(no subject)

[proximoception]

Repetition repetition repetition repetition. The noise made by the great machine producing repetition.

The rest of us gathered to argue which things were worth doing and which pursuits were misguided metaphors for those, but there was always a sizable number who stayed away elsewhere repeating. You could see some through their windows from our window. They repeated one or two things each, and from their identical demeanors you couldn't say it seemed to matter which. The repeating was the key. One man wrote his name over and over again in the same book, all over the cover, sides and every page, until it could only be identified as the Bible by the indentation of the once-gold letters. A woman sewed an endless Charlie Brown sweater out a window, until its folds massed up to her needles like a giant Hershey's kiss - one of the new flavors. Another sang a single high C note every twenty seconds for exactly one, no matter where she was, what she was doing, whether she was sleeping. They all had the same parents. We all do - they're the two who keep on having all the children.

We who gather have a special way of breathing, keyed to pi, so as to avoid these deathly patterns. We're not insane - we don't use each word only once in a lifetime like some do, which would count as repetition, since it would entail moving forward across the dictionaries of language after language following some kind of method, one that would inevitably regularize. But the breathing is a symbol of our commitment to not repeat in what's essential; one we need, since all we share besides is the need to argue about how to do this.

My notion is to seem to repeat for years at a time but then suddenly interrupt the process - in a different manner in each instance. My vocation is spinning pennies. I put two identical coffee cans exactly halfway full of pennies at either end of a table. I sit between them in a chair, take a penny from the left, spin it from the middle of the table such that it drifts down to the right hand can, hits it, and wobbles to rest nearby. I then put it in the right hand can and take another penny from the left. When this can is empty I pick up my chair, take it to the opposite side of the table and resume. I haven't missed the can or lost a penny to the floor in decades, which is good because the penalty for either is to eat the penny and beg on the street for its replacement. I do this from 9 in the morning until 6 in the evening, at which time I join the gathering and argue my notion of discrepancy. Others argue I use a method (as I argue they do), but how can what I do be anything but notional when my breaks from routine are always different and occur unpredictably? In April 1982 I spun three pennies in rapid succession, in April '85 I emptied one full can into the other, in April '88 I took ten minutes off to polish the table. When I enumerate these achievements I am inevitably interrupted by a newcomer crowing about the broadly equal intervals among these dates, but she has fallen right into my trap! For in March 1991 I spun a nickel.

I maintain that the mere appearance of repetition does not itself constitute repetition. Repetition resides only in the intention to repeat. Suppose after the necessarily non-repetitive gestation and nurturing processes an individual arrives at majority resolved to repeat, but is instantly killed by a wayward shooting penny before a single action of his can be iterated, much less repeated. Was this individual not, nevertheless, one of the others? And if I am resolved to non-repeat but perish before it next occurs to me to do so (for I can hardly set the date in advance), whether tomorrow or in fifty years time, does not my ultimate understanding of my purpose inflect my behavior from the root, despite what any observer might be inclined to think?

Though I set them above the others for at least recognizing the danger we are in, those with whom I argue are fools and, ultimately, repeaters. Their notions stink of methodology. Some of my opponents try to key other behaviors to pi, for example, failing to realize that it is a useful rallying point but at last not to be trusted. How can one prove the second half of pi will not prove a repetition or mirror image of the first, since we will never experience it? It is for this reason that I bless death, freeing me, unlike all material and abstract things of this world, even our great ratio, from a continuity susceptible to disruption of the original. I alone will be destroyed uncorrupted, and my one, pure, never wavering, never to be repeated intention with me.