While undertaking a summer crash-course in Sanskrit – which I recently completed – I was informed that the English word “horror” comes from the root hṛṣ (pronounced “hrsh”), which forms such Sanskrit terms as “harṣa” (joy). The link is to be found somewhere near the Latin version of the term, meaning trembling (see horripilation – hairs standing on end), as one can easily imagine having goose bumps in both frightening and pleasurable moments (cf. The Orgasmatron).
This situation gets interesting when one considers the slang spoken by the delinquent youths in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Their lexicon involves various terms which seem to have been assimilated from Russian such as “rookers” for arms, “groodies” for breasts, and (how could I ever forget!) “droogs” for friends. Perhaps one of the most intriguing of these is the word “horrowshow” which is used for pleasurable or “good”/satisfying things; for example, “horrorshow groodies” would mean “nice breasts”. This is derived from the Russian word “harasho”, which means “well” or “good” (to the best of my knowledge). This word must also have its etymological roots in hṛṣ; I would be very surprised if this were not the case. Simultaneously, however, it contains the English word “horror”, coming from that same root.
What astonishes me here is that we have come full circle, so to speak, through no actual effort or exertion on the part for any human agent who sought to arrive at this (re)integration of hṛṣ with its various offspring. Semantically this root has gone through many perturbations which led it to mean horror in English, yet, through the unintentional – I can only believe unintentional... Would Burgess really have known or sought to bring horror back into unity with its root through his youths? – inspiration of one author, it has arrived in a usage remarkably close to the “joy” from whence it came originally.
What this realisation sparked in me was a renewed interest in Nietzsche’s “Eternal Return”. I was to find, only a few days later, that the play I am currently rehearsing, an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five, features the topic of the endless recurrence of time. It was at that point that I resolved to really explore this notion in a deeper way...
For Nietzsche, the realisation of Eternal Return is a terrible event. It should make one plunge into the deepest depths of sadness; to think that they must relive endlessly all they have up to this point, and everything else they will experience – all of it unchanged... To react positively to the discovery shows someone’s ultimate affirmation of life through their “love of fate.” This kind of extreme reaction (in either direction) is avoided by Billy, the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-five, when he is made aware of the circular nature of time by his Tralfamadorian captors. He meets the information relatively matter-of-factly (after some further querying) and, indeed, begins actively espousing it later in the story, not because it is some kind of easy escape from death – indeed, he takes no such pleasure in it – but merely because it is true (to his character).
As a broader concept, the Eternal Return has resonances with a variety of different notions, from ancient spiritual traditions to modern scientific hypotheses, and I don’t intend to list them all here. Rather, I will entertain some interesting questions which I feel are broad enough to apply, at least in part, to any given formulation of the Eternal Return scenario...
Does the set need to close for repetition to occur?
It could be that my life begins repeating the moment I die. My death is then the closure of my life, as a set. It seems illogical that my life could repeat if I did not die. In this sense, for any experiential repetition to occur ever, there must be a complete “unit” (beginning – middle – end / Brahma – Vishnu – Shiva) or else the thing to be repeated does not have an identity, as such. Obviously in the case of eternal return and life (as the experience par excellence), there must be an endpoint to my experiences for my “new” ones (that is to say, the repetition) to begin. I suppose – though this seems to be pushing it – that it needn’t be death as such; a recurring dreamlike state (dreaming in sleep, for example) may suffice, in which case the repetition could be parcelled out in manageable chunks (Then the dreamtime is the eternal repetition of another life/plane? Also, this would get us caught in a situation where the first life experience is never completed as I repeat the day’s experience in my sleep, which necessarily includes the sleeping and dreaming of the repetition itself – or are we arbitrarily limiting the repetition to one in this case? Not really eternal return then, is it? ). If we extract the Return out of the experiential sphere, could it not also be the case that repetition is occurring at every moment? Since subjective experience is no longer required, there seems to be nothing holding the Return from occurring simultaneously and at infinitely many different moments... though this would probably be drawing the bow too long (haven’t I already done that?).
Can fragments repeat while the whole itself does not?
Interestingly both for Nietzsche and in sh5 repetition is taken to be complete; that is, wholesale repetition of everything “to scale.” Couldn’t it be possible, for example, that my life repeats but the whole entirety of time (the life of the universe) does not? The wheels rotate many times in exactly the same fashion, yet the ride may never itself repeat. This is an insult to our sense of self-importance, that we justify a repetition of the whole universe (though it does stand to reason; why should we discriminate between my life and the entirety of all existence?), and thus is conjured the argument that all the circumstances which led up to my life being exactly the way it was – and thus necessary for its repetition – must occur again, and so the causes of those causes, etc., until we reach the beginning of time (see Buddhism’s Dependent Origination). Likewise, all the impacts, no matter how subtle, I made upon the lives of others would necessitate the repetition of the future, until the end of time. This seems a strong argument but I think it is helped along by our wish to be a part of the whole (or something at least), and not be dramatically, drastically, doomed to a completely unitary existence for all eternity; and, simultaneously, to be special, to have this absolutely necessary part to play in the unfolding of totality. Surely if my life were to repeat, it wouldn’t just be a cheap video cassette of birth to death (though that may be all I see) but rather the repetition of the whole great cosmic cycle. My own Self can’t be all there is; the ground upon which my feet stand must be firm! Must be something other than myself! There is no reason, however, that the apparition of prior causes and posterior events was not merely an illusion (as, very well, the whole experienced life may be) and therefore I am the only thing that ever repeats in entirety; all my friends and family being merely exigencies of my own movie, not real in any concrete sense outside of their relation to me.
Going beyond simply the repetition of single lives, isn’t it possible that even if my life does not repeat, different processes on different scales, be they experiential or no, do? Say, for example, that the universe always big bangs and big crunches in exactly the same fashion every cycle, but the occurrences of various phenomena in between these events vary, either only slightly or drastically. Likewise, one could say, perhaps, fertilisation of various life bearing cells occurs repeatedly but always with various minor fluctuations. This is certainly no longer Nietzsche’s Eternal Return and, indeed, may no longer qualify as repetition in any real sense. It does, however, lead to my final question...
Does repetition need to be exact or may it vary in precision?
Say my life is drawn out onto a timeline; cartographically, if it is to help understand my life (but isn’t this just another dirty abstraction?), it must be simplified in some sense – each and every moment cannot be as detailed as in reality or else I am doomed to repeat my life ad nauseam up to the creation of the map (very similar to the dream recurrence outlined above). So what are the points that stick out? My marriages? My friendships? My travels? What points are pointed to on this line? Further, when (if) repetition occurs, perhaps every detail needn’t be exactly the same; perhaps, so long as I am married to Mademoiselle X on date Y, and a collection of other particulars, the fuzzy bits around the edges are up for variation. Obviously, this is no longer perfect repetition; in fact, some may argue, along the lines of dynamical systems theory, chaos theory, etc., that even minute changes to the fluff around the sides could have major implications for the meat in the middle. For example, say I am “fated” to marry Xaxa who I met in the cinema on Friday, having only decided to go because I found ten dollars under the (PETAR) c(R)ouch; surely the finding of the money is not a central life event that would be necessary for any repetition, even thought without it I never met my future wife. There a number of various responses here. Firstly, marriage to her may not be a central life event (didn’t you guys end up getting divorced a few years later anyway?), or even marriage generally; from this it follows we may never know what the true central life events are so it might as well all be random in any case. Secondly, maybe the finding of the ten dollars was a fated event as well as my meeting and marrying Xaxa, insofar as it was a necessary condition for that to occur. Thirdly, it is possible that, if my marrying Xaxa was an essential life moment and therefore fated, I would’ve met her in another way were it not at the cinema.
When one couples this question with notions such as reincarnation (taking a big step outside the realm of Eternal Return as understood up until now), you get friendship groups which survive various lives and always manage to meet each other life after life, destined to discover each other repeatedly, working through their interlinked story, always getting just a bit further but never far enough... Another interesting theoretical coupling is the Return with the notion of the Jungian archetype. There are certain templates (processes, characters, essences?) which repeat in various differing times and locales but which endure in their repetition due to some primordial force or influence which they exhibit. Interestingly, responding to the above quandary of the impossibility of know what is the to-be-repeated and what isn’t, here we see a potential honing in on the repeating elements. Perhaps we can, through our shared stories, transcend time and discover what it is that is the essence of this repetition.
As a final image (which was really implicit from the beginning, and explicit if you followed the link here) we have the alchemical Ouroboros, an age-old symbol of cyclical time and eternal recurrence. This brings to mind the question: how does this serpent move? What motivates it? What force compels this process? Is it that world-renown mystical serpent energy (e.g. Kundalini) or does it just happen on its own, that is, without cause? This question is getting to such metaphysical heights that any attempt to even rationalise potential explanations is absolute speculation (though hasn’t this whole venture been such?). The Return may be required, or it may be contingency. Can it be considered as a telos, an endpoint to which we move ourselves? Repetition seems to preclude any sort of teleology but, in another way, repetition could exist in a sophisticated teleology; the wheel moves forward in virtue of its spinning, not despite it (but will it ever stop?).
As a final note, something which very clearly resonates with the Eternal Return, especially as represented in the Ouroboros, is David Icke’s notion of the “Time Loop.” For him (that is, as told to him by Ayahuasca), the Time Loop is a creation by consciousness due to its illusion of isolation and separateness from totality. Time doesn’t ultimately exist and is only necessary insofar as we remain trapped in the matrix of fear, anger, and separation; this matrix manifests various agents and occurrences to maintain our illusion and thus its own existence. Time loops, though whether it does so symbolically or literally is not made clear but it is certainly not linear. While the philosophical implications are not fully explored in his text “Tales from the Time Loop” (they may be elsewhere, I haven’t read any of his other books – though it really isn’t a central concern of his; more important is how we get out of this situation), they do seem to have significant resonances with Nietzsche’s notions of Eternal Return and broader conception of temporal repetition.
