"The Russians say: laughing bride, weeping wife/weeping bride, laughing wife. The couple who write their own marriage ceremony have, we can predict, a rocky time ahead.
This supposed ability to sidestep, to forgo, ritual comes from a mistaken belief in one's own powers and a misapprehension of personal grace. It is misplaced and it is sad, like the viewer at a magic show who confides, 'You know, he really didn't make that duck disappear.'
Now of course the magician didn't make that duck disappear. What he did was something of much greater worth--he gave a moment of joy and astonishment to some who were delighted by it.
In suspending their disbelief--in suspending their reason, if you will--for a moment, the viewers were rewarded. They committed an act of faith, or of submission. And like those who rise refreshed from prayers, their prayers were answered. For the purpose of the prayer was not, finally, to bring about intercession in the material world, but to lay down, for the time of the prayer, one's confusion and rage and sorrow at one's own powerlessness."
--from David Mamet's "Three Uses of the Knife"
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Three Uses of the Knife
Posted by: homo ludens
