2002-02-26 - 20:17
"Holy ground, Highlander! Remember what Ramirez taught you!"

Have I ever discussed our student rituals? We call them by a variety of names--Thesis Parade, Casimir Effect Demonstration[1], Naked Passion Dance--but they're all basically the same: People light fires and dance around them banging rhythmically on things. Most people get liquored up, and usually some people get naked. We had one such ritual this Saturday--the aforesaid (2nd 1st Annual) Casimir Effect Demonstration. This time we banged things rhythmically while making a circuit of the campus, down one end, across the canyon, back up and over the other bridge and through Gray Center to get back to the quad, where the serious (safely contained) bonfire commenced.

Nobody got naked, probably because there were outsiders present--the performers from the hip-hop show that was going on later that night in the Student Union. (Temperature does not dissuade people from getting naked around here, as long as they've got fire and alcohol.) All the other elements were present, though. There were also free non-drugged brownies. People danced. I watched this inebriated freshperson in a colourful shirt, black skirt and heels dance for quite a while. She had the most entertaining intoxicated dancing style I'd seen in a long time. As an observer of people, I collect things like that. I tried to commit her style to memory, something to duplicate for a show sometime, maybe.

In terms of religious or spiritual orientation, we're almost all disillusioned atheist ex-somethings here, and so we have to find other ways to satisfy our need for ritual. Theses could be written, perhaps have been, about these idiosyncratic gatherings, these nights wherein the white-collar, and mostly white, liberal arts college students come together to take part in a primal dance around a bonfire--blazing on a lawn or in a shopping cart--to crude percussive music of their own making.

I like it, as long as people aren't assholes about the fire. Or the alcohol.

Tonight, I was walking across campus, which is a little more colourful than usual due to the just-commenced Arts Week, and I saw a little fire outside the "English Culture" theme dorm. I went to investigate. Two people I didn't know and one I did, a WTO-protester type lefty who was in one of my classes last year, had set fire to... something. They'd poured all their lighter fluid on it and basically obliterated whatever it was. One of them was saying, "Yeah, there's not much of it left," as I walked up; another was explaining to someone else that this was the English Dorm.

I observed for a moment, and since nobody was volunteering the information, I asked what they'd burned. "A Union Jack," my acquaintance informed me.

I noted that the English Dorm residents weren't going to know they'd done so, since it was so well-done, so to speak. "Well, it's more for our own benefit," he explained.

"But wouldn't part of the appeal be the reaction of the English Dorm people?"

He smiled. "It's more of a... sacrifice to the ancestors. To let them know we haven't forgotten where we came from."

Hi ho.

[1]Don't ask me, man.

[edited 1/1/03]

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