repeating unrepeatability
“The scientist seeks laws or generalizations”, Charles Van Doren and Mortimer Adler say. They search for patterns and laws. For rules and principles of sure repeatability. They want “to find out how things happen for the most part or in every case”. It’s the universal over specificity. The broad definite strokes of predictable certainty. The historian, however, casts their concerns in a different way. They are concerned with the particularities of the past. The peculiarities and contingencies of context fixed to the distinctions of a specified time and place. But, a maker is something more porous and in-between. To make anything, whether a poem, a portrait, or a picture, whether a sculpture or a sentence is to live in the narrow vastness betwixt surety and wondering.
A maker creates structures and processes and rituals. The fine tuned memory of muscle invariably finding its way into the well-worn grooves of routine. But we also know that nothing ever really repeats. That every rigidly practiced gesture creates something different than it did before. That the results of all our systems will always resist becoming a rule.
Makers are scientists of procedures and historians of immediacy. Every attempt is a first attempt no matter how experienced we might be. All our recurring efforts are in service of the singular. It is a faith in the evidence of the unknown becoming known as a deeper mystery. The unrepeatable repeating of something that wasn’t there coming into existence, again and again and again ad infinitum, each time in a different way. The only truth we can hold is that every iteration is surprising.
May you trust the stability of your structures and the moments of unexpectedness.
May every repeated act of making reveal the particularity of your becoming.
May the unrepeatable singularities within the monotony carry you fully.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
"May every repeated act of making reveal the particularity of your becoming." Love 🩵 this!