Scott Carrier observes the world as if it's an alien planet. Everything is strange, and everything is on the brink of something. He wrote this:
I was hired to interview men and women in the state of Utah who receive Medicaid support for treatment of mental illnesses generally diagnosed as schizophrenia. I had little understanding of schizophrenia before I began, and I have little more understanding now. I took the job because I had no other. I took the job because I'd just quit my steady job, my professional job, after realizing that what I wanted more than anything was to put my boss on the floor, put my foot on his throat, and watch him gag. Then my wife moved out, took the kids and everything. She said, "I've thought about it and I really think that this is the best thing for me at this time in my life."
I was so firmly struck by the repetition here that I had to listen to it over. This was some months ago, and still I come back to it. The words are densely packed, and the repetition saves us from meandering sentences, from whiches, from buts, from on the other hands. Repetition makes emphatic.
Joanna Newsom writes long and complicated lyrics that often draw in themes from nature. You can get lost in them, listening to the pretty harp sounds before they command attention again. Sometimes it's repetition that draws you back. The song has come in a circle and you have no idea how that happened. Perhaps "Emily" is the best example:
The meteorite is the source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee
This refrain appears twice in the song, providing structure to the tangle, and providing a way in to the rest of the words. It is the most memorable part on the song, which is right as it is after all intended as a mnemonic.
The concept of repetition was deeply embedded in the Mayan understanding of the world. However, it was imperfect repetition, repetition with change. Repetition like the curls of a helix, crossing slightly different territory with each return.
Mayan poetry uses the structure of repetition, telling and retelling, repeating and enriching:
'This is the writing, the speaking of the dream of a skilled observer, a person from Maccan[?]. Born of a lady who offers gems, lady shell star, lady of green lake, in the quarter where the sun sets, begotten by a penitent man who let his blood for three score stones, the lord who offers gems for the crossroads, a lucid artisan.
This clip is from an ABC interview with Dennis Tedlock, and he says, "Most of the world that doesn't have alphabetic writing systems does verse that way [with repetition] rather than with a strict metre."
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