No more moon – just a movement of clouds, a change in light, and a slight, accidental change in focal length.
I wonder how long I can keep this practice up. Is there any need for me to do it more than once? Does doing it over and over again make it more interesting or just demonstrate a capacity for repetition? At one level, I could argue that I continue to do it as long as it seems interesting, as long each morning presents a new problem – not only of what to document, but also of running – of how to make sense of my running. Yet at another level, the project is plainly very much about repetition, about the strangeness of repetition, which can only takes shape as long as I continue with this practice, until, as it inevitably will, some unexpected impulse or event brings it to an end. So, putting these observations together, persisting with this activity becomes a means of exploring, experiencing and thinking through the correspondence between novelty and repetition.
In some ways this has a superstitious aspect. As long as I can continue with an activity – as long as I can repeat it, as long, paradoxically, as it can never be repeated – then somehow any possibility of genuine novelty and repetition is suspended. The danger is warded off. It is placed at a safe distance.
[And I realise this sounds very much like the ‘fort-da’ game from Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, except that Freud’s focus is exclusively on the dimension of repetition within the child’s game, ignoring the element of novelty that also motivates each throw.]
[Nietzsche’s dice throw is also relevant. The “eternal return” as the precise conjunction of repetition and chance.]