A wedding ritual
I don’t often get to see the actual ritual of a wedding, in its entirety. One of the rare times that I did, I watched it in a rage, and towards the end I started to feel desperate for escape, almost like I was suffocating. The smoke, the chanting, the oppressive need to be there and to hear this and to watch it through to the end.
A morning ritual
I don’t hate rituals in themselves. I start to see the value of marking things. The way we do with tea and conversation in the morning; or when I am alone, tea and music. This denotes the beginning of the day, or moving into consciousness. I think about this line in Terry Pratchett’s the Hogfather. If you don’t save the Hogfather, the sun will not rise. A great ball of fire might light up the sky, though. In other worlds, if you miss this ritual, say, of tea in the morning, it doesn’t mean that there will be no day. It just means, maybe, that I will be more confused, less aware, that I won’t register the change, that the previous day will extend itself through my consciousness. If I am fighting with someone, the fight will continue, repeat itself, and no matter how hard I try or how much I want it, nothing will change, nothing will change until I start a new day, until I perform this ritual of awakening, of sitting back and thinking.
In the wedding ritual, the bride’s mother must tie the marriage knot, must give away her daughter. I get the feeling, looking at her, that she may have never registered this separation, this acceptance of cutting something away, if it wasn’t physically forced on her, this symbolic action. The enraging part was that in everything that was said by the person who guided the ritual, there was no understanding that the man also had to cut this umbilical cord. The bride and the groom were not untied, let loose. Symbolically, the bride was released into the husband’s family, and mainly he speaks to show his acceptance of her, and mainly she speaks to commit to him and his family.
And yet, I do think that it makes a strong impact to ritualise this moment when you leave – not your home, not your family, but this space where your energies are tied to that of your parents (though the leaving really should be mutual, to be real). It’s only in the past couple of years that I really start to see how houses, homes and lives are run by this connection. Once upon a time, alone after a fight with a partner, I found that I was thinking not about him, but about my parents. I had this crazy fear, this terrible rage, this desire for violence and self-violence, and it felt like something was cutting me open, and I realised that this was an inheritance, from my family and from my childhood. And I wanted at that moment not to call, not to go back home, not to deal with the relationship even, but just to cut this cord of connection, to find my way back to myself.
An imagined ritual
It would be nice if we had some ritual for growing up that had nothing to do with marriage at all, that our mothers symbolically untied a knot instead of tying us up to someone else, if we took these seven steps to walk away first, and not commit ourselves to walking towards something.
Maybe then we could have some more mature ritual for marriage itself, because before we were married we were already somehow individuated, we were complete, and then we could be much more curious and prepared and interested in newness, in forming connections.
Even if this marriage ritual was more balanced, even if the mother of the groom and the mother of the bride had this symbolic action of cutting their own cords and making new ties, it still would happen too quickly. You cannot, I think, cut something and tie it up in the same action. You don’t have time to register, to understand and find yourself as a separate human being, before you start locating yourself in someone else.
A Fool
A hundred years ago, my girlfriend and I made ourselves a marriage ritual. We both read about the Fool, she from St Francis and I from Tom Robbins, and I remember this Tarot card, which I have seen again many times, of the Fool, walking in the wilderness, carrying his belongings, about to step off a cliff. In some peculiar way, even though a couple of years later we had a divorce ritual, even though we broke up, we kept these words, this image, endlessly walking off cliffs; committed to some idea of movement. And in so far as a wanderer meets up and speaks and shares travel stories with another wanderer, in so far as you can make connections on the road, we’ve always kept this commitment to each other. Maybe both of us would have been helped, though, by this other ritual I have imagined, of releasing yourself from family, from these two things, belonging and inheriting.
Love
And I also thought, last night, about two other rituals. One was manufactured for my brother and his wife when they came home after getting married. They sat in hard chairs, and we all fed them bananas in milk and threw rice on them. The other happened on the day my niece was named. We all fed her with milk in a silver spoon, and whispered her name in her ear.
I didn’t try to analyse these rituals too much, because I felt them, inside, differently. These are rituals of love. In the way that when someone is doing something which is important to them, in the sense that you all gather and wave when someone sets off on a journey, in the sense that you are full of good wishes and some of us pick and choose carefully, find the right words, and some of us can’t, we find this thing, this action, feed them and toss something on them, that does all of this. It’s a participative thing, it’s a shared thing, it’s neither masculine nor feminine, it’s very simple. You feed them, you bless them. Blessing not in the sense of the blessings of the elder. We all did it – adults, children. Friends, family. Blessings of love. Everyone in the room.
With my niece, she was a very small baby – she didn’t have words yet. So we give her something she recognises – milk, and something she doesn’t – her name. and again, it’s all of us – everyone in the room. And I guess you hope that you make some organic connection between these two things – the milk and the word, you feed them to her, together, so that, maybe, there is some mysterious awakening, the body remembering the word, the name.
Maybe the thing I remember most from these two rituals, is the wide, overwhelming sense of affection floating through the room, collected in the actions.
Colours
Photo: Priyadarshini John
The things I remember most from my brother’s wedding, are the two of them standing next to each other in the beginning, the strength of the colours – white and red. Somehow, by simply standing there alone, they seemed to be at a great distance. The moment when he misunderstood about this red thing that he was putting on her, and drew a strong red line on her forehead instead, how it seemed to glow before the fire. The registrar’s office where they got their marriage certificate – the white sari and flowers fluttering among the cows, goats, dogs, vegetables, and my brother bringing us a flask of tea.
And I remembered then and now, when I went to the same office a few months after, a bride walking in. She was tall and broad, a strong woman, she was so present, she seemed to turn us all into shadows or ghosts. She wore this long braid, down her back, loaded with flowers. She wore a silk sari, shiningly, fiercely. She wore gold chains and a gold belt, and seemed to radiate this light, and in this office, in this dust, among these papers, she shone like a warrior, proud, powerful, ready to ride off across two worlds.
