The following article was published on my Substack page, What The Tide Reveals, on 16th September 2026, talking about the idea of repetion. It’s free to subscribe to the page.
In Gertrude Stein’s long novel, The Making of Americans (1925), she uses repetition relentlessly, insisting that only through the process of repeating can life appear real and vital:
“A man in his living has many things inside him, he has in him his important feeling of himself to himself inside him, he has in him the kind of important feeling of himself to himself that makes his kind of man…”
What she believes is that human beings only allow themselves to be known through recurrence. Later French writers like Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec took up the American’s challenge. Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947) narrated a fairly simple incident 99 times, utilising a different literary style in each, while Perec’s La Disposition (1969) was a 300-page novel whose primary distinguishing element was that the letter “e” was absent.
I suspect I am too drawn to this kind of Gallic wordplay — the clear downside of it is that the wordplay eradicates the soul food.
I like how the Jungian writer James Hillman talks about the soul in a much more visceral way than his revered master. Here he is, talking to Wes Nisker:
“Soul likes intimacy; spirit is uplifting. Soul gets hairy; spirit is bald. Spirit sees, even in the dark; soul feels its way, step by step, or needs a dog. Spirit shoots arrows; soul takes them in the chest.”[1]
A few years ago, I got very excited about the idea of writing a novel called 12-Bar, which was going to be structured in the same way as a 12-bar blues song. Let’s say the blues is in A, progressing through D and then E: you’d have a first chapter featuring Andrew, a second chapter starring Diana, then back to Andrew, then down to Edward, then back to Andrew. In between, you’d get minor characters who could conform to acceptable notes in a 12-bar blues in A: E flat (Elsie), G (Garth), C (Catriona). Inevitably, I obsessed over this for quite some time, and finally pinned down the blues guitarist Vince Lee, peppering him with questions: would it, for example, be conceivable in any situation in a 12-bar in A for F to appear, and if so, for how long? He took a long drag on his cigarette, looked at me and said:
“I think you need to chill out, man.”
So that hasn’t seen the light of day yet, but you never know.
I came across the work of the painter Christopher Bramham quite by accident, about twenty years ago. I wandered into an art gallery in Mayfair and there in front of me, huge and imposing, were a series of paintings he had done since moving to rural Cornwall. The paintings were all of the same thing: a pine tree at the back of his house. There were maybe seven or eight of them, all of exactly the same tree, all with the perspective of the tree pretty much identical, but each one entirely different because of both the season in which he painted it and the emotions/thoughts he brought to each sitting. Here’s a couple of them from the printed catalogue:
[1] https://inquiringmind.com/article/1102_8_hillman-soul-of-matter/
They were astonishing. In the catalogue, he writes that the trees are “less of a picture and more of an intimate record…When things were bad I did have this feeling of tying myself to the mast (tree) during the storm. I wanted a simpler, bolder, subject and have clung to it. The pines are sort of portraits, even figures.”
And they made me think: what if I could just write the same story, but keep writing it, again and again. Could that turn out differently, more authentically, than the work by those too-clever Frenchman and their American muse? Would it be possible to give the same depth of feeling and sensation as Bramham gets with all his pine trees to a single story?
Somewhere in all this there is an unlocking key. Repetition per se isn’t always good. If I repeat idiotic behaviour because I haven’t taken the time to work out how dumb it is, then that’s cause for criticism, not a route to truth.
So repetition is only useful as a guide if it is active, if it is expressed deliberately.
In the Kraftwerk song The Robots, Florian Schneider repeats two Russian phrases in a deeply distorted, machine-like voice:
“Ya tvoy sluga
Ya tvoy rabotnik”
which translates as:
“I am your servant
I am your worker”
I could listen to that part of that song on repeat for hours. The juddering, repetitive electronic keyboard rhythm coming in after Schneider rasps “rabotnik”. The music itself reminds me of the noise which petrol pumps make when they’re dispensing petrol, and I cringe from admitting the number of times my wife has caught me listening to them with a look of happy idiocy on my face, hoping the tank doesn’t get filled too soon.
Repetition has wrapped up inside of it some arcane power. Maybe I can access that.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.