It is foundational to all things, however much the common era may valorize novelty or “innovation.” How much of advancement, in any domain, comes through the re-inhabiting of old forms, the reuse of project plans and outputs as structures, the application of discarded structures as trellis or scaffolding. The possession of a line’s rhythm with new words, and thereby new blood, and therefore reanimated. A prompt given to the struggling writer, desperate to sink a hook into the blankness: rewrite an existing sentence. By repeating what’s gone before one might hear things anew and in the echoes understand the size of the cavern they’ve wandered into.
I’ve heard it said (and subsequently, by force of desire, see it to be true) that physicians and business people have in common the body of knowledge built on casing: on seeing dozens, hundreds, thousands of different cases, and from these observing patterns, and these observations and gatherings being robust enough, from them extrapolations might be derived, that themselves become greater knowledge, along with the practice of derivation itself.
Interruption destroys deep thought; repetition (of form, shape, or pathway) becomes recourse for creating a facsimile of continuity out of frayed threads. Picking up where one left off and redebuting the movement again is difficult. Seeing the trajectory intended is one thing; to inhabit it, and stick the intention’s landing, another.
Repetition, to repeat, is the combination of “attacking” and “again”; to re-attack, to mount another attempt. In attacking at the same place, one is tempted to fall into patterns of action, continuous movements in the same veins and wave, moving the air in the same ways over and over again. But the place one attacks is never the same; and the ground is always changing; but by staying still, one can’t hope the new will reveal itself, one has to move oneself toward novelty and strike again.