I’ve begun to realize that the seasons are not the rituals that we assign to them. Summer is not Independence Day or a trip to the beach; autumn is not Halloween or Thanksgiving; winter is not Christmas or the NFL playoffs; spring is not Easter or the beginning of picnic season. Nature’s rhythms do not adhere to our calendars. The pandemic has condemned us to our boxes and now our rituals have begun to show their fragility. The risk of infection has been prioritized over our annual trip to grandma’s, to Yosemite, to the pumpkin patch. As the months roll past and each consecutive ritual is sidelined in the name of public health, our grasp on time has steadily weakened. The pandemic has shown us that ritual is tantamount to our understanding of time, and that it is not enough to maintain a personal routine. In order to establish a tangible sense of time, we must practice ritual together. The rituals that define our lives and make up the profile of our society are, at the very most, dissipating, and at the very least, revealing to us their own transient natures. They are opening themselves to the possibility for radical change.

Everyone agrees, at least everyone affected by social distancing orders (and especially those that take these orders seriously) agrees, that time has become ambiguous. Not only ambiguous, but looming. I talk and think more about time now than during any other point in my life. Time has managed to unseat weather in my list of most acceptable small talk topics; it has become a recurring theme in internet memes, many of which gesture toward our collective inability to establish whether 2020 has lasted 30 days or 100 years; it has entered our daily discourse in a way that is somehow more unprecedented than the pandemic itself. As individuals, we’ve been given nearly eight months to think about lost time, about all the things that could’ve been, but were instead replaced by time spent in isolation. When something does occur without interruption, like a wedding that has been planned several months in advance, it somehow feels cheapened. Guests who were originally a part of the planning phase are now staying at home out of a sense of responsibility to their loved ones. As they flip through an album of beautifully rendered wedding photos on their Facebook feed, each one featuring groups of maskless, open-mouthed faces, the whole thing comes off as a narcissistic gesture of ill-will. Something as simple as a wedding has begun to lose its meaning. Similarly, the responsible church-goer is forced to ask themselves if attending congregation is worth the risk of infection (or infecting others), if God would approve of individual worship in place of group worship, or if God ever thought about the risk of super-spreader events. The sacred has been brought low during our time inside. We cannot blame those who attempt to grasp onto the old ways because we too would enjoy a respite of normalcy, but we should not be held responsible for leaving them behind in the wake of a rapidly changing world. During the past seven months, we’ve not only been re-evaluating the rituals in which we take part, and which color the fabric of our everyday lives, but also the very structures which produce those rituals.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I couldn’t help but imagine the future as some unquestionable “unknown.” Fear of the unknown is a classic human folly that I’m not ashamed to have experienced, but after everything that has happened over the summer, I think it would be a mistake to leave my rendering of the future as a lonely question mark. In my attempt to comprehend all the meaning behind the George Floyd Rebellion, a struggle against state sponsored violence that continues as I sit and write this, my thoughts return again and again to the toppling of statues that many of us witnessed both in person and behind the veil of social media. As a symbolic gesture, the toppling of a statue is a blow against coagulated time. When the mob pulls down a statue of Christopher Columbus, it is a conscious effort to dislodge the coagulated gunk that hinders the cogs of forward-looking revolution, to free the spirit of time from the cyclical madness of our society, and to open avenues of reinvention. It is difficult but not impossible to locate an on-going discourse about the culture of revolution that is being fostered in the aftermath of the George Floyd Rebellion. In an anonymous article published in Ill Will Editions called “Rhythm and Ritual: Composing Movement in Portland’s 2020,” an article that inspired me to write what you are reading right now, the author talks about the formation of ritual among the participants of the Portland wing of the George Floyd Rebellion. They suggest that it all begins with the repetition of a protest slogan:

Where consensus would otherwise fail us, rhythm and ritual can help shore up consistency. “Stay together, stay tight” is a ritual, emphasized by the follow-up phrase: “we do this every night”. We know it is a ritual when we see it bellowed full strength even by those that are new, or who cannot come every night because they have a different mode of life. We must create spaces in which such patterned relations can grow. We must notice them, cultivate them. Snacks, medics and self-care are important for nourishing individual bodies— but how do we nourish relations within and between groups?

The author shows us that, even while the pandemic continues to erode established rituals, other forms of ritual are being cultivated among those who are capable and willing to imagine different possibilities for the future of our society. The slogan that the author chooses to highlight, “Stay together, stay tight,” is apt because it emphasizes the growing cohesion between the various left-leaning alignments taking part in the rebellion. Those of us who are still paying attention are bearing witness to the birth of a new cultural movement. As the George Floyd Rebellion nears its five-month anniversary, the end of the pandemic is nowhere in sight. Time will remain decentralized, raising questions about what rituals from the old world will endure this test of instability. Meanwhile, those of us who have taken to the streets will continue to speculate upon and experiment with new ways of being.

It’s odd to think back on a summer that featured the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, burning police stations, and clashes between riot police and protestors that resembled something from an experimental dystopian sci-fi film, all the while feeling as though nothing has fundamentally changed. Condemned to our homes, we cannot help but intuit countless degrees of space between ourselves and major events, even while these events are occurring in our own neighborhoods. The George Floyd Rebellion has shown us that when the streets are galvanized, they tend to operate on their own sense of time, moving much faster than we are accustomed to after we’ve spent the greater part of our days trapped inside. They figure both the future and the past as malleable objects, a perspective on time that is itself an act of resistance. The oppressors have always figured time this way, using it to rewrite the histories of their own atrocities. In response, the rebellion has reappropriated malleable time by pulling down white supremacist statues and setting fire to the symbols of white supremacist authority. Even while the local, state, and federal government insists upon moderate (in other words, impotent) policy changes, they cannot wipe from our collective memories everything that has occurred since George Floyd’s murder. As witnesses, we are responsible for internalizing the change that the rebellion has rendered, and not allowing progressive impostors to convince us that a police reform bill is the bottom line for “real change.”

As we near the pandemic’s second winter, the calls for a return to normalcy are beginning to look more and more absurd. For a long time, I thought that the pandemic would end with a singular event that would restore the old world and let us get on with our lives. The image that would frequently come to my mind was Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day in Times Square, where a sailor is embracing a dental assistant and devouring her face for all of New York City to see, a snapshot of time captured moments after the news broke of Japan’s surrender to allied forces. That’s what I thought the end of the pandemic would look like. I suppose that says a lot about my hopeless optimism; it certainly says a lot about my knowledge of how viruses work. The more I think about it though, the more I realize how terrible it would be for things to end that way. Even if we were to take V-J Day as an example, the end of WWII only served to usher in a new era of US imperialism. Similarly, I fear that a sudden end to the pandemic would lull us back into a comfortable status-quo. Luckily, or unluckily, things will not end that way. Prolonged isolation can at times make everything feel completely empty, but as we continue to form bonds over the heat of shared struggle, meaning will inevitably follow.