“How even less do most movements represent initatives by which an agent posits and extends its identity!…A campesina in Guatemala occupies her hands with the rhythms and periodicity of her knitting as she sits on the stoop gossiping with her friends…every purposive movement, when it catches on, loses sight of its telos and continues as a periodicity with a force that is not the force of the will launching it and launching it once again and then again…when (the carpenter) pauses he, alone in the neighborhood, registers the nearby tapping of a nutnatch on a tree trunk…The movements and intensities of our bodies take up the movements and intensities of toucans and wolves, jellyfish and whales…[through] These movements extend neither toward a result nor a development. They are figures of the repetition compulsion…” I am trying to understand this whole passage from the “Bestiality” chapter. Musically, Lingis notes the periodicities of life and whereas some of them, such as the knitting and hammering, are done for an articulatable reason, others, such as fiddling with ones hair repeatedly, have less well understood motives. Lingis wrties of “the” repetition compulsion; whereas I have experienced it, I am not sure what he represents when writing of it: psychology? anthropology? his own opinion? biology? etc. Is it a well-accepted phenomenon, or is it something he believes in? The same goes without saying of “the movements and intensities of our bodies take up (those) of toucans and wolves…”. When he writes of intensities, is this in the same sense as planes of intensity? Oh what a tangled web we weave when we wax eloquent. Or maybe I’m just exercising my spider genomes. Repetition, whether or not it is compulsive, has value in human existence. That which springs to mind is the way in which it lulls us and makes us feel safe. On the other hand “Every purposive movement, when it catches on, loses sight of its telos and continues as a periodicity” is a VERY interesting thought relevant to my work. I am planning to do dissertation work on music and ritual, and repetition is almost always involved. Last quarter I did a term paper on alternate teleologies and their therapeutic psychological benefits. This fits right in. Another passage that will assist my own research interests is the one about Le Clezio’s observations on the music of the Lacandon Maya in Chiapas: “how their songs, leaving words and meaning behind, pick up and join the basso continuo of the frogs the dogs, the spider-monkeys, the agoutis, the wild boars, and the sloths in the tropical night.” The immense spiritual depth and strength of surviving Mayan peoples is a topic too large for here, but suffice it to say that the implied recognition of the value of identity with ones environment and ecology has both material and psycho-spiritual utility.