Finding a Rhythm to Work and Live To

Subscribe to The Anti-Mimetic Newsletter on substack for essays like this delivered to your inbox weekly.

I’ve been feeling down this past week. It might be because I’ve been listening to too much discordant music: the uncoordinated, nonrhythmic pulse of content, which is less like a pulse—which indicates life—and more like clashing cymbals (symbols!). An infinite array of them.

I’m writing this on Palm Sunday, which begins a week marked by a very specific cadence of time for me—one which transcends whatever is happening in the world: the engagement-grabbing headlines of the news cycle, the twitter timeline, the car horns in DC.

Anyone who has entered into the life of a religious tradition that is marked by history has entered into a rhythm which is not subject to or determined by anything that a politician says; or the release of the next episode of Succession (believe me, I’ll be watching tonight); or even the traditional “work week”. If they enter deeply, they find a higher frequency to which they can tune in.

I do not mean to suggest that this “tuning in” is possible only for those who are part of an ancient tradition. All of us have special days that are marked by solemnity—the anniversary of a loved one’s passing, or the celebration of a joyous occasion (a wedding anniversary, the birth of a child)—on which the volume is turned down on whatever is happening in the world. We don’t care as much about it. Our focus is elsewhere. The noise takes a back seat to whatever rhythm it is we have tuned into.

Other events have this effect, too: becoming a parent, going to war, or becoming a caregiver for a sick friend or parent. These things thrust a different experience of time upon us.

It’s hard to describe the way that time changes when I walk down the long hallway of my father’s care facility, back to the “memory care” unit (which is called the “Reminiscence Wing”) where people are suffering from various stages of dementia. The world slows down while I am there. I am focused on his needs and his care, and also the stories that he wants to tell me from his past (he still remembers specific jumps that he had as a member of the 101st Airborne division in Vietnam, but not that I came to visit the day before).

***

Many things alter the perception of time. Substances, including alcohol, conform time to its own rhythm of consumption.

Leisure is an anti-mimetic act—contemplation frees one from the demands of action. (And true leisure is the basis of culture.)

The algorithm dictates engagement on its own time.

Falling in love imbues time with a richness and texture that it doesn’t seem to have in the merely tick-tock moments, and it moves at a different pace.

Cities have a time. Farms have a time (determined by animal life). Families have a time. Substack has a time. (To the frustration of some of my readers, I’ve never published this newsletter on anything resembling a regular schedule…because that’s not the kind of time I want to be bound to.)

And time flows differently for children than it does for adults.

I am often ask myself: who is the time-keeper of my life? To whose rhythm am I dancing?

The cliched phrase “beating to his own drummer” fails to capture the reality that there are very few people who are actively drumming to the beat of anything these days other than the constant demands of content consumption. There is no drummer. It’s a symphony without order.

Know this about rhythm: it has an objective quality. There are certain notes and chords and words and speeds of conversation that simply can’t be layered on top of the wrong rhythms. The bassline in jazz helps shape the kind of music that is ultimately made. The bassline must align or syncopate with the drums—which is an interesting thing to be think about amid the cacophony of voices online talking about “the alignment problem” of AI technology. “Alignment” is a telling metaphor in part because it’s a visual one.

And the people talking the loudest about alignment have no rhythm.

Please read what I have to say below as a piece of my own cultural experience and not as a prescriptive. (I realize that my readers come from a very wide variety of backgrounds, but my hope is that everyone can relate what follows in some way to their own life, or to the more general idea of cultural rhythm, whatever your own solution may be.)

One of the greatest changes to the rhythm of my own life was when I decided, at age 29, to experiment with praying something called the Liturgy of the Hours—a particular form of ‘perpetual prayer’ which all priests and religious (monks, friars, etc), on the day of their ordination, commit to praying daily for the rest of their lives. But these prayers are also something which the laity are invited and even encouraged to participate in, even if very few do.

The story of how I learned about this ancient practice is a long one (which disrupted a very different “rhythm of life” that I was living in Las Vegas at the time, punctuated by poker tables and bars), and I’ll have to save it for another time. But I adopted this practice at a moment in my life when every day and week seemed to blend into the other and I had lost any sense of true rhythm in the midst of my 80-hour hustle and work hard/play hard mentality and nothing seemed to stick and and and and and.

The practice consisted of psalms and readings from scripture that are recited at specific times throughout the day (morning, mid-day, evening, night, and more). The psalms prayed at each particular “hour” conform and relate to the time of the day at which they are prayed, and so does the specific rhythm of the psalter throughout the week: each day, Monday through Thursday, is distinct and moves toward Friday, and eventually toward Sunday. Every week recapitulates the entire liturgical year. Each Sunday is a mini-easter. Fridays are somber and include reflections on morality, suffering, and death. Mondays are a new beginning.

This gave my life order. It caught me up into something larger and perhaps even anti-mimetic in terms of rhythm—at least in relation to the world.

I’m sharing this because I’ve been thinking a lot about time: how strangely Covid warped it, and how our algorithmic existence continues to warp it further.

Maybe I’m simply in search of lost time.

As I wait for those transcendent moments to break in and disrupt the tick-tock-tick-tok of American time (which is very different from Italian time, by the way), I realize that I have the opportunity to create space for a breaking in or a getting hit. I have the opportunity to tie myself to the train tracks—to tie myself to the mast of my ship, to avoid the lure of the Sirens—in order to get run over by the train that bears the emblem of the real.

The older I get, the more I realize that my life is less about what I do, and more about my ability to receive or be affected.

Maybe part of the reason why I’ve been down is because so much of the “cultural analysis” I read seems devoid of love. And without love, everything sounds like clashing cymbals. We lack the love which orders the symphony. But the symphony is still being played, if only we have the ears to hear it and the will to tune in.

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”

—T.S. Eliot, excerpt from BURNT NORTON in Four Quartets

If you enjoyed this piece, please subscribe to the Anti-Mimetic Newsletter where you can find essays like this delivered to your inbox weekly, along with a community platform where you can meet and talk to other people thinking along similar lines.