“Understanding life is more than just living it; it is indeed propelling it forward. Life does not flow along a slope on the axis of objective time that would serve as its channel. Although it may be a form imposed upon time’s successive instants, life always finds its primary reality in an instant. Hence, if we delved into the heart of psychological evidence, to the point where sensation is no more than the complex reflection or response of a simple act of volition—when intense attention concentrates life’s focus upon a single isolated element—then we will become aware that the instant is the truly specific character of time. The more deeply penetrating our meditation on time, the more minute it becomes. Idleness alone lingers; the act is instantaneous. Could we not say then, conversely, that instaneity is an act? Take a weak idea, tighten its focus upon an instant, and it will suddenly illumine the mind.”
— Bachelard, The Intuition of the Instant
When we sit parked on, say, a park bench to think about human history in that vaguely cool yet collected cloud of our belonging to the human experiment at large, remnants and recorded figures—photographs, old film, paintings, etc.—linger on the front of the parade of images moving across the mind’s eye like bright ghosts in grand marshal attire, or the glimmer of a knife in the sun. Of course we each share a kinship with the remnants and remainders, with what remains; in each of us there’s a small nugget of endurance just as each of us is a reminder of the generations and generations which have come before us, which have persisted through the epics and struggles of their own times and places to arrive in the world of today through you yourself.
My father’s side of the family was lucky enough to skip poland and russia for the united states in the decades following the american civil war and in the decades before the outbreak of the first world war in europe; my mother’s side is tremendously more murky. Although I know my great-grandfather drove a tank in europe in 1945 and that his wife, my great-grandmother, served as a soda jerk in san francisco while he was abroad since work in lanesboro, minnesota was in short supply, I know little else. Most everyone is here by luck. Some more than others. A friend with whom I shared a buddhism class in college told me his huta ancestors barely survived the rwandan genocide, for instance, by concealing themselves in a toolshed for weeks; without doubt, each and every one of us has a small bit of gratitude for our being here at all to tell the tale. Thousands of years of people, not dissimilar from you, fading off into the recess of what’s remembered, merely trying to survive in their own way.
Most of what we think of as History is the history of what remains, of what persists. The dark ages are only dark to our modern gaze. From the high middle ages, we’ve received religious texts transcribed by the overzealous hands of bald monks—remnants of a once cohesive, now alien media/cultural environment—without very much escaping from their more scholastic bald-headed tint, and the colloquial understandings and relationships which defined the social/cultural atmosphere, unless otherwise recorded, has been lost to today’s flashlights. Hindsight is not entirely 20/20; in fact it appears to be so much less than that. But then again, some does remain. We have the Odyssey, we have the Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.
As we continue to live out history—“living out history” being a posturing of ourselves towards what’s remembered. We seek to create documents to prove that we were here at all.
Whether or not this reduces the idea of Creation to a mere anxious materialism is a valid question to ask. Of course materialism is an essential component of what makes the act of creation what it is, but we mustn’t leave out the spontaneity and the idealism which also goes into the craft. To create is to puppet reality for many purposes, one of which might be to speak towards our posterity or for the work to outlive us in our flesh and blood. There are other things we leave behind, though…
Imagine now that you, the reader, are in a coffee shop or an office: look around and think about one thing that you’ve done today that you could imagine everyone else in this room has also done, something as mundane as walking outside, using the toilet, eating food, drinking water. Everyone exists within these mundanities, the every day variants. It’s what our cities are made of. It’s what our lives mean. We can look to these small and large mundanities, too, as remnants which have been paved for us by human history, and the mundanities which we change, introduce, embrace are what will most clearly be left to its backwards gaze. Only none of the future people will know it was us.
Habits and traditions weather on as local or family spoken-word histories fade. Is there really anything wrong with this? On its surface, no; but upon deeper reflection it seems to me that family and local histories have quite a bit of value in our feeling okay in our individuality, in our time and place. To disinfect every surface of a location’s history, transform a historical building into, say, a McDonald’s, to drain every city of its personality in favor of the whitewashed clean-cut aesthetics of franchise obsessed small business and, on the other hand, the bone-dry aesthetics of LED strip lights in white-walled bedrooms, is to wipe clean the slate of our understanding of ourselves in history.
While the connection to the past and its remembrances are increasingly severed, we never quite stop collecting—we’re social hunters and gatherers at heart—and we instead opt for something new to occupy ourselves with. We may have even agreed to clear the slate for a reason. There is a lot to know about, a lot of worlds to look into. The clearing of the slate was perhaps a preparatory act as it prepared us to dive into the mysteries of the instantaneous world in which we live in today.
As the capabilities for the preservation of every individual mundanity increase in power, the way in which we live is etched into (electronic) stone. In such a way, life, as written in statistics, has become the dominant art form of the twenty-first century; to look back on our online activity, our notifications, the films we’ve watched, the books we’ve read, is to look back on our life’s work in the resin of databanks.
Art as an outlet, too, has been subsumed by the data-fication of the real (appropriately, in my Webster’s Dictionary, Data and Dada share a page). Every off-ramp leads to the same roads, it seems sometimes. But all the same, we can fall asleep so easy in the back seat of a car—against all odds!—precisely because our comfortable surroundings are so tactile in their steady humdrum presence so long as the driver isn’t a complete maniac behind the wheel. Those comfortable surroundings nudge us and remind us that we’re kept inside by a genuine nowness en route from here to there. Its the tactility of the presence within movement, then, which might keep us from losing ourselves in the digital hallucinations. Because now, as you drift away into sleep, there’s rest to be had, there’s a comfortable movement. Whoever is driving is taking care of us—we’re along for the ride, after all—to arrive where we are going.
With that being said, there are clearly alternatives to be had to the tyranny of a statistical etching of our lives, to the anxious materialism of keeping records of ourselves. Steady commitment to the nonsense of presence can lead a path through; and what would be a better definition of that than the performance of ritual?
This past October, I began taking a couple hours out of my week to sit down behind a Tascam 8-Track I found on eBay the summer before to compose covers of entire albums, moving from song to song, instrument to instrument. I began with The Natural Bridge by Silver Jews, moved onto Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan in November, and have been keeping pace since (starting work on covering Pavement’s Slanted & Enchanted this week).
This project—which I’ve referred to as my albums project—seems rather monumental and (um) self-aggrandizing on paper, but in reality, for me, it feels like nothing more than going for a daily run or sitting in a meditative pose by the open window on a spring morning. Music is fun, of course; but moreover I’m kept comfortable in place within the project precisely because no one save for myself and my tape deck will ever hear any of these songs. They’re for me and me alone.
I bring this up to illustrate that the separating off of career, hobby, passion, exercise as conceptual blocks around acts and rituals tend to keep those acts from finding for themselves a sense of importance. There are senses of purpose beyond the ability to share. Of course I have considered finding some way to monetize the project, squeeze some money out of it, — what if I released the covers on Substack and paywalled them? what if I sold CDs at shows? what if…? — but the fact that any attempt at monetization would likely result in a DMCA from Sony Music keeps me sober about it.
And who wouldn’t want to play music? Who wouldn’t want to find a guitar tone that sounds like a dry-reverb’d trumpet and then layer 4 of the same melodies in different pitches on top of one another, panned, in various degrees, to the left and right so that their whole version of Bob Dylan’s Rainy Day Women sounds like the insides of an accordian? Honestly it’s not very hard when you have time on your hands and there’s no real pressure about trying to make anything perfect since, again, no one will be hearing these songs except for me. Making music, writing: these are the closest things I know to magic.
You can really do whatever you want as long as you don’t expect anyone else to care. The world is yours to value; and this individual sense of valuation is very important if it lies beyond the reach of cold, hard cash. Discipline towards nonsense is important because it is only once you’ve figured out how to reach beyond the meanings and purposes most amendable to our fretting anxieties about ourselves that the world can begin to grow its colors.
I’m of course talking about the creation of personal rituals. And there are many to choose from and to make your own. My rituals have been meditation, writing, music. I dislike talking about them and yet they keep my world in order. The meaning I get from such routine tasks, taken for their own sake, gives the world its meaning in turn.
This leads us onto a question of What Exactly is a Ritual? to which my answer is To Move God To Care.
As always, and sheepishly, I’m going to make clear that I’m not a religious person. Religion seems wonderful for some people and I’m not going to bash it despite certain tendencies of the more puritanical variants, but whenever I write or speak about the Spinozist version of God I find myself needing to make clear that by God I mean Existence. I could use “Existence” instead but for whatever reason “God” seems a more fitting word for what I’m attempting to describe. If, for the sake of this essay, we’re to humanize Existence, what other word is better suited? Besides, would it be completely out of place to classify Religion as a whole as a subcategory of Magical Practice?
Ritual practice exists, in terms of Human History, beneath the foundations of Christianity and Capitalism and Greek-Roman Orthodoxy which underline much of the world we’ve created for ourselves. Divination, dream interpretation, and astrology were all more common in Carthage than they are today, even in, say, Portland, Oregon. Even in the Christian canon, the Magi - the Persian ritual practioners after whom the word Magic was created - knew of Christ’s arrival in Bethleham because a new star had appeared in the sky. Certainly they had been keeping track of the stars. For a practitioner of ritual magic in the ancient world, the movement of the stars are of the utmost importance—in no way should we chalk this up to ignorance of the truth of helium and gravitational orbit. The priorities were different.
Ritual magic as a whole was widely and openly practiced, for the most part, until the catholic church of the late second century began ordering mass executions of practitioners of ritual magic outside of church connections (certainly priests were still allowed their communions with God/Existence!) and of course nearly a millennia passed before it began to reemerge from the seeds left in the rural pockets where farmers held rituals to move god to care about their crop yield. It blossomed into the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement and so on and so forth.
In our current century we tend to fall into a habit of considering ourselves somehow more advanced than the people of the past. We have advanced in many ways, sure. We have electricity, for one, and clean water, for two. Practitioners of ritual magic are not facing the burning pyre anymore for doing their work outside of the Catholic Church—thank god! Most people are free in some regard to make their magic where they see fit. But there is a soft dread permeating personal rituals which wouldn’t seem too dissimilar from the fear a ritual practitioner might feel in the height of Catholic repressions.
It seems as if, when Max Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit of Capitalism, the “disenchantment of the world” he described was more a flipping of enchantment over from the swarmy hands of the Church to the Free Markets of financial and information capital.
As such, it feels deeply foolish to spend multiple hours a week doing much of anything that doesn’t lead to some sort of numbers in the end, some sort of viable gain to be seen after years of work. Statistics has become an undeniable force in our lifetime. The preservation machine in overdrive.
But I can’t help but wonder if Historians, in a millennia’s time, won’t look back on the early half of the Twentieth Century as a time without relics, only half degraded plastic, as everything we have put value into in our lifetime is wiped gradually from every server, lost to an eternity which will gaze back on us in our time, shrug, and move onto a more interesting time with better architecture and a better historical record of events. There’s a decent chance we’re in something of a dark age. Yet rituals and ritual magic weathers on. And this also reflects the history of magic in the West since Catholicism forced it underground. Bits and pieces remain of an endlessly fascinating tapestry of belief and meaning and action which each of us, in our own way, contributes to and finds meaning from. But, importantly, the preservation of those pieces wasn’t pivotal to the practitioners, rather it was the understanding of power and action within presence which rituals unlocked that drew hundreds of generations to commune with God/Existence.
So since such an understanding of ritual magic exists beneath Capitalism itself, since its purpose is less towards preservation and more towards presence despite the qualms of the state or of logic, we might look to it for a solution to our individual search for purpose and meaning despite the solitude of careerist climbing or Qanon style conspiracy rabbitholes. In short: personal commitment to regular rituals is the best way to steady one’s mimetic defenses. Maintaining a regular communion with your surroundings, with your presence, is one of the few surefire ways to save your circumstances from becoming whitewashed.
One last question for you: does the infinite exist? If it does, and if the word Infinite has any meaning, then it must be endless. There can only be one Infinity because if there were two, then the two halves wouldn’t be infinite as only together would they be infinite. If there exists an Infinite, I mean to say, it would be the entire universe. And if our individual existence is merely a stint inside of this single Infinity, then we might as well relax a bit as reality is reality and it’s all the same; we can choose to follow any of its routes. If you show up day after day to listen to the birds sing, beautiful music will tell you what to do; if you light a candle and say the same line night after night, the world begins to fall into order as if it were in your control; if you pray for the sun to rise before the break of dawn, the sun will rise. And if one day you forget, and the sun rises anyways, you can thank Existence for cradling that ball of helium up into the blue once again for another green day. If you keep careful track of the stars you might notice when a new one appears. That’s to say, if you return to your circumstances, time and time again, your circumstances will make the time for you. And life becomes fun again. And beautiful.
chicago — 04/07/2026
I feel like every thought on this essay could give me hours to think, to dissect how I assemble my life. Thank you for this!
gorgeous writing!!