CJ Eller

Last Friday I didn't get to writing a new post. This means that my publishing program spits out the contents of the post from the previous day. Not an intentional repetition like those Tumblr shrines of singular images, but a repetition nevertheless.

My mind floats towards solutions to this issue — changes to the underlying publishing program, changes to the underlying writing routine. But my thoughts also drift towards not even considering this an issue. If a Tumblr blog with the same picture of Dave Coulier every day, why does repeating a single post have to be a problem? For all I know, the repetition of a post could be the first time someone sees it. For all I know, the repetition of a post could take on new meaning. For all I know, I don't know why repetition should be an issue.

I'm reminded of an article from The Atlantic by John Barth, aptly called “Do I Repeat Myself?”:

Once upon a time, perusing a book about the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, I noted that some twelve centuries before Homer, in about 2000 B.C.E., the scribe Khakheperresenb was already voicing what I like to call Khakheperresenb’s Complaint: “Would I had phrases that are not known,” the scribe laments, “in new language that has not been used not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.” I used to comfort my students (and myself) with the reflection that for all we know, two or three millennia of sea and sunrise metaphors might be like the first few million stars in our galaxy—a mere drop in the bucket!—while at the same time acknowledging that Khakheperresenb’s feeling of having arrived late to the party is not to be dismissed.

[...]

If I could time-travel back to the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, I would console Khakheperresenb with the familiar paraphrase of Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.” Or André Gide’s comforting remark, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” Originality, after all, includes not only saying something for the first time, but re-saying (in a worthy new way) the already said: rearranging an old tune in a different key, to a different rhythm, perhaps on a different instrument. Has that been said before? No matter: on with the story!