Helix

With Cleo now more than a year old, I'm growing used to the idea that we have a real history together. I remember days from last summer, and can compare them to this, or I can recall pushing the stroller on the same stretch of sidewalk, months ago, that we walk today. What's really striking about such thoughts, though, is that while this July may bring the same angles of sun as last July, and the library reading group may still chant the same lullabies as we did six months ago, everything has changed, as well. Nothing, as they say, really remains the same.

Here's what I mean, in more specific terms. I just got back from taking Cleo to a playground near Loyola University. We've been there before, several times: it's a pleasant, leafy place, and nearly always has a few kids romping about. In the past, though, Cleo's been more or less limited to the bucket swings. The normal swings were too tricky, the slides too high, the stairs too forbidding. But today, suddenly almost everything was in play. She climbed up a slide, gradually worked her way to the highest point in the castle-like core of the playground, and then tried to skid down the spiral slide on her belly.

Same playground, same kid - but a few months make it an entirely new experience.

Academics sometimes talk about time as a helix. For instance, in The Sociology of Work Keith Grint writes that "it is possible to consider time as something of a helix, a spiralling motion in which there are apparent returns to previous forms but at a different level from before." Make sense? Okay, then: let's get even more philosophical for a moment. In a book about American avant-garde music called The Object of Performance, Henry Sayre argues that "there is always, in the repeated occurrence of a thing, a reference to some former occurrence..." In other words, a motif, when repeated, is not quite the same as the motif when first played.

But I like Brian Eno's summary of the matter best. "Repetition," he has said, "is a form of change." Indeed. Same playground, same kid: but where I once looked down at Cleo, in her stroller, she now looks down on me, from her tower in the playground.