Last week Swells mentioned a tune she’s currently digging so much that she claimed, “I might need to ease up on the rotation soon so I don’t forget all the other songs I know.” That got me thinking a lot about repetition, particularly as it concerns art and our experience of it. How and why can certain gorgeous bits of culture float by us, meriting momentary appreciation and even awe, while others—and we can never really predict which ones—grab hold of our imaginations to an almost obsessive degree? If you’ve ever listened to a song twenty times in a row, started rereading a novel the moment you finish it, gotten lost in a painting, or watched a movie so many times you know it by heart, you know the thrill and comfort of repetition. How randomly art wields this power over us; how willingly—helplessly—we hand it over.

An example:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uzi7toukdA[/youtube]

A lot of you got fired up about Boratto’s tune “Beautiful Life” a few years ago, and while I definitely enjoyed listening (it’s arguably even the better song), it never commanded my attention like this does. (Seriously, over the weekend I was painting the bedroom and made an iPod mix to stave off the boredom. Nothing sounded quite right until I just gave up and put “Galuchat” on an endless loop.) To one person it’s just another slab of plinky-plonk electronica—to me it’s positively epic. It’s organic, oceanic, airborne. It breathes. It’s blood pumping and daybreak and the tightly coiled petals of a dahlia before it bursts into flower. It makes me swoon. I can’t tell you why.

When you tumble into an infatuation with a work of art, you fall in love a little bit. You invest improbable amounts of emotional energy. The connection feels weirdly personal, like a relationship. The term we borrow from Greek to describe this inanimate transference is cathexis. (Freud’s term was Libidobesetzung, which is almost mortifying enough for me to abandon writing this post altogether.)

Another example:

(Vittorio Corcos, “Sogni” (Dreams) [1896], National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome)

I know it’s not empirically the best painting, just the one I love most. If you added up all the time I’ve spent just looking at it, what would it be? Days? Weeks? How much time just contemplating those shades of yellow, that tiny flash of blue?

In my line of work, cathexis is something of an occupational hazard. It takes absurd amounts of energetic focus to complete a Ph.D. in literature, and all that energy has to come from somewhere. If you get a little crushed out on Elizabeth Bennett or Portia or Brett Ashley, so be it. The queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was fond of saying, “Obsession is the most durable form of intellectual capital,” a quote I had pinned above my writing desk for years. It seemed to legitimate the strange, almost involuntary way I backed into my profession—for while I probably attribute way too much importance to the formative impact of being queer, in this case it’s actually true.

With so little representation of my reality in mainstream culture, while still a kid I became extremely good at parsing out those little bits of TV, books, and music that didn’t make me feel, like, completely insane. A glance, a timbre of voice, a throwaway line, a slightly-dissonant key change—I close-read the hell out of those ephemera, built a whole world out of them, like a bird making a nest out of carefully-chosen grass, twigs, and trash. It happened most often in books, which usually rewarded obsessive analysis, but books could also allow me to climb inside them and just live there for a while if I wanted to. Half the time I didn’t even know why something could move me so much, but as my studies continued through college and grad school, trying to get to the bottom of such questions proved to be incredibly generative and intellectually (though never solely intellectually) sustaining. Even now, the power of repetition comes in handy when I find myself analyzing for a living, teaching Twelfth Night for the dozenth time. Now I know how the whole process works, but it’s no less mysterious for that.

(Cathexis, first grade version. Actually, this one isn’t all that mysterious.)

Technology has changed (maybe revolutionized) the way one can understand and experience cathexis. While it was once a mostly solitary, cerebral process—which for me began, after all, because I was a strange lonely queer child who lived a few frames out of phase with reality—today’s kids hang out their mental laundry on the internet for everyone to see. Say that during an hour-long TV show there’s a subtexty three-second segment that speaks to your imagination. Now you can build a .gif of it to play on a literal endless loop, upload it to Tumblr, and watch it get reposted by a hundred other strange (but marginally less lonely) people with the same fixation. Forget the bird’s nest—these kids are building great big noisy castles out of their obsessions. It makes me wonder what kind of scholars and observers they will grow into as they hone and channel the power of their Libidobesetzung via social media.

It may come as no surprise that I’m currently in the throes of another artistic obsession. It’s so all-consuming and sincere that I’m actually embarrassed to talk about it. Does this ever happen to you? Apparently it’s not the kind of thing you grow out of. Just be grateful when it comes along.

* btw, this is one of my favorite-ever lines from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (talk about cathectic adoration, oh my GOD).