my variations

repetition compulsion and variation

Hello friends—

Over the weekend, I finished reading the Rougon-Macquart, the twenty-novel cycle by Émile Zola. It has been a very transformative reading experience, actually, and I don’t know that I will ever be the same. But I will have more to say about it elsewhere and later.

I am going to write a piece about the novels, so I went to my enormous shelf of notebooks to find an extra-large softcover Moleskine. I know that I have many of them on the shelf, but I am not sure which ones contain what writing, if any. I sort my notebooks by size in the hopes that one day I will suddenly become a person who writes by hand and will slowly fill them, necessitating a more elegant and sensible organizational scheme. Such a time has not yet materialized, yet we live in hope. Anyway, I found a notebook and pulled it down and opened it to be confronted with one of my old MFA notebooks. This happens once or twice a year, I accidentally stumble upon these old versions of myself. In fact, the reason I finally broke down and put all my notebooks on their own bookcase was to seal them up in one place so I wouldn’t accidentally come across them while looking for a roll of film or a misplaced lens. If they lived on a set of shelves, then they couldn’t be in the drawer of my coffee table or lurking about in my plastic storage towers. But here we were, and there I was, from 2017, staring up at me.

It is a particular kind of self-harm, my looking at those notebooks. Before, I’d look at them and think, haha, look what I didn’t know how to do yet. It was the same attitude I had as a child when I‘d accidentally stumble upon toys that I had outgrown and I’d feel a rush of glee, thinking, wow, I was such a baby last year! I had a plastic workbench! Hahaha! Now I have action figures! The same delight a slightly older baby feels upon seeing a slightly younger baby and realizing for the first time in their lives that time is a thing they are moving through. Then there was a period of time, starting about two years after I graduated, when I’d go looking in those notebooks for a certain kind of clarity that I felt I was missing at the time. In 2021, I was in such a despair about a loss of focus and drive in my work, and so I wanted to go back to the me who had written so intensely and so furiously to change his life, to see it dashed upon those pages.

But now, four years or so after graduating, and now that I am a teacher of creative writing myself, looking at those notebooks just makes me sad. Because I can see how intensely unhappy I was. How sad and frustrated and hurt and needing guidance, needing attention, needing care, needing to feel that I mattered to someone or anyone, that my work was coming along or not coming along. When I look at those notebooks and the towering dark cliffs of graphite and ink that I doodled into the margins, I am struck by the fact that this is the work of an unruly and anxious consciousness, a storm building with no outlet. The notes I took of other people’s workshops contain the usual mix of things: quotations from the teacher, from my classmates, observations and questions, my own formulations of storytelling. I can see a sensibility coming together across those notebooks, a slow realization of what matters to me in fiction and what doesn’t. A stance, a view, is cohering in those pages. Slowly, fitfully, sometimes angrily, but it is there, a mind sharpening itself. But when I look at the pages pertaining to the days when I was workshopped myself, it’s just sad. Smudged graphite, smeared ink. Truly unwell, surreal drawings and doodles. Blocks that shimmer and dance across the page. But what I am most struck by is how intensely the margins push in and narrow, so that the words themselves are forced down a jagged inlay, like falling through a crack in the earth.

I recognize in the doodles the same visual process from when I was very little. I mean that when I was little, I built images up out of squares. I’d make a castle out of nestled squares. Or I’d draw people made from squares. In middle school, I started just layering squares and rectangles and circles upon each other, for no reason at all except to quiet my mind. I don’t even know that this was a conscious thing, you know. I say to quiet my mind, but that implies a level of agency that I do not know that I felt when I was doing it. I just remember being twelve, thirteen, sitting in class, feeling furious about anything and everything, and just making the shapes again and again. I did it at home and at school. I did it on the corners of newspapers and notebooks and construction paper. I made them in sand and I carved them on asphalt in the summer with rocks. I sometimes drew them on the rocks themselves with a pencil or with my mother’s eyeliner. I traced them on the fogged glass in winter and I drew them with the point of my fingernail into the cheap leather on the school bus seats. Tracing the lines again and again until it made something like peace in me. But again, I wasn’t doing it to make that peace. It’s more, I was just venting an urge and the peace was just the side effect of having vented it. That’s the best way I can explain the almost accidental, non-causal relation between feeling better and having done the doodles. The whole story of my life might be told in these intensely repetitive structures. In some way, I imagine that they are my first and true means of expression.

A few months ago, on Instagram, I came across the artwork of Dana Piazza, who works in these gorgeous sweeping lines against stark white backgrounds. His forms unfold like billowing smoke or ink dropped into water. They spread and taper in all dimensions, giving the impression of shadow and depth, and out of this, one gets the impression of motion or stillness. His drawings remind me of topographic and cartographic illustrations, where lines show gradations in elevation or the pitch and turn in the underlying rock, boundaries between sea and land.

Lines 177 and Lines 58, Dana Piazza

There is something extremely tranquil and satisfying about the surface of his drawings, yes, and there is the beauty of their stringency, the fact of a single color used in repetition across a single background, and yet, the variations in pressure or layers create a strobing effect across the forms themselves, something that to my mind reads as the unruly undercurrents of an inner life. There is such a wonderful conflict between the exterior calm and the interior riot in his forms, all of which is bound in exquisite, almost unbearable tension by the self-same interpolation of the lines that fall in parallels. I have watched video of Piazza working. The way he leans over the paper and draws the marker across it in an even stroke. I am amazed at the steadiness of his hand as it moves. Or maybe it is the marker that moves and the hand that follows.

Lines 61, Dana Piazza

Sometimes the lines blur together to make surface that is almost creamy and smooth. Other times, Piazza opts for thicker strokes, so that the form is striated, spangled, so that you might be able to pick out one single line amid the whole. I love the way the intensity of the color shifts across his forms, this way and that, softer here, darker there, like a dance of light.

I suppose none of this surprises me in the end. I am very much drawn to repetitive structures and forms. I am soothed by them, yes, but I believe that something can and does emerge from the steady and meticulous recapitulation of former conditions. I am a serial repeater. I replay games. I rewatch movies. I reread books. I listen to the same music again and again, not necessarily for any other reason than it gives me pleasure and it does make me calm. I can take the same walk one million times and never get bored of it. Sometimes, when I think about my childhood, I realize that it was very much that. Me walking the same stretch road between the two huge forests that ran on either side, up and down, talking to myself, making up little games, coming back to them day after day. I never got bored of it. It never occurs to me to be bored of repetition because to me, there is no place closer to the divine than in the repeated utterance, the paper folded back again and again, the same cup for the same coffee made in exactly the same way. It’s novelty that exhausts me. I suppose I also don’t have the arrogance to assume that I can exhaust something totally in just one go. Who am I to say that I’ve gotten everything out of it the first time around.

Freud of course tells us a great deal about repetition compulsion. Repetition functions sometimes as an alternative to remembering, in which experiences are re-enacted without our conscious awareness of them, because we cannot seize upon the content of the experience directly. When the force of direct confrontation, that is remembering, would shear us, we instead repeat in ways big and small, the little dramas of our pasts and our constituent selves playing out in shadow puppets upon the cave wall or with whatever material is at hand. In this way, the experience can be safely expressed at some distance from the core displeasure that caused us to be unable to move on from it in the first place. In fiction, this often takes the form of a story that in its narrative mode is evasive or withholding because the character has experienced some key trauma or incident that they cannot put into language. And so the form of the story takes on the repressed drama. It avoids and goes mute just as the character avoids and goes mute. The drama of the soul unfolds at the level of the very structure of the story or the novel. This also sometimes takes the form of a story that is endlessly recursive due to flashback or exposition. The story cannot move beyond those events in the past into a horizon of the future because the character cannot move beyond those events, and so the story again becomes constrained by the repetition compulsion, playing out on a loop those events in the past which have caused the story to stall. You see it also in television, perhaps it most common there. It was the core structure of Succession, for example. The siblings were unable to move beyond their father because to move beyond would have meant for him to die, a result of the keenest unpleasure, and so the story loops endlessly, around and around, reconstituting the same relationships and conflicts, changing the surface details, yes, but in the end, always re-establishing the status quo.

Succession was not static though it appeared so. There was a great deal of movement within that program, yes, people went places and did things, though it can be said that it was often the same places and often the same things. What changed was the delightfully absurd patter of the dialogue. The actual structures of life—the material life—were largely unchanged, but not unmoving. Yet because of this deeply rooted repetition compulsion, the show seemed to stand still even when it moved at its greatest speed. It simply could not kill the father, who should have died in the first season, let’s be real. And in the end, the death of the father is what ultimately forced the show to lurch forward, and look what happened, it ended.

This also pertains not to The Gilded Age, but to the work of Julian Fellowes writ large. Indeed, his entire oeuvre might be understood to be the repetition compulsion within the mind of a single man. Why else would he stage again and again the same kinds of dramas with the same kinds of people in the same milieu. What changes are the dresses and the accents. But the drama of the inner life remains the same, which means that he builds novelty on the outside without letting it ever truly penetrate the interior life. He traffics in types, not people, though he has been blessed with many great actors who find space and room to turn out wonderful performances. But on the whole, the story, my god, the story, what story.

It is not enough to change a job, a location, a hair color, a dress, a name. Surface novelty is not the same thing as range or diversity. Real novelty, I think, requires a depth of sight. The capacity for engaged, sustained attention.

When I was in my program studying creative writing, I was sometimes dinged in class because my stories had to be read a second time to get the most out of them. It never occurred to me that this was a flaw or a fault. I had assumed that everyone experienced life this way. In the second pass, in the second glance, the second thought. I thought that everyone lived that way, not on this surface layer, but in the reconstituted history of the moments we pass through. I was writing fiction out of that as though it were the only way to live. I had not taken into account that for some people, life comes in the first shot and only the first shot. I felt very sad about that.

I suppose that’s why I am sometimes baffled when people say that my work is very self-similar. I always think it’s a compliment at first, but then I realize that they do not mean it this way. What they would like is more surface variation. They would like the interior to remain the same, but for my characters to be forty-five, fifty, sixty, to play out the same dramas but with slightly different costuming. But to me that matters less than refining the interior. I feel that there is still this rich interior vein I am trying to refine. I am trying to come to some answer or set of answers about the capacity for human relation in a world of vanishing symbols. Or rather a world that is filled with so many symbols that none of them can be understood across the vast gulfs between our micro-trends. That is what I am trying to understand. It didn’t occur to me that this work would have to be carried out in a carousel of changing clothes and minor alterations. That seemed silly to me. Surely, if we could tell the difference between Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot, and between Lydia Bennett and Louisa Musgrove, then perhaps, just perhaps, we might be able to distinguish between the shades of anxiety felt by a thirty-one-year-old PhD student in biochemistry and a suicidal math student, between dancers whose lives are vastly different. I sometimes think, well, we used to read Tolstoy, you mean to tell me that I can’t have four dancers in one story? Two black gay guys in one story? People used to know the difference between Captain Wentworth and Admiral Croft, but two gays in one place is too confusing? Even if one of them comes from the middle class and the other from working poor? What would the world make of Bazarov and Arkady Kirsanov today? Would that be simply too confusing? Two men of similar backgrounds, one naïve, the other more worldly? Is that too fine a difference to stake a fiction on?

My understanding of life is one built up out of repetition. A life built on the virtue of repetition. Of course I wouldn’t come to feel it as a flaw or fault. But other people are not like that. When I look at my notes, I see someone very anxious and very unhappy. Someone struggling at a deep, almost spiritual level to reconcile his mode of life with what he perceived to be a dictate to change himself, to shift his understanding of life to be more aligned with what other people felt and did. He suffered tremendously. But he did not change. Instead, he went on suffering and eventually he graduated. And then he became me.

I sort of marvel at that. That my grad school self did not alter his way of living and making meaning out of things but instead went deeper into it. I think I might have become the sort of person who writes ten short stories in drastically different voices and styles and who assembles collections as though they are theme parks. That isn’t to say that’s bad. It’s just that I don’t think I would have been very happy doing that. I am interested in the close and intense scrutiny channeled upon a single surface for as long as that surface can abide it. This impulse is there in my drawings. It’s there in the page that almost tore under the pressure of my pencil and my pen. It’s there in my stories and my novels and my essays. That almost unbearable scrutiny. Somehow, my grad school self had the instinctive impulse to cultivate that aspect of his personality rather than shunning it. And so now here I am, trying to make sense of it, I guess.

But man, I wish I had been able to offer myself some guidance. Some kind of help. Assurance. Kindness. If I had that version of me in workshop now, as his teacher, I think I’d say to him that I could see his anxiety and his pain, and that it was okay to write how he wanted to write. That there were many things he had yet to learn about characterization and pacing and structure and plot and form, and that he had to get that language thing under control, but he’d be fine, and he’d be a writer and he wasn’t wrong or made wrong or that his way of understanding life was as valid as anyone else’s. I think that’s one of the important things you need in a writing program. The sense that you aren’t wrong if you have a different conception of life than other people. That you should write from your deepest convictions and be prepared for other people to have their convictions, to look for what is useful and interesting in that incoherence. But above all, just to trust your own line of sight.

I think I just was very needy as an MFA student. And I felt very…circumscribed. Some of that—a lot of it, probably—was me. But also, I think, I don’t know. I have a lot of sympathy for my MFA self. I look at those doodles and just think, damn, there’s somebody who needs a teacher, a friend, somebody to say, hey, chill, it’s okay. That’s not anybody’s fault or anything. Life is hard. But still. As a teacher, I look back, and I think, that’s somebody I wish I could help.

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