling and chilling.

• Tajja Isen, in The Walrus, on racism & book design.

• This story about Chris Fuentes and his dog Lola made me cry, and also, that NAA lobbyist giving the party line about how rentals are a “low-margin business” who a sketchy website tells me lives in a $1.3 million dollar house is going to burn in hell one day.

• Speaking of rich people houses: the listing for the West Village house Claire Danes is selling. There are many nice details but the clawfoot tub + bathroom fireplace is just too perfect.

• Dogue.

• I love that Mike Walz signed the bill to provide free food for school kids, but I didn’t know that Philando Castile’s mother Valerie was an advocate for the cause in honor of her son, and an important part of the movement to get the bill passed. An interview with her by Becky Dernbach in the Sahan Journal here.

• Anne Carson in The London Review of Books on Parkinson’s, and bad handwriting.

• An interesting article on the Voynich manuscript, by Ariel Sabar in The Atlantic.

• Interesting article in NyMag by John Herrman on why AI “summarization” bots are largely useless at best.

1. Not to sound like a republican but it actually felt really good to read a new book about a husband and wife who actually like each other & like living together!!!

2. Savaş, Ayşegül. The Anthropologists. (3)

3. Ibid

4. https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2024/07/16/writer-ro-kwon-exhibit-rituals-novel

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/magazine/productivity-self-mesmerism.html

6. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4155/the-art-of-the-essay-no-1-e-b-white

7. I got them as a gift for Nathan early in our relationship, which now that we live together and share an office has really paid off.