Word: rituals
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bruins fall sports program is an American dilemma. Brown's football team has traditionally been the doormat of the Ivy League and usually just prays for the final game of the season against Columbia. To compensate for the afternoon funeral. Bruin fans have made Saturday morning soccer victories a ritual...
...keep from "going round the bend," Barrymaine devised elaborate daily routines. He ended each day by dictating faintly remembered news stories into a make-believe telephone. "Oh, Miss Jones," the ritual began, "I've got a good lead for today." When he had finished "filing" the story, he sometimes put in another imaginary call-to his 25-year-old daughter in London. He found the perfect use for China's stiff brown toilet paper: he made himself a deck of cards out of it and played solitaire...
...seems as fit for dance as drama. At times, the company freezes in still lifes of agony. One is constantly aware of Cieslak's psychic pain, a pain beyond tears, beyond endurance, beyond escape, except by redemption. Religion and drama were once one and in Grotowski's ritual theater they seem, for a few miraculous moments, to be rejoined...
...most important one, certainly, is the re-establishment of transcendence. Bourgeois values are inherently material. That is why, for example, we have come to laugh at religion. Religion seems to fulfill no role in the market-place or its mirror in the mind, the arena of rational discourse. Religious ritual can be important only to those who need to have abstract, transcendent belief acted out on a concrete level. For those without the need religion is without purpose. I am Jewish, but I can not watch the Communion or the Elevation without feeling my spirit begin to escape...
That kind of McLuhanesque gadget might seem to be the ultimate in efficiency, but its acceptance by the military epitomizes the failure of briefings. Even without benefit of computer, the armed-services style of communication has become a ritual recitation of memorized details, a reduction of experience to a set of quantifiable data. The supposedly hard fact has been glorified; the untidy, elusive concept has been smudged into a supposedly measurable statistic...