Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.
Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil. Limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too.
My work involves the physical manifestation of emotional reality. Thus, the invisible becomes visible; the normal, abnormal; and the familiar, unfamiliar. Ordinary life is an endless source of fascination to me in its ritualistic objects and behavior.
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
I would rather do what I did than crawl in front of a ritualistic Left and lie the way those other comrades did betray my own soul.
In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
Medicine is incredibly ritualistic.
Long before I had ever seen a ritualistic service I became a Ritualist.
Comedy takes all of life and puts it through a lens of acceptance, just by the mere act of talking about it on stage in a communal setting. It's very primal and ritualistic in that sense.
Zen has lost its zip, if you will, or its nothingness and has become ritualistic Its established in monastaries with strict codes of koan study.
Coffee takes on an almost ritualistic meaning. I learned that from being on hurricane patrol for a year in the North Atlantic.
