MaxiRam Castle* is beginning to accept me as one of its own. I’d been entering this beehive via Reception, which has its ritual ways of making sure visitors are not wasps in disguise, whilst honouring them with attractive young ladies, wood, leather, a stylish lobby and real coffee. Now I come in by the other entrance which is staffed by a different breed of bee, called Security. Their charm is to know you by sight and welcome you daily into the fraternity of workers. This entrance is dingy and takes you through long corridors in the bowels of the building, where cleaning staff congregate early in the morning, and nothing is designed to impress. I was impressed nevertheless by a plaque which commemorated the visit in 1976 of Her Majesty the Queen.
I recall skimming through various anthropological texts, long ago, where the behaviour of various tribes was described in terms of totem and taboo. Words like ritual, mystery, magic and medicine would be used, with the implication that the medicine men of such tribes held sway by means of superstition and irrationality: so unlike the white man who came to observe them! Or so we were led to believe.
But I see now, returning to this manifestation of Babylon (in the Rastafarian sense), that we seldom use the word “rational” honestly. Rationality is a totem of our tribe, but it does not mean we behave rationally (just as proclaiming democracy as a political totem does not entail respect for democracy).
I see that every human being is besotted with ritual. It keeps us going in a world which is almost always—from our own individual viewpoint—irrational; a world which seldom places us at the centre of its dedicated attention. We have to fit in as best we may.
It’s in ritual that we find our comfort. I mean a skilled and efficacious ritual. I learn to perform a behaviour which creates a desired result, and it gives me a little happiness—regardless of morality or rationality. This is what I can do. People depend on me for this, or even if they don’t, this is the arena in which I can perform my clown tricks, whether to an audience or not.
Yesterday I had a tedious task to complete and I was able to delegate it to an assistant, an “agency temp”. She seemed a person of considerable education and refined manners, but had some difficulty coping with several spreadsheets and databases open at once so as to compare their contents. She feared the proliferation of slider bars, minimize, maximize and close buttons as if they were shark-infested waters, and she resorted to pen and paper to try and keep track of the important numbers. In short, she failed to establish an efficacious skilled ritual. Various subtle indications from her supervisor and other staff conveyed the message to me that this lady had to be “put out of her misery”: either sent back to the agency with regret, or found work that she could do with comfort.
My own rituals at MaxiRam Castle are not fully developed. I’m an ill-trained performer on the high wire, in fully-attended live shows.
* Maxiram Castle was my code name for the Fujitsu building in Bracknell.
a wayfarer’s notes 
so your computer is ok now.
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No, I am limping along with two networked computers. All being replaced soon.
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wonderful descriptions, Vincent. I particularly enjoy your comments on corporate ritual.
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Very interesting post. I am thinking about how ritual comforts us, because it creates a sort of consistency and predictability for us that permits us to experience order and constancy, so we can at least to some extent feel a level of cpntrol in our life, and so that certain things can sort of be put on auto-pilot, not demanding quite so much of our attention. On a grander scale we find that ritual is something we pass down from one generation to the next (like a holiday tradition, for example, that becomes sort of a family legacy).
If I stop and think about it, I can come up with so many different things in the course of a day that I could define as ritual, and how this organizes my day in a way that makes some things more efficient and requiring less of my attention…like to have to give attention to it would be likened to reinventing the wheel every day.
Richly layered thoughts, as always, and wonderful writing!
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But maybe there are rituals and then there are rituals. Just heard a piece recently on NPR on the last remaining “cargo cult” – the people on this island believe that rituals will bring them industrial goods…
Of course others would say that all rituals are in that same category.
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Well how do you know that the cargo cult rituals don't work for them?
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Such an evocative description of “that place” we used to work!
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