3 kg of apples (12th of February 2012)

Repetition is allegedly the mother of knowledge and success, and, really, it is difficult to deny that we do progress with persistent exercising and repeating of certain actions. A good example is the control of a computer mouse. It always surprised me how troublesome for older people who never met the computer before is to move the arrow over the screen. To those who are accustomed, it looks completely natural, but it requires establishing certain links in the brain in order for this activity to proceed smoothly. Those links are established best by exercising, i.e. by boring and painful repetition.

I have somewhat mixed emotions about repetition:

1) It is obvious that repetition "works" - one can see it easily e.g. when comparing my early drawings with those made in the last couple of months. It is obvious that I picked a couple of guitar chords simply by repeating and learning to rearrange fingers quickly. It is obvious that I know what laplacian is and that I do not get scared when I see it because I broke it in pieces several times from the start. It is obvious that my leg slips to the break almost unconsciously because I have many times seen situations in which one must break in order to stop things going the wrong way.

2) On the other hand, repetition sometimes blocks me, leads me to learned modes from which I cannot escape. I take my guitar and it's always Am, Dm, E, E7, Am, Dm, E, E7 and so on, and so on, I can never "spontaneously" think of some creative combination, e.g. first rotating F and C, and then, in refrain, I go to D, G, D, F#m, D, G, Em, G, A, D. Repetition can lead to fixation of patterns in the functioning of the brain which you cannot get rid of anymore. Because you like to do certain things, you will be sentenced to do them all the time. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy and the death of creativity.

3) And, from the third point of view, seeking for creative solutions and ignoring repeating of recipes that certainly work (and that many have already tried), may easily lead you to spending too much time, without really progressing. Someone should really explain to me the basics of the watercolor technique before I start searching for my creativity while smearing colors.

People who like to repeat the same things all over again, often fool themselves with the idea that they are moving somewhere, that they progress. Some of them also sincerely (?) think this, so they call their repetitive and often very boring activity "a school of thought". The idea of the name is to emphasize that they reached their status of the repetitioner in a very difficult manner (through "school") and that anyone trying to run away from the hypnotic hug of repeating boredom is necessarily an impostor, superficial and of poor quality.

Such an attitude is quite common in science, most often in the branches that have a long tradition and that do not go nowhere in particular for a really long time. Those guys fool themselves that the additional one percent of knowledge compression and its formulation in even more elegant way is some great achievement that only the consecrated ones can understand. Of course that many could understand it, including me, but they are not interested in it. It is boring. It is something related to sociology, and unrelated to the passion for knowledge. It is boring.

One of the reasons I like the music of Kate Bush is that it is geared to run away from the already seen and the already repeated (when it's good). She is the only one who can succeed in using never before formulated and scorned musical combinations to make something impressive and apparently "logical" (it is in fact far from logical...).

I recently listened to an (old) interview with Tom Waits who told an anecdote about the situations in which the band gets stuck in repeating patterns, schemes and riffs. It is all great and performed in the best possible way in the world, but it is not new, and it is not inspirational. Waits said that he disperses the musicians from their own instruments to those of others: guitarist on the drums, drummer on the bass, bass player on the trumpet and the trumpet player on the guitar. C'mon guys, let's see what it turns out to be!

For now, I am just smearing the watercolors. I painted three kilos of apples, but none of them is edible.

And, in the end, here is a thought that should yield some comfort to those who repeat without much success (as I do now):

Last updated on 12th of February 2012.