November 5, 2021
Writing is always hard work, and yet I love writing these newsletters. I think of them as reversing the procedure of The Productions of Time, where I attempted a Big Picture, one reader’s sense of the total pattern of the imagination. In contrast, the newsletters are occasional, decentered, serendipitous, improvisational, the imagination blowing where it listeth. They are “news” in the sense that the reader never knows what they will light upon next—mostly because the author does not know himself. I hope they provide a counterbalance, showing that the imagination is not just a “totalizing” will to unify everything into a big Oneness. I do not know whether or not readers find their unpredictability disconcerting. For me, it is exhilarating, and I hope the feeling is contagious.
At the same time, I admit that this new endeavor brings with it a new anxiety, ironically an anxiety about newness. Will I be able to keep coming up with ideas week after week, or will I run out of them and begin to repeat myself? However impatiently I dismiss it, the anxiety perches in the back of my mind like Poe’s raven, croaking its doubting message. But this is not really about me. Let me try to turn my own insecurity into something positive, a pretext for meditating on the role of repetition in both art and life.
I think of creators in several areas of popular culture who live with the pressure of coming up with something new on a regular basis. A comic strip artist has to produce a new strip every single day, every week of the year, with basically no time off, ever. Tom Batiuk has been producing Funky Winkerbean since 1972. To my mind, the strip is as good as it has ever been and has matured and deepened immeasurably since it began as a very funny but one-level humor strip nearly fifty years ago. Yet readers complain sarcastically and self-righteously on discussion boards if a certain day’s strip seems less than perfect to them. I feel like asking: why are you so ungrateful in your consumer mentality? Are you capable of creating anything at all, let alone every day for half a century?
Pop and rock musicians face a yearly-or-so pressure to produce not just a new album but something that doesn’t “merely” repeat their previous successes. The demand is not just for quality but novelty: more of the same, even of high quality, is not enough, and reviewers can be just as highhanded and impatiently dismissive as comics fans. Science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany has spoken of the situation of the commercial writer whose income depends on high productivity, a novel every single year or more. We are talking about more than the discipline of hard work and long hours. The demand is for continuous creativity—the very word “novel” means new—and creativity, being rooted in the unconscious, cannot be willed, at least not past a point. Both commercial and literary writers can be subject to writer’s blocks, and Delany points to the number of science fiction writers who have burned out more or less permanently. Some cease publishing; others lapse into producing potboilers—in other words, into mechanical repetition.
A moment’s thought informs us that we are really talking about something far wider than the psychology of creative types. There is a universal fear that our lives will wear out and lapse into repetition, running on autopilot: we say we are “in a rut,” or “running on a hamster wheel.” If we have a certain kind of education, we may refer to the myth of Sisyphus, condemned in the Greek underworld to rolling a huge stone up a hill. The task is endless, for the stone immediately rolls down again. In his book The Myth of Sisyphus, the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus turned this into a metaphor for the absurdity of human existence. The Biblical counterpart is the Book of Ecclesiastes, with its expression of a world-weary pessimism: the sun goeth up and the sun goeth down, and in the end “all is vanity.” Hemingway applied this to his whole “lost generation” in The Sun Also Rises. Not just work but love can wear out, marriages devolve into mere habit, perhaps leading to divorce not just despite many years together but because of them.
At its greatest intensity, such repetition is demonic, a condition not just of death but of hell. On every level of hell in Dante’s Inferno, the damned are condemned to repeat some action for all eternity: Ugolino gnaws on the skull of Ruggieri, who starved him to death; Paolo and Francesca are blown about in the whirlwind of lust. The endless, futile repetition is perhaps a greater punishment than the actual ordeal. The psychological state is captured in the famous “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy in which Macbeth says that all our yesterdays have only lighted fools the way to dusty death: it is a mental condition of hell on earth.
But, in a move that should be becoming familiar to readers of this newsletter (as it becomes to my students, to whom I say that such perspectivism is the essence of critical thinking), I would like to make a case for the opposite of this argument. For repetition is the basis of life, beginning on the level of the body itself. The heartbeat is repetition; breathing is repetition. If these cease more than momentarily, we die. The heartbeat is a promise, even in the womb, where unborn children first experience the regular rhythm that is the foundation of all security. We rock babies to sleep, or to comfort them, and they are comforted because they remember that promise.
On a higher level, habitual, repetitive behavior is reassuring. We share this with animals: our guinea pigs are creatures of ritual habit, any disruption of which is, I assure you, immediately disturbing. As for being on the hamster wheel of life, hamsters love their wheel! They will run on it endlessly, sometimes so fast that the wheel is a blur of motion—sometimes too fast, and the hamster is shot off the wheel as if from a slingshot, only to go right back and start running again.
Music is perhaps the fundamental art because it begins on a preverbal level as rhythm, a regular pulsation deriving from the rhythms of the body, melody and harmony working their changes above that primary ground. Sex is also rhythm, and akin to music, as the sexual connotations of the phrase “rock and roll” attest. When children acquire language, repetition becomes verbal. Children demand the same bedtime story, told the same way, over and over (and these days also the same movies), a trial to their parents’ patience but often part of a whole repeated bedtime ritual that assures children that it is safe to go to sleep: they will be protected by ritual spells from whatever goes bump in the night.
In demanding the same bedtime tales, children are recapitulating the original mythic mode of literature. In The Guest Hall of Eden, Alvin A. Lee argues that medieval Old English poetry has not been well served by modern criticism, which looks for originality, including the kind of realism that individualizes and differentiates characters and events, and judges texts that lack it as unsophisticated and formulaic. As well to criticize medieval art for lack of three-dimensional perspective and naturalistic portraiture. Instead, such poems are assimilating both events and characters to a greater paradigm that both literary critic Northrop Frye and depth psychologist C. G. Jung call archetypal. When, in Beowulf, King Hrothgar orders the building of his great guest-hall Heorot, the poet associates it with the Creation of the world in Genesis, and yet not out of flattery of the king. Hrothgar is repeating God’s original, or archetypal, act of creating an ideal order out of chaos, just as King Arthur will do later with Camelot and the Round Table.
However, on a fully mythical level, repeating does not mean just mimicking: it means “happens all over again.” Not a similar event, but somehow the same event, transcending time and space and difference. The ironic skepticism that is the temper of our time regards such a notion with suspicion, as some kind of mystical irrationalism or else an attempt to reduce the multiplicity of the world into a monotonous sameness—one size fits all. But it is a perfectly common mythical move. When Australian indigenous people re-enact their creation myth, in the form of a quest journey, they actually become their divine ancestors, who are not only figures in the landscape of the desert journey but who somehow are that landscape, the ground of being in a startlingly literal way. And mythical repetitions do ground people, at least in a functioning mythology. To repeat the archetypal stories and characters is to be bound in a sense of common identity, a sense of permanence despite all change, all loss in time. I suggested in a previous newsletter that the crisis of modernity derives from the fact that masses of people in our time have lost that grounding and are swept like leaves in the wind by the first authoritarian collectivizing movement that blows their way.
But we do not live fully in eternity, like the gods. In time, life’s vitality must be periodically renewed, the battery recharged, so to speak, so that repetition becomes cyclical, and is reflected in the various cycles of renewal, wheels within wheels, that make up our existence. This kind of repetition is deeply tied to the natural cycle. There is a type of deity that is cyclically rather than changelessly immortal: called by scholars the dying god figure, it is originally an embodiment of the cycle of vegetation, hence of the food supply on which survival depends. Plants die but are reborn seasonally: as dying god religions become more sophisticated, their center of gravity moves from hope concerning the renewal of food and drink to the hope that we too may be planted like seeds in the earth only to be reborn. With the so-called higher civilizations (that question-begging term), this may become a renewal of the kingship, with the king assuming the dying-and-reviving role: there are vestiges of this in the figure of the Fisher King in the Grail stories. It may become a renewal of the whole society: Mircea Eliade, historian of religion and mythology, used as his favorite example the Babylonian New Year ceremony, in which the Creation myth was recited, because the renewal of the year is a renewal of time itself.
Secularization in later societies brings this idea of cyclical repetition and renewal down to a humbler level. As we see in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the extended holiday period reflected in the title, including Christmas and New Year’s, the “twelve days of Christmas,” was traditionally marked by a loosening of social order, in which a certain amount of reveling and rowdiness was tolerated. Mythically, the old order descends at the end of a cycle into the chaos out of which it arose, from which a new order will arise, beginning a new cycle. Humanly, however, all too humanly, it means an amount of chaotic excess, drunken partying and, shall we say, relaxed behavior, of which we hope no one takes pictures and posts them online to be seen by our employers. We make New Year’s resolutions vowing a renewal of our lives, despite knowing that they are a repetition of the vows we made last year. The New Year’s baby toddles in as the geriatric old year hobbles out, and the cycle has repeated itself one more time. For all that, cyclical repetition and renewal are not necessarily always the parody they so often become. When folk singer Pete Seeger took the words of the Book of Ecclesiastes and made them into a famous folk (and folk rock) song, he was not merely repeating. He was transvaluing the skepticism of the original into a remarkable statement of the acceptance of repetition as the basis of the good life. There is a season—turn, turn, turn—and a time to every purpose under heaven.
Sometimes, however, there is a demand for something more than repetition of life’s cycle, however renewed. Sometimes there is a need for something genuinely new under the sun. I think there will always be a tension in human life between acceptance of the human condition of life in cyclical time and the need to break out of the closed circle, the temenos or magic closed circle that provides safety and a clearly defined identity and to light out for the territories, as Huck Finn said. One manifestation of the latter, as that allusion implies, is the restless urge to wander, to seek the world beyond the hill, as I spoke of in the last newsletter. (Uh oh—am I beginning to repeat myself?)
The word “revolution” can mean a turning of the wheel. Or it can mean an upset, a refusal to play the game of the Wheel of Fortune, because that is to play by the house rules, and the house rules are always rigged. The revolutionary iconoclasm of much modern art since the late 19th century, the rejection of the ideal of a repetition of traditional forms and the insistence on a radical break with the past, expands into a pervasive feeling that Western civilization itself is worn out. It cannot be renewed or rejuvenated or improved but can only be repudiated, an attitude that intellectual historian Jacques Barzun, in The Use and Abuse of Art, calls abolitionism. And now for something completely different, as Monty Python said. This form-breaking impulse accounts for much of the hostility to Frye’s and Jung’s notion of archetypes.
Not all contemporary artistic expression is so intransigently radical, but even more tempered versions insist that traditional artistic forms, whether in literature, music, or the visual arts, be subject to constant innovation and self-critical improvement—and thus we are back to the rejection of repetition, to the demand that works of art should be unique, like snowflakes, no two alike. “Innovation” is of course a buzz word in the capitalist business world, where the typical sales pitch includes glowing descriptions of upgrades, new options, ceaseless metamorphoses of fashion. Capitalist “innovation” and the ideal of scientific “progress” have conditioned the public to expect a ceaseless succession of the “new and improved.” Anything but repeats and reruns. Creativity becomes a buzz word, and is in danger of being debased into an obsessive demand for constant novelty.
The upshot is that in art, in politics and social values, in love, we are faced at every moment with an agonizing decision. When is a mode of art, love, or life worn out, become mere dead repetition? When does it call for a repetition that is a renewal, a recreation? And when should we break with the old in favor of a new paradigm, of difference? No way out: the only choice we have is choosing, and we must live with the consequences. Yet although we have free will and moral responsibility, the human will reaches a limit and can go no further. Beyond that point, we cannot change, cannot act, cannot create by will alone, but must wait for the intervention of a mysterious power or energy beyond our control, beyond our knowledge—if only to give us the wisdom of knowing what to choose. In art, that mysterious power may be called inspiration, the Muse, the imagination. In religion, the traditional name for it is grace. Out of the interplay of will and grace, our life unfolds. We work hard, we love hard, to the limit of our powers, and then we hope and pray.