You choose a spot on the sofa and you sink into it. Over time, with infinite repetitions, that becomes your spot. There is a typical way you sit, and around that spot grows an accumulation. Remote controls, books, papers, pens, chargers. Sometimes bowls, bottles, glasses, spent implements of sustenance and pleasure. Whatever it takes to keep you riveted to that spot. A little altar grows to the life that you’ve been living.
This keeps your life reproducable. You sit down each time ready to perform your usual devotions. First the television, then the Roku, flip open the computer so you can have two screens going at once. Check the usual websites, presaved by history preference, check them again, change the Roku from Hulu to Youtube. Close the computer irritably, didn’t get anything done there, kick back and read under the lamp listening to music. Check twitter on phone. Get back on computer. Classic things. All within immediate reach. I have my little altar. These are my rituals.
The shape of the day conforms to the shape of my surroundings. What spot I put myself in, what objects I surround myself by. If you want to change your mind, change how your space is laid out. But who really wants to change their mind? Few with any frequency. There must be continuity of some kind. Ritual spaces of the everyday provide that continuity.
As quarantine continues I break the tedium of my modern altars by reverting to ancient ones. I make a bed of the sofa and keep the liquor close at hand. There used to be guilt associated with this act, but I no longer live with my parents. I no longer live with my ex. No one is around to make me feel guilty about it. I succumb easily to a binge, but I have other desires now. The old habit is only a layer of sediment over the new habits. Brushed aside in a week.
I look back at the work which took so much of my life and wonder if any of it was necessary. Life outside of this space begins to feel unreal. I get news of COVID-19 from the internet, people are ostensibly dropping at a greater rate than ever before. The oil prices inverted, the stocks are volatile. I’m out of a job, and all the hikes keep closing. Yet none of it touched me yet. I’m floating in a space, reciting mantras in my little temple. Certainly in some reality these things are real. The screaming protests, the dead dictator. Certainly it’s all real. But here I remain, an American Hero, performing my devotions, alone in my little space. So radically have the connotations of my normal activities so quickly changed.
But these activities are my person. I carry the altar around with me in a convenient backpack and set her up wherever I go, whatever year or season. In this way, perhaps the world outside doesn’t affect me. My laptop, a chosen set of books, paper, pen, at a restaurant, surrounded by plates and cups. On a hike, next to a waterfall, my book, paper, pens. Sometimes I don’t get anything done, it’s impossible, but I keep my little altar up. My shield against the shifting world around me.
Quiet days pass in devotion to habit. The little grooves I’ve worn into my psyche, pressing into the earth around me. Where I am, so is my space. Welcome home.
- 04.26.2020
