Repetition
Particularly what it implies, and not so much what it is, as illustrated by our fictional friend F.
The Loss of Meaning Through Repetition
F was only a few years old when he learned some words. F was only a few years older when he learned some magic tricks could be devised from some of those words. He would start by choosing a word, any word, whichever one he felt like plucking out of the clear blue air: Air. Fine, he'd start with Air. First-grader F would sound the word out: Air, Air, Air. He would feel the sharpness of the peak of the A, it pokes, "Eh". He would notice the trailing-offness of the R, the way it closes the world up in a sort of endless envelope. Air. Air. And, though he'd never read any Gertrude Stein, he would start speaking the word over and over and over, repeating it several times with his mouth. Air, Air. The more he spoke it, the more the word seemed to get "handled", and the more it got handled, the more its corners wore down and its facets blended. Soon, F realized that Air turned into something else, still airy but something else entirely: the more he said the word the less he could see the word, and from repetition he found the loss of meaning.
Meaning Gained via Repetition
Meaning Gained via Repetition
A bit older than before, our F is now learning his body. He has walked, and been walking, and has noticed that his knees get less and less scraped the more and more he walks. Unlike the words, if his body repeats something the meaning only gets more and more solidified. F rides a bicycle, and notes the same principle taking place: practice does indeed make perfect. Why, though, does it not unfocus the same way language does when repeated? For F, he concludes that it must just be another mystery of the body and another disconnect between it and the mind. When thinking repeatedly on the same subject the more instances recalled, the fuzzier, gauzier, the thought seems to become --- all until it is as stretched and as see through as air. The body, on the other hand, gets harder and harder from repetition, and the more a movement is performed, the better it gets and the more graceful it appears. F, circling his knees above the pedals of his bicycle, rotating in perfectly timed intervals with his own involuntary breathing, starts to notice that the 100th time he performs a climb he is less winded and he guesses that on the 1000th he will even be smiling the entire way up the steep grade. His body, in effect, gets "used to it". Strange, F ponders, how the mind gets less and less "used to it" when he repeats himself in his head. He wonders, too, how his friend with a stutter handles things, constantly rewinding and playing forth the same word or sound as though it's caught in some loop that it can't escape. He's seen the friend wince on at least one occasion, and F feels his assertion is justified: body repetition is not the same as mental or linguistic repetition.
And When the Two Criss-Cross
We know F is too naive, we know he sees this all too black/white, we know this and we appreciate it. We, in the world, know that there are physical instances that simply cannot ever be repeated, that even in his example of Cycling there are many other factors to take into consideration and not just the body. Is he riding in the rain? Between two mountains that happen to be on fire, with bad soot draping the air? At an altitude higher than usual? On a Tuesday after a horrid night's sleep, or on a Sunday morning after a splendid breakfast of buttered toast and eggs? Repetition hinges on every single factor, and it can't be true unless each and every individual factor is taken into consideration --- and even then, it still is only sham-repetition simply because he can't travel back in time and perform the exact motions at the exact moments. Much speculation has gone on about the assassination of John F. Kennedy; people argue now as they did then, decades ago. One shooter, one bullet, six wounds - or - Two shooters, several bullets, etc. The only scientific way to settle this is to re-create it. Re-creation, the bastard brother of Repetition. They find a trained marksman, they find the exact same ammunition rounds, they make anatomically correct wax dummies that they position exactly as they had been seated in the car, they make sure the distance from gun-barrel to body is at the same angle as it was estimated to be at the time of the shooting --- all these factors are woven together to create an acceptable "re-creation" of the event. We are smarter than that, and smarter than F; we are positive that this is simply self-indulgent, and impossible to repeat. Anything physical is impossible to repeat! No matter how perfect, how controlled, the scientists and various experts can get there will never be a way to bring back the people nor the time, and its effete snobbery to think that it can be duplicated to the exact detail: Kennedy and Oswald are both dead, and their verbal stamp of approval can never be given to the experiments. (Parenthetical aside: The experiment did end up proving in some small regard that there could have been one shooter with one bullet, and the faked injuries matched identically to the real ones. I take issue with that "identically", but I care nothing for the debate and know little of scientific process: quite over my head and pointless.)
And When the Two Criss-Cross
We know F is too naive, we know he sees this all too black/white, we know this and we appreciate it. We, in the world, know that there are physical instances that simply cannot ever be repeated, that even in his example of Cycling there are many other factors to take into consideration and not just the body. Is he riding in the rain? Between two mountains that happen to be on fire, with bad soot draping the air? At an altitude higher than usual? On a Tuesday after a horrid night's sleep, or on a Sunday morning after a splendid breakfast of buttered toast and eggs? Repetition hinges on every single factor, and it can't be true unless each and every individual factor is taken into consideration --- and even then, it still is only sham-repetition simply because he can't travel back in time and perform the exact motions at the exact moments. Much speculation has gone on about the assassination of John F. Kennedy; people argue now as they did then, decades ago. One shooter, one bullet, six wounds - or - Two shooters, several bullets, etc. The only scientific way to settle this is to re-create it. Re-creation, the bastard brother of Repetition. They find a trained marksman, they find the exact same ammunition rounds, they make anatomically correct wax dummies that they position exactly as they had been seated in the car, they make sure the distance from gun-barrel to body is at the same angle as it was estimated to be at the time of the shooting --- all these factors are woven together to create an acceptable "re-creation" of the event. We are smarter than that, and smarter than F; we are positive that this is simply self-indulgent, and impossible to repeat. Anything physical is impossible to repeat! No matter how perfect, how controlled, the scientists and various experts can get there will never be a way to bring back the people nor the time, and its effete snobbery to think that it can be duplicated to the exact detail: Kennedy and Oswald are both dead, and their verbal stamp of approval can never be given to the experiments. (Parenthetical aside: The experiment did end up proving in some small regard that there could have been one shooter with one bullet, and the faked injuries matched identically to the real ones. I take issue with that "identically", but I care nothing for the debate and know little of scientific process: quite over my head and pointless.)
The physical act cannot ever be repeated perfectly.
Repetition and its Diminishing Effects
Suppose F joins the seminary instead of the university. Suppose he is a sensitive student and even has a favorite priest for a professor. Suppose, even, that there is a 50 year gap in the ages of these two men. F appreciates the priest's slowness, and from this slowness F begins to appreciate the patience created in that lack of speed. The more F is in the company of the priest, the more patient he begins to feel. This proximity, in some small way, promotes a tiny repetition of its own --- and from familiarity grow the flowers of happiness. We can clearly see the point in this: repetition as a wonderful builder of relationships, the more repeated the deeper they grow. F remains ambivalent, but is happy to notice some of the effects of this without ever really grasping at the whyness of it. Fine for him! But, what he does happen to notice after his many encounters with the priest is that their rosaries look different from one another. In his hand, F's rosary resembles a pile of individual rubies all with sharp facets and perfect shape; quite a contrast from the old priest's which looks more like a string of pebbles. A thought flashes across F's unfettered mind: the priest has touched his beads for 50 years longer than F has, and by handling them, praying over them, passing them through his fingers and palms for so many years he has worn them down and rubbed them smooth. F sees this stark repetition! He sees it clearly in his own hand and in the hand of his teacher and priest: the act of loving something physically will always diminish the thing loved. F recalls a night spent on a couch, reading a story about a boy kissing a girl for an hour or longer and the way his lips began to get raw. This nonphysical pleasure coupled with this physical painfulness: He can't help but frown, our poor F.
Suppose F joins the seminary instead of the university. Suppose he is a sensitive student and even has a favorite priest for a professor. Suppose, even, that there is a 50 year gap in the ages of these two men. F appreciates the priest's slowness, and from this slowness F begins to appreciate the patience created in that lack of speed. The more F is in the company of the priest, the more patient he begins to feel. This proximity, in some small way, promotes a tiny repetition of its own --- and from familiarity grow the flowers of happiness. We can clearly see the point in this: repetition as a wonderful builder of relationships, the more repeated the deeper they grow. F remains ambivalent, but is happy to notice some of the effects of this without ever really grasping at the whyness of it. Fine for him! But, what he does happen to notice after his many encounters with the priest is that their rosaries look different from one another. In his hand, F's rosary resembles a pile of individual rubies all with sharp facets and perfect shape; quite a contrast from the old priest's which looks more like a string of pebbles. A thought flashes across F's unfettered mind: the priest has touched his beads for 50 years longer than F has, and by handling them, praying over them, passing them through his fingers and palms for so many years he has worn them down and rubbed them smooth. F sees this stark repetition! He sees it clearly in his own hand and in the hand of his teacher and priest: the act of loving something physically will always diminish the thing loved. F recalls a night spent on a couch, reading a story about a boy kissing a girl for an hour or longer and the way his lips began to get raw. This nonphysical pleasure coupled with this physical painfulness: He can't help but frown, our poor F.
And, Individuation Through Pattern
Not knowing much art, F has only a few touchstones to ground himself in that world and of them he can only cite Warhol when he needs to. That's fine, he'll do. F recalls Warhol, pre-film: the Brillo Boxes and the Soup Cans, and the way in which they formed patterns in their repetition. Their squares were identical in rows along the floor of some gallery, just a bunch of boxes the same as they are in the supermarket. F is naive enough to be satiated with that excuse as the artist's raison d'etre, but we know the rest: its only when all of the boxes are meticulously lined up does one start to notice that this one is off kilter and that one has a slight drip drooping from the bottom tip of the second L. F can't see this as it is, but he "feels" it: the sense of completion he gets from staring at a photograph of the installation, with all the rows and stacks of boxes one after the next, and the dizziness he feels when he marries the image with the afterthought of the image. Similar to folding a piece of graph paper in half, his mind fixes the grid of boxes from the photo over top of the grid of the impression he gets from seeing them --- it is only then that he starts to see gaps in the perfection of the pattern. In his own life he gets a better sense of this phenomena: its only when he has a snapshot that appears to mimic a sameness that he can detect tiny fissures and breaks in the pattern. A scatter of leaves, or leafs as he calls them for fear of joining two dissimilar ones together by name: those two leafs are very different from that pile of leaves. He may not have the ability to see plurality, but at least that comes at the cost of singularity. It seems safe to assume that if our F can only see singular things, he bestows upon them the sense of wonderment that comes with being a special, non-repeatable thing --- and that isn't too bad.
The Fallacy of Permanence in Regards to Repetition
Everyday for any stretch of years, F has walked along the sidewalk and noticed one of those leafs. It might be yellowed, curling on its edges with the veins twisting marvelously between its individual cells forming a nonstatic pattern. Each morning his eyes meet the leaf on his going, and each evening his eyes meet the leaf on his coming. Daily, weekly, yearly, it goes on like this for a long time. The same leaf, too, each time --- as implausible as that sounds, it is needed for the sake of the point. How long will it take him to count on that leaf being there? How many instances must he pass it before his mind stops viewing it as a surprise and starts expecting permanence? F is keen enough to know that leafs fall all the time, but still can't seem to see that past the fact that his leaf was there yesterday and that alone implies that it will be there tomorrow. Just the same as the fact that he has arms and legs, can close his eyes and still know that he will have them when he opens his eyes. Even with his capacity for thought and feeling, he can't rectify the logic of this, and that's just fine. So for F, his leaf eventually, through repetitive acknowledgement of its presense, takes on a miraculous sheen of Foreverness. It is, for him, a slice of permanence on his walk: it was there yesterday and it will be there tomorrow, and the more yesterdays there were, the longer tomorrow starts to become. This is the fallacy of permanence, and it will provide F with one of the deepest heartbreaks he will ever know when he gets slapped across the cheek with those frigid fingers of reality. He will cry, endlessly cry, from an eternal spring of tears, the very day he passes his tree and fails to see his leaf. He will cry a month after that, too, when he passes the spot marked by an absense. He will cry a year later, perhaps, when he remembers the leaf and how long it had been there for him to smile at. He will even cry, our dear poor sad little F, when all of those collected passings start to separate into individual ones and the repeatedness of it all slips away with time. Eventually, thank god, he will smile as this forrest of memory becomes countless individual little trees to remember on their own, as they were. Yes, he will smile when he remembers that perhaps on a fine Tuesday morning he happened to see that leaf at the very instant a nice breeze passed him by leaving him with a nice chill to accompany the bright greeness that the leaf leaves on his eyes. He might even smile when he remembers the way the leaf felt to his skin on the one evening he deigned to touch it, the way he had to stoop down to it gently to meet it at its level, and how he enjoyed lowering himself to it in a bit of submission. He will always remember the feel of it against his palm and fingertips and even though it wont be there tomorrow, he learns that happiness is not in the promise of a tomorrow but the fact that there even was a yesterday to inhabit.
The Fallacy of Permanence in Regards to Repetition
Everyday for any stretch of years, F has walked along the sidewalk and noticed one of those leafs. It might be yellowed, curling on its edges with the veins twisting marvelously between its individual cells forming a nonstatic pattern. Each morning his eyes meet the leaf on his going, and each evening his eyes meet the leaf on his coming. Daily, weekly, yearly, it goes on like this for a long time. The same leaf, too, each time --- as implausible as that sounds, it is needed for the sake of the point. How long will it take him to count on that leaf being there? How many instances must he pass it before his mind stops viewing it as a surprise and starts expecting permanence? F is keen enough to know that leafs fall all the time, but still can't seem to see that past the fact that his leaf was there yesterday and that alone implies that it will be there tomorrow. Just the same as the fact that he has arms and legs, can close his eyes and still know that he will have them when he opens his eyes. Even with his capacity for thought and feeling, he can't rectify the logic of this, and that's just fine. So for F, his leaf eventually, through repetitive acknowledgement of its presense, takes on a miraculous sheen of Foreverness. It is, for him, a slice of permanence on his walk: it was there yesterday and it will be there tomorrow, and the more yesterdays there were, the longer tomorrow starts to become. This is the fallacy of permanence, and it will provide F with one of the deepest heartbreaks he will ever know when he gets slapped across the cheek with those frigid fingers of reality. He will cry, endlessly cry, from an eternal spring of tears, the very day he passes his tree and fails to see his leaf. He will cry a month after that, too, when he passes the spot marked by an absense. He will cry a year later, perhaps, when he remembers the leaf and how long it had been there for him to smile at. He will even cry, our dear poor sad little F, when all of those collected passings start to separate into individual ones and the repeatedness of it all slips away with time. Eventually, thank god, he will smile as this forrest of memory becomes countless individual little trees to remember on their own, as they were. Yes, he will smile when he remembers that perhaps on a fine Tuesday morning he happened to see that leaf at the very instant a nice breeze passed him by leaving him with a nice chill to accompany the bright greeness that the leaf leaves on his eyes. He might even smile when he remembers the way the leaf felt to his skin on the one evening he deigned to touch it, the way he had to stoop down to it gently to meet it at its level, and how he enjoyed lowering himself to it in a bit of submission. He will always remember the feel of it against his palm and fingertips and even though it wont be there tomorrow, he learns that happiness is not in the promise of a tomorrow but the fact that there even was a yesterday to inhabit.
