Repetition is masturbation

Healthy and fun.

Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp.

I went to a special high school for the arts where I had really great visual arts education. One teacher, Ms. Gifford, was even kind of edgy. She didn’t like us sticking to our comfort zones, so if she saw you playing it safe during critique, she’d say (in front of the whole class) “you’re masturbating!”

She was referring to Marcel Duchamp (the urinal guy, who I quite like)’s famous and cryptic quote “repetition is masturbation”. And, like, point taken, but I never really saw what was the problem with either?

As I write, I’m listening to Ennio Morricone ‘s “Ecstasy of Gold” for perhaps the 2000th time since I discovered its name in 2021, on repeat. I knew as soon as I grabbed hold of the song that I was about to enter a protracted engagement with it, as if I were wrapping the first scout report on the long journey to faithfully reconstruct a scale model of the song in the bottle of my head. I just love repetition.

I guess we all love the feeling of minimizing prediction error through learning or mastery, but what I have is an unslakable and patient urge to systematically obliterate prediction error. I am smoothing down the rough edges of my models constantly in my head until they sync up perfectly with the next repeated experience. I want to know the choreography so well and dance so closely in time with anticipated reality that we merge.

I know when I’m about to start a jag of repeating a song, or recorded words, or a particular food. I have this feeling like I’m chipping away at a mine tunnel, and each swing of my pickaxe feels urgent and necessary and pleasing. I may never reach what I’m looking for at the end of the shaft. The point is to go through the swing of the axe again and again, studying it, perfecting it, making it an extension of my arm. Observing each resulting chip in the wall, learning its patterns.

Sometimes I come to the end of one these jags and have the knowledge of the thing that I sought. (This usually happens when I’m working on an accent and it clicks— it just feels like I “got” the logic of the sound set, so my brain puts it down.) More often I put these fixations down and pick them up again several times (happens most often with intellectual fascinations). Sometimes they peter out as though squeezed dry (happens most often with music). Some obsessions (like foods) seem to go on indefinitely. I ate at least one can of Campbell’s Chunky Vegetable Soup a day for ~8 years, and I would probably still go for it if they hadn’t changed the formula. I loved to notice little differences between each can. For me, knowing it so well opened up more things to observe about it— it was something I could know with exquisite intimacy.

So, yeah, repetition is like masturbation. It’s satisfying and fun to repeat things. Breadth is one direction to go, but so is depth. I’m strip-mining the experience of the repeated thing one delectable layer at a time, extracting everything from it. I like deeply knowing myself and what I like 🤷‍♀️