The Hidden Grammar of Repetition

The Writer and the Occult

A student in my Writer and the Occult seminar asked me about a curious experience she often has, wherein she hears the same phrase echoed twice from two sources within milliseconds. She might hear someone say from the TV in another room, That’s all there is! while at the exact same moment she’d be reading an article, and there’s the phrase, That’s all there is. . .

Or she’ll hear someone shout from a distance, Julia! as she’s reading a poem about someone named Julia. This occasionally happens to all of us, but it happens to her a lot, she says. What does it mean?

I didn’t know if it meant anything, but I gave her a writing exercise: Since the seminar was a conversation about the occult, when she experiences this again, think of somebody who died and imagine there was some sort of communication from the other world, someone trying to get her attention by pointing out linguistic clues. Just imagine this. Don’t actually believe it, but play with the idea.

Hearing the same words coming from different sources at the same time is a common human experience, I think. Sometimes I’ll be scrolling through my phone and I see the word San Francisco and I look up and there’s a magazine on the coffee table and on the cover it says San Francisco. Imagine there could be hidden meanings in this repetition. Maybe when we notice repeating words or phrases, we intuitively get a glimpse of some deeper meaning embedded in reality.

One day, I encountered the word Kentucky, and within 10 seconds, I saw it again from a source that had nothing to do with the first. I remember the poet Andrés Montoya telling me that two of the most beautiful words in the English language were Kentucky and weep.

Say it, he said. Kentucky and weep.

And it did sound beautiful, so we both started saying, Kentucky and weep.

Maybe whenever I see or hear Kentucky it releases his spirit, and when there is a random repetition of the word, even more so.

Imagine that all the different words strung together from different parts of our day, things we hear on the TV or a podcast or out the window or as we’re walking through the aisles of Walmart – If we were to listen to those random words and run them through some sort of complex processing system like our brains, we might notice that certain words come up more often on a particular day. Could these word-loops reflect or parallel the meaning of that day and allow us to intuit the future? Can you imagine it? Can you follow your imagination?

Divination systems like Tarot cards, I Ching, etc, are used to help prepare people for what they intuitively know might be coming. Perhaps when my student experiences this repetition of language, she might be uncovering another divination system by which she can go deeper into hidden realities. She could ask herself, Well, what does it mean:

That’s all there is?

Julia?