Creatures of Routine
2024
written as an accompaniment to Lorie Ballage’s solo exhibition
Rituals, Ripples, Kunstgarasjen, Bergen
The Beatles' "A Day in the Life" starts with a set of lyrical expositions that map the quotidian woes of 1960s Britain. It's a slow unfolding of headlines of a fatal car crash, a filmic adaptation of a military victory and some surrounding apathetic reactions from the general public. The free-form structure of the lyrics that wander across the melody of the song in the first instance allow for a feeling of supernatural calm that pervades these events. John Lennon's voice warbles through with a spirit of almost disaffection: he is reading the news, it is rather sad, but it is happening anyway. Then, the middle section of the song erupts as a spring of regular pleasures that breaks forth into Lennon's mildly melancholy recital. First an orchestral intervention develops from the wavering chaos of Lennon's extended last line "I'd love to turn you on", which is itself a reference to Tim Leary's psychedelic mantra 'Turn on, tune in, drop out'. The orchestra builds into an extended atonal crescendo the ends in, of all things, the sound of an alarm clock going off. In wafts Paul McCartney's reliably upbeat voice with:
Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, I noticed I was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
McCartney's narrative interruption of a selection of normal actions gives a base of reliability of the everyday to ground the listener. The musical bridge is complete with a regular drumbeat that inspires structure, consistency, rhythmicity and possibility; a knowing what is to come in the repetitions of the daily actions. Even though the protagonist is late, he still goes through his ablutions, paying attention to the regularities that shape the form of an entry into a day, and the actions that continue into it. McCartney comes in to remind us of those structures that hold us—the ones that, most of the time, remain unmentioned.
I saw Wim Wenders new film, Perfect Days in a little Kino in Berlin a couple of weeks ago. Perfect Days is a film about a humble Tokyo toilet cleaner, Hirayama, and his quietly introspective life. Very little is explicitly revealed about each character in the film, sparking a curiosity about their inner lives and motivations. One of the film's strengths lies in its ability to convey so much with so little dialogue. It relies on subtle gestures, the rhythm of daily routines, and the power of observation to communicate. In the absence of extensive character exposition, the audience is encouraged to draw their own conclusions and immerse themselves in the silent world of the characters, principally that of Hirayama. We follow the daily rhythms of his life, complete with a little strife, but with little variance from day to day. Much of the film is focused on a pride in cleaning, not just the toilets of the city, but in the cleaning and servicing of his own body. It is not quite the same gritty and insistent social realism of repetitive and quotidian epics from film makers such as Wang Bing—there is still a touch of the Hollywood to it—but as an audience we feel ingrained in Hirayama's daily routines and rhythms that constitute the majority of his waking life. Hirayama's routines ground him, and he appears to take great pleasure in their regular repetition. When small interruptions occur to his daily routines of washing, grooming, eating, and sleeping, it pains him; he is put off kilter, out of joint. In regaining the simplicity of his life of quiet routine, Hirayama finds his pride and peace. Only at certain points do we see snippets of his internal life breaking through in a strange mixture of pleasured and pained facial gestures.
Dan Fox, in his book Limbo, says that "Repetition is reassuring, because it suggests there is a pattern to the universe we might be able to grasp, and refine our responses to." Repetition can be both a source of limbo, and a staving off of conditions of stasis, depending upon the outlook. The monotony of the regular routines of caring for our body and the bodies of others can be a prison that we build around ourselves. If we view the repetitions of the small tasks of washing, cleaning, prepping and eating as boring familiarities that hold us back from experiencing the Real Events of Life, then they can quickly become infernal bindings that prevent us from a feeling of actually doing something with our time. In Repetition and Difference, Gilles Deleuze argues against viewing repetition as mere duplication or recurrence of the same, instead suggesting that repetition inherently involves difference. Each repetition brings about variations or differences that contribute to the ongoing evolution and becoming of things. In this sense, repetition becomes a creative and transformative process that animates the flux of existence. Difference through repetition, for Deleuze, is not merely a negative or relational term but a positive and productive force that generates the diversity and complexity of the world.
Buddhist practices tell us to pay attention to the repetition of the small actions in a day, as these actions represent the majority of our lived experience. If we focus on the subtle differences in our daily tasks, paying attention to the changes, then we can be more present in our bodies and in our selves, reducing the suffering anxiety of living-in-the-world. I try to keep up a daily practice of meditation. Using the Mindfulness of Breathing technique, I count my breaths, paying close attention to the micro movements and sensations within my body that constitute the experience. Every breath is different. Sometimes I will feel slightly more air on the back of my throat, or my diaphragm will contract at a marginally different angle, or the wind of my breath will excite a new nostril hair that I had not been previously aware of. By counting these breaths, I train my mind to return to a consistently reliable constant—like a ground zero that, in theory, can be recalled in moments of anxiety or distress.
I practice my meditation every morning, first thing when I wake up. "If you can win the morning, you can win the day" is what I am told in multiple different ways from a myriad of smiling affirming assertive faces of The Self Help Influencers. This army of smug gurus must have infinite amounts of morning to go around considering the extensive list of their morning routines that they assure me are completed with a strict consistency. One of the tenants of the self help movement is that, through the regular repetition of a set of daily actions, one can frame the day for an assured success. Ignoring the sociopathic addicts who insist that rising somewhere between 3am and 4am is necessary to complete these tasks, there is some truth to this claim. If I start my day in the same way every day, I am comforted by the similar repetitions of ritual and routine, even if my location and time zone are variable. There's a comfort to sameness, one that is perhaps only felt in its absence. The uncombed hair, the uncounted breaths, the uncooked breakfast eggs, the unscrubbed teeth, the unwashed socks all lead to a steady unravelling of the foundations of what it means to be a unified and whole thing—a person built on habit, a creature of routine, one who is on top of things and functioning. In the absence of the foundations necessary for a smooth transition through the day, things become destabilised, and insecurity enters the chat.
Living now, for many, is a balance somewhere between uncertainty and stability. Life requires enough uncertainty to keep things interesting, to allow pockets of emptiness for the unknown to flow into. Uncertainty is also felt in the events—global, local and personal—where the individual or collective rug can be pulled out from under the self in acts of break, disaster, shift and switching. Stability, on the other hand, can come in many forms: financial, locational, familial, communal, in love and in comfort. For me, stability is formed within the everyday grounding rituals and routines, ones that I adhere to almost religiously. In my past few years of financial and locational and romantic uncertainty, what has kept me grounded is a stability of routine—a routine which can be enacted in whatever location I am currently inhabiting; a routine that is highly predicated on rhythm; a routine that is subjected to the variations in vibrations of my mood and temperament. My routine is one based in writing and reading, stretching and meditating, cooking and walking, cleaning and exercise. When space, place, time and surroundings fluctuate, it is in the small regularities of these repetitive and reliably grounding activities that I find comfort, find clarity.
An art of attention, an art that attends to the everyday is an art that attends to the very fabric of the living breathing working shitting pissing scrubbing kissing eating fucking thinking loving sobbing beings that we are. There can be a deep sense of meaning in the rituals and routines that we make for ourselves, that we complete for ourselves. Or there can not be, but regardless they hold us, maintain us and keep us going.