An eye pronoun chew. . .

I had to play at a wedding the other day and had a lot of time to stand around thinking (dangerous). These were kids, way too young (21) to comprehend how serious the whole thing is—my heart went out to them for what they were undertaking and how blind they were. Got to thinking about the way most American weddings are run—the lineup of “groomsmen” and “bridesmaids” standing up there in feudal knight and lady-in-waiting fashion wearing their matching livery. This is a very old custom going back to at least Roman times where 10 witnesses were required at a wedding. We still think we need witnesses, and the lines of men and women are descended from more dangerous times when the men wore swords—the brothers-in-arms of the groom faced the sisters-in-sorcery of the bride, each there to back up their man and their woman and to show the other side the dangerous consequences of faithlessness or desertion. There are a lot of cultures around the world whose marriage ceremonies resonate with some vestiges of their original purpose—people dance and sing and throw down empty glasses, light firecrackers, carry grooms or brides around on their shoulders, fire Kashalnikovs into the air, ride horses around wildly, perform fake kidnappings of the bride, etc. I am pretty certain though that most American weddings are significantly lacking in the celebratory passions they might once have had. For example the photographs—when did photos become more important than the actual ceremony? Are we so drained of community feelings and passions that we just walk through these ceremonies so they can be photographed to maybe someday show children how strange and young their parents looked before they were born? The wedding yesterday took 35 minutes, the photos took almost 2 hours, and then a tired and wan couple was escorted into a reception of people whose feet hurt from standing in a crowded reception hall without enough chairs (non-alcoholic, in deference to feelings of some relative or another—booze would have helped with the hurting feet). Anyway, these kids are now legally married and at least didn’t do that GODAWFUL thing about shoving cake in each other’s faces, so maybe they’ll wake up in a few years when they have found out what marriage really is all about and decide they did the right thing. Hopefully. You have to wonder at all the expense and fuss and bother. Is it all just to make a public spectacle so the young impressionable couple will think three times before giving up, to show them by the supposed importance of Ceremony that everyone from 11-year-old second cousin right up to grandparents will be really pissed at them if they split? I don’t know what a wedding ceremony should be. I have had two of them and as ceremonies go, they worked--there were passions and feelings that were communicated to the attendees and I felt married afterwards, like the society around me had sanctified and approved of the whole thing. Everyone should work from their feelings, but having feelings that originate in one's own heart and not in the movies is rare these days. I think most people imitate some vanished cultural pattern that they do not understand and then wonder inside why they are not spiritually stimulated by it. But then, most people in our culture are never spiritually stimulated, so waddya expect?