Repetition and revulsion

incantation
So a call for effect: I ask ________. I ask ________. I ask ________. I ask ________. The repeat entreats, endures out a threshold in its and again and again and again. A really really really ask “but not only that,”[1] the performance of devotion: I won’t stop since the source of power, the entreatied, doesn’t want me to stop “but not only that,” the source is boundless and will only answer if it reckons me for kin. So again and again and again as “recursiveness, incantatory insistence … repeated ritual sip … aiming to undo the obstruction it reports.”[2] Again.

quotation
Or sampling. A repetition of someone else. Thus, metonymy and synecdoche as much as reference or allusion. Because to quote is to act on the desire for something of the source for one’s own — a piece, a residue, a proximity. As is to sample. As is to appropriate. To gaffle. Want_______. Want_______. Want_______. Want_______. To want and take is an act of will. Oh yes. One wants this part, one wants this whole, for what one wants them for, and the taking shows one’s power as much as how one uses what one takes. Look what I know and/or look what I can do with this knowledge. And that knowledge is first that there is something I know to want. And that want is a fingerprint. And that want is one’s whether one wants it or not.

refrain
Do it again but also don’t.

riff
Brick and brick and brick may make a house — that house a haptic and optic riff of brick. Pattern’s a sense language. When sonic, repetition may also make a sound house out of air in a someplace, and that place is a context in which and against which. Mantra-dome. Chant-manor. Blues-house. Jazz-rise. Rock-fort. Highlife-compound. Loop-redoubt broken out the cut. And in the sound houses, too, people occupy, occupied with being in the houses, and leaving them to come back often, and sometimes to stay out and out. From outside the house, we hear some of what’s happening in, and hear something else when the door swings open with coming, with going.

loop
When I think of repetition, I also think of loop. And the loop is a circle that accumulates. “… the climax could be the accumulated weight of the repetition …”[3] The weight revises the repetition even without changing its components. “What does it mean for characters to say the same thing twice”[4] — that they are no longer saying the same thing; they are saying the same thing again. A revision. It changes. It isn’t static. Here, hear, it grows.

refrain
… don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop …
… stop don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop don’t …

work
To beg: stop! don’t! again and over, is to ward against another’s again. An agon, an agony. Sun up to sun down / picking that cotton then Sun up to sun down / chained and shackled then Sun up to sun down / whupped by the master arecycles of labor and suffering within the macro cycle of a day into night, the refrain of “sun up to sun down” a measure of the loop and a rhetorical mooring for an improvisational recount of woe: “picking that cotton” or “whupped by the master” or “stay dogged by one-time” or. These improvisations set in a field of constraint, a field that constrains in a loop of “sun up to sun down.” These improvisations, reports of labor, and endurance that exceed the single loop of one day. These improvisations are not the improvisers, who repeat (work) till they can’t because they must because someone else demands it so. These improvisations are not synecdoches of that work. They are an additional work. Neither work is static, they grow as they strain as they grow till.

revulsion
To rework that work is “performing unfreedom.”[5] A done to def. And def a cut death of the not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good genus. Death, in some ontologies, offs the on & on & on it kept on. But doing death is a cut doing to death, which is an on & on & on (a repeated action: a labor) to the break of dawn. Sun down to sun up. To death, and death a cut that cuts other cuts. An ending. Breaks are allowed in labor to prevent laborers from breaking, but to work past it? Grunt. Selected instructions for reading certain poems: do it louder and louder till you can’t, then do it one more time. Another’s: say “ng” again and again in a way that courts vomiting or fainting till the recording ends. Be doing death to def. Doing to def is ill. Doing death is cyclical till something breaks.

refrain
Don’t do it again but also do.

work
I be doing death.

revision
… is cyclical sick till something breaks.

1. Nathaniel Mackey, “Preface,” Splay Anthem (New York: New Directions, 2006), xv.

2. Ibid., xiv.

3. Susan Parks, “Elements of Style,” The America Play (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1995), 10.

4. Ibid.

5. Joshua Lam, “Sonic Afro-Postmodernity: Voice, Duende, and Doubling in Douglas Kearney’s Poetics” (paper presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, Toronto, Canada, May 3, 2015).