In 1986, Gloria Steinem wrote that if men got periods, they 'would brag about how long and how much': that boys would talk about their menstruation as the beginning of their manhood, that there would be 'gifts, religious ceremonies' and sanitary supplies would be 'federally funded and free'. I could live without the menstrual bragging - though mine is particularly impressive - and ceremonial parties, but seriously: Why aren't tampons free?
Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.
The summit is the mere formality, the ceremonial demonstration of what was agreed to long ago, weeks, months before the summit.
Ballet is the body rising. Ballet is ceremonial and hieratic. Its disdain for the commonplace material world is the source of its authority and glamour.
The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.
Mum wasn't at all religious, but she thought that going to the theatre was as important a ceremonial, communal experience that a person could have.
Men neglect the duties incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods; religion is also separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that the world is almost, literally speaking, a den of sharpers or oppressors.
Christianity has no ceremonial. It has forms, for forms are essential to order; but it disdains the folly of attempting to reinforce the religion of the heart by the antics of the mind.
The aboriginal women leaders of Papunya - the Papunya Artists - performed a dance for me: the Honey Ant dance. They'd never done it for anyone else. They honoured me with a ceremonial stick that signifies the story of the land.
As a book person and a movie person, I feel Jewish. My Dad was more Buddhist than anything, and on the West Coast I've often had the impression that Jews become Buddhists. I think, if anything, my religion has more to do with California consciousness, vibrations and energy. My wife isn't Jewish. There's nothing ceremonial going on at our house, I mean, occasionally a candle gets lit. But, definitely, my Judaism is an ongoing relationship, one that remains to be consummated.
Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.
The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Democracy's ceremonial, its feast, it's great function, is the election.
My father had retained an emotional affection for the ceremonial of his parental home, without allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom
