A fellow blogger brought this up. Why do we repeat ourselves so much? Their concern was with repetitive thoughts. Why do we spend so much of our lives thinking the same thing over and over again? My answer was that I didn't know but that it wasn't just thoughts. We repeat ourselves in time - we often have the same breakfast every day, for example. We also repeat ourselves in space - for example, we take care to arrange our living spaces to be broadly the same as everyone else's. These repetitions are very important to us.
I once suggested carpeting our living room with AstroTurf, painting landscape murals on the walls and painting the ceiling blue. We could furnish the room with garden furniture, I suggested. Nobody I suggested it to liked the idea - it was, quite simply, 'not done'.
It's the same in the arts. Did Bach write one Prelude and Fugue? No. He wrote hundreds of them. Did Agatha Christie write one whodunnit then follow it up with a Mills and Boone? No. Did Picasso paint one blue picture and move on? No. He painted them by the barrowload. Of course, once you've done something once you might want to do it again to improve and develop whatever it is you've done but nevertheless there comes a point when it's time to move on.
In the arts, it's even often said that 'form is repetition'. The composer John Cage had the right idea, using chance and indeterminacy to sidestep repetition. However, not content with doing it once, he did it over and over again.
To return to interior design. I quite like the idea of sleeping in a large tent pitched in another AstroTurfed room lined bookshelves (for when I feel like reading in bed). A hi-fi in the room could play recordings of ambient sounds from outside: birdsong, bleating sheep and so on. I could perhaps choose my location from a selection of ambient recordings. Before you ask, I could turn the spare bedroom into a 'dressing room' where we could keep our clothes.
I'll never get round to it. Like everyone else I'm too busy leading a repetitive life. We even invent timetables to make sure that we do. In fact, I wonder if we're capable of doing otherwise? If not, are we as free as we think we are?
What sort of things would you do if you decided to reduce repetition to a minimum?
While you're thinking about that, it's ten to eleven here. Time to put the kettle on...
I have no desire whatsoever to leave my very repetitive life style. It has of course changed over theyears. Work meant a strict routine sticking to a timetable, bring up a child from birth to adulthood similarly relied on a routine - in fact the child itself demanded it with (in my days) food every four hours. Everything has a routine - cows need to be milked twice a day - or three times a day - the farmer might set the routine but then the animals stick to it. The whole world runs on a routine - the rising of the sun, the seasons,everything. I could go on but that would be repeating myself. Sufficient to say we need routine - it makes us feel safe. As for routine in the arts - we can't get into the mind of Picasso to discuss his Blue Period but I wonder what he would have to say to you.
ReplyDeleteDespite this post, I have to admit that I too am a creature of habit. It's interesting to think outside the box, though.
DeleteI would need to divorce in order to avoid repetition! My dear husband does not cope well without his routines.
ReplyDeleteI'm a creature of routine, too. I think that's what led me to think about this!
DeleteHow interesting. I've never thought of it as repetitive and always called it routinized. I'm seriously routinized. My siblings know when and when not to call me. They know what time we're having breakfast lunch and dinner. They know what time we turn out the lights. A change in those repetitions could alter the whole universe. We're very careful about that. LOL! Interesting idea, though. I love the astro turf and the landscape murals painted walls.
ReplyDeleteThwnks for that. I do think we all tend to conform to some perceived standard when it comes to what we do with the spaces in our homes. It's something we might benefit from being a bit more experimental about.
DeleteSomething I repeat to myself that makes repetition ever fascinating:
ReplyDelete"Everything under the sun is new."
I've never seen the entire movie, only that dance sequence here and there on blogs. Each repetition in that dance has a heartening freshness. Now I want to see the entire movie. Thank you!
It is what I call my comfort zone!
ReplyDelete(Same here but don't tell anybody!)
DeleteWatching the trailer for the movie and reading the plot on Wikipedia, I sense that Bob Dylan was and still is influenced by Godard. I'm thinking of his recent song "Key West (Philosopher Pirate)" and the contrasting videos he was involved with for the song "Beyond here "Lies Nothin' -- one horrifying and the other heartening -- repetition through entirely different lenses. The video for "Duquesne Whistle" is another example. Innocence and experience. That's for sure. My life has been too much like those plots for me to find them entertaining, but they do cause me to reflect on my experiences of joy and sorrow and learn from them.
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting! I've never thought about Dylan being interested in Godard.
DeleteI'm watching Godard's Alphaville in installments at the moment. I'd forgotten how much I liked watching his films. Used to get together with mates for film nights before the pandemic.
We are all, to some extent, creatures of habit. There is a comfort and safety in our regular routines. Even animals follow habits and routines. I know my cats do and other animals I have known did so as well. Because of this we are more able to enjoy a sense of excitement and a fresh new interest in our lives when we do change things. It is part of what makes a trip somewhere special. Of course some changes can be bad ones but we generally make it back to our old or new routines. But I don't think having routines or habits means we have to be like everyone else. We can still march to our own drummer and carpet our living room with AstroTurf, paint landscape murals on the walls and paint the ceiling blue!
ReplyDeleteYes.
DeleteAs for trips, I'm a right one for going on the same trips over and over because I like them!
Reduce repetition? In the words of Margaret Thatcher, no, no, no.
ReplyDeleteRun that past me again...
Delete(A psychologist colleague of mine years ago recommended that expression as a great substitute for 'pardon'. She said it really makes people think you're carefully considering what they said instead of dozing off!)
We are slaves to routine. Some of us are just outright obsessive compulsive. I blame mine on being a teacher for 37 years and having to obey the bell. Interesting question and post.
ReplyDeleteThank you. What fascinates me, after years of teaching, is how you develop a clock in your head! You just know instinctively that such-and-such a length of time is up!
DeleteI once heard an Australian biographer speaking about one of the problems of writing biographies. All life is repetition, he said. One of the problems was finding an interesting life amongst all the repetition...
ReplyDeleteAnd there we go, repetition. Day after day. After week, after month, after year.
No biography for me...
Alphie
That's interesting. It reminded me of reading Nausea by Sartre. His narrator is trying to write biography. His problem was that lives were not 'stories' and he couldn't work out what his subject's life was actually like from the anecdotes that had come down about him. I guess the repetition factor just adds a further level of difficulty.
DeleteI've always thought of the repetitious things as the 'bones' of our life. There are things that must be done. THere is no getting around it. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. We can dress our bones up however we like. We can wear makeup, choose how we wear our hair. But we need that framework.
ReplyDeleteWe need a certain amount of repetition to ground ourselves, but too much leads to boredom and fractures our sense of time (I think this is happening to a lot of people under lockdown).
ReplyDelete