Repeat yet again (Classical Bellyflop Series, vol. 2)
I have a frictious relationship with repetition. On the one hand, I don’t believe that anything ever repeats, not really, at least not in the strict sense of a “repetition of the same.” For example: I I I I I I I I. This is not the repetition of the same I. Each I is different. Each occupies a distinct space and has resulted from a distinct pressing of my computer’s keyboard. In casual conversation, one could easily suggest that I have repeated I. But when I really think about it, I don’t see a single I repeated. I see I and I and I and I, always new.
On the other hand, my body seems to feel the return of habitual action, specifically habitual actions that trouble me. The air seems to thicken each morning at 7am when my three-year-old bolts out of bed to start a new day. My body drags itself to an upright position so as to follow and hesitates because of a deep uneasiness about doing this again, of trying to get energy again, of repeating the struggle of parenting. I could possibly describe this as a “continuation” of parenting, instead of a “repetition,” except that there is something very Groundhog’s Day about it. Same with the non-linear path of potty training: poop, again! In this scenario, it doesn’t feel like new poop. It feels like I’m re-living the totality of the “training” process. At the other end of the continuum, where this repetition feels most invasive, I encounter trauma, which is the epitome of this bodily sensation of repetition: I, in the present moment, feel again a series of affronting and unwanted bodily reactions that I have experienced before. This is related to the idea of nomos that I wrote about last time, the habit of experience that instantiates itself through (ostensibly) repeated action.
I have a frictious relationship with repetition. Does it exist as a natural phenomenon of life, or am I the one who fabricates it? To answer this question, I have, for years, explored the topic of repetition in theatre and performance studies. Each time one performs (any habitual activity) or each time an actor steps onstage to enact a part in a pre-designed performance, what precisely is happening? Do we repeat our actions, or is each time a totally new experience? The most intriguing treatment of these questions, however, appears not in theatre and performance scholarship but in philosophy and psychoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and Jacques Lacan’s re-workings of Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on repeated (neurotic and desirous) behavior are texts I return to, repeatedly (?).
But answers to my questions are elusive. Since repetition is a phenomenon that has attracted so many thinkers, surely the Ancient Greeks had something to say about it, and thus I turn again (?) to the problem, this time in the form of these “bellyflops” into the Classics. What I found was quite surprising, somehow an answer and not. I hope my discoveries help any of you who also experience repetition with a sense of suspicion or dis-ease.
First, it is important to point out that there are many words for “repetition” in Ancient Greek. Of these words, only two have cognates in contemporary English:
Ῥαψῳδέω / Ῥαψῳδός: To recite; e.g., one who recites poetry. English equivalent: Rhapsodize, Rhapsodist.
Ὑμνέω / Ὑμνήσεις: To sing of, to commemorate; lamentation(s). English equivalent: Hymn.
The Rhapsode was an early version of an actor, but he was tasked with reciting Epic tales in performance, such as those of Homer. Plato dedicated much of his treatise Ion to this figure of the Rhapsode in an effort to figure out whether the performer has any real artistic ability. Is he not, rather, motivated by the Muses, which is to say, completely taken over by god-like forces? This is what Plato seems to wonder. Key to my interest is the function of the Rhapsode as the one who re-cites, who once again tells auditors of mythico-historical events crucial to the formation of Greekness. Repetition, in this case, serves a pedagogical function insofar as it leads the listener to a correct (or at least socially validated) interpretation of events. How do we handle the ethical conundrum before us? Listen to this story and remember how it was handled before. Repetition resembles a navigational tool here, insofar as it helps individuals and groups steer between the extremes of hubris and ignorance so as to find the safe path toward Truth.
At the same time, the Rhapsode is treated with suspicion, as is the case in Ion where his autonomy or agency as an artist is called into question. Likewise, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus refers to the Sphynx as a “versifying hound.” That’s not a flattering title. The Sphinx, who plays a crucial role in the maintenance of the health of Thebes, tells riddles. He uses poetic speech to confuse the listener, or at least to obfuscate the truth. As a kind of rhapsodist, the Sphinx misleads. This, in fact, was Plato’s worry; namely, that the awe-inspiring abilities of the performer could infect the emotional balance of the listener and, thus, his powers could be used for ill as well as for good causes. The repeated telling of stories can install all sorts of truths among a people, some harmful, some helpful.
“Hymns” likewise travel in two directions at once. In Church, as a boy, I sang hymns found in the hymnal. These were songs that we repeated every year so as to perform our devotion to God. Of course, the words in the songs also told—i.e., rhapsodized—certain stories that carried specific moral lessons and structures of belief. Still, the songs were sung in good faith, as commemorative praise of presumably good deeds. In classical texts, however, the “hymn” carried a lamentative connotation. In Sophocles’ Electra, for example, we hear this warning: “If you do not leave off these lamentations, they plan to send you to where you shall no longer see the light of the sun, but while still alive in a dungeon, outside this country, you shall bewail your troubles.” The song sung is an expression of sadness, and the repeat singing of the song leads to more sadness. Repetition is not an emollient.
Thus, the first realization about repetition that I made through this bellyflop into the Classics is that repetition brings the actor-agent to a liminal space perched precariously between two distinct realities. On one side, a positive re-citation of instructive past experience. On the other side, a self-replicating sadness enacted through continued lamentation.
This is just the beginning, though. There are so many other words for repetition, words that have no easy English cognate and therefore play no active role in daily speech. A shared quality of these words is the function played by repetition in narration. That is, the flipside of “telling” or “explaining” seems to be “repeating,” insofar as each time I speak I resume or take up again an idea that has been spoken before. This realization resonates in Michel Foucault’s and Michel de Certeau’s discussion of discourse as “that which forms the object of which we speak.” It is possible, maybe necessary, to think of discourse as always preceding the individual speaker. We don’t create discourse when we speak. Discourse creates us through our speech, the associations we validate while talking, the positions we assume while stating our beliefs.
Examples of the narrative function of repetition appears in the following words:
Ἀναλαμβάνω (take up again, resume, in narrative or argument; recollect in mind/memory; repeat in detail)
In Plato’s Phaedo: “I am reviewing this position a number of times on purpose so we don’t miss anything [...]”
In Lucian’s Saturnalia: [Cronos] “I take over the sovereignty again to remind mankind what life was like under me [...]”
Ἐπαναλαμβάνω (take up again, resume, repeat; revise, correct, undertake)
As ἐπαναλαμβάνων, in Plato’s Phaedrus: [Socrates] “I know very well that when listening to Lysias he did not hear once only, but often urged him to repeat; and he gladly obeyed.”
Επανδιπλαζε, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: [Prometheus, speaking to the Chorus about Io] “If any of this is obscure and hard to understand, please ask again and you will learn it more clearly. I have ample leisure—more than I want.”
When I look at all of these words and their usage in various texts, I notice that each one takes place in the act of speech. There is no evidence that the Greeks used the word repetition to describe the embodied actions of re-living (a traumatic event), rehearsing a desire (in the sense that Lacan talks about it), or simply doing something routinely (which would bring us back to nomos and habit.) While I was hoping to find a word that would help me unpack the bodily sensations I find so discomfiting each day, a word that would somehow cross the threshold from the abstract realm of language to the flesh of the body, this array of narrative repetitions actually proved quite eye-opening.
To explain, I turn to another one of the Ancient Greek words for repetition, one that appears in a famous text from antiquity:
An unphilosophical but none the less an effective help to the contemning of death is to tell over the names of those who have clung long and tenaciously to life. How are they better off than those who were cut off before their time?
This reflection comes from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. The word used by the Stoic Emperor and translated as “to tell over” is Ἀναπόλησις. In this context, the repetition is an act of recalling to mind so as to observe one’s daily actions and reflect on their results. There is a poetic equivalent of this word, Ἀναπολέω, a verb that denotes “turning up the ground again.” Aurelius is likely aware of this poetic image since his Stoic practice of reflection is very much a tilling of one’s life’s events. He advocated for turning up the soil of one’s daily interactions so as to challenge the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. In this passage, he challenges the common sentiment that clinging to life expresses some kind of strength. What, he asks, is the proof of that? We don’t even need philosophy to help us answer that question. Simply look at the dirt, so to speak.
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves form the tracks that our lives tend to follow. These tracks do not pre-exist. If, then, we feel like we are repeating something, we may very well be living into the groove of our own stories. Why do we lay these grooves? I suspect we do it because it provides a sense of familiarity in what is otherwise a chaotic world. Unfortunately, this sense of familiarity is entirely fabricated. The most common repetition, the most usual track that we construct for ourselves through the world, is pure artifice. There is no track or course that we can consistently run. There is only the story of the track. But the story doesn’t match the unfolding of one’s life. Some forms of trauma may very come from trying to force the illusion, from choosing to believe that the stories we tell ourselves are necessarily equivalent to how things actually are. Perhaps, then, a way to heal from traumatic experiences is to construct a space in which we can systematically let go of the stories we tell and see what happens. (I think this space should be “school.”)
So what of my frictious relationships to repetition? The lesson of this deep dive into the Ancient Greek language is that I must grow more aware of the performance in which I cast myself. How much of my unhappiness comes from the words I use to describe my bodily sensations? Rather than narrating my upset in familiar ways—Ugh, why is it always like this?—can I sit in the bodily sensation and live it without words? I guess I can test this out every morning at 7am.
Related blog posts: “Pedagogy”: What’s in a word?; Nomos; Independent Thinking Skills!
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