Our kettle broke a couple of weeks ago, so we have taken to boiling water in a pot on the stove. The other day I found myself staring at the water as it approached boiling point, paying close attention to every stage of the process.

At first tiny, perfectly spherical bubbles appeared at the bottom of the pot. As they multiplied, some began to rise to the top. The water began to make a hissing sound as more and more of the bubbles appeared, and slowly the surface became agitated.

When the water finally started to boil in earnest, it felt like a momentous event. It was beautiful and singular -- not a mere instance of water boiling, but rather the singular, untimely revelation that takes place each time water turns to steam.

Water on its own tells us nothing about steam. The transformation of one into the other is a radical shift, a great change -- in short, an event.

We explain away this event by talking about temperature and molecules and all that. But the things and forces referred to in those explanations exist on the same plane as the water itself.

Molecules are no more real than water; they’re just another level, water seen from another perspective. Citing the behaviour of molecules does not explain the phenomenon of water boiling; it merely describes it differently, or perhaps describes an entirely different event.

At the level of the Real, there is only this transformation, which happens according to its own immanent -- which is to say aesthetic -- logic. To explain something away by referring to what is unseen in it is really just to postpone its immediate reality.

Because we do not see the molecules, we can tell ourselves that their behaviour is more primal and thus, somehow, causal. In truth it is nothing of the sort; it is just more behaviour, more phenomenon, more spectacle.

We must contrast the causal and the aesthetic. On the aesthetic plane, there are only singular events, none of which loses an iota of its singularity for happening many times over, because every time is the first time.

Plato was right: the Forms are real and singular, yet they manifest each time in their real and singular way, each manifestation being an expression of their absolute singularity.

You see this with artworks. Take a pop song, for instance. There is a sense in which a recorded song happens again for the first time each time it is played. The more you listen to it, the less you feel the New in it.

Eventually, the song seems to lose its newness completely; it takes on a patina of age, it begins to feel worn and deflated. But then, one day, you’re driving and the song comes on the radio.

And the fact that you weren’t expecting to hear it, coupled with the fact that it is happening as an aleatory event rather than as the mechanical result of your deciding, yet again, to put it on, makes the song new again.

Which is to say that you sense immediately that the song has always been new and will always be new. When you were sick of the song, it wasn’t because you had come to know it too well. You had merely fallen out of sync with its newness,

you had become deaf to it -- a buzzing drone of sameness had enveloped the song, so that you did not hear it anymore, but only a memory of it... only a representation.

A few years ago, when I was developing a TV series on tea, I came across a video of a Japanese tea master explaining how to brew gyuokuro tea, which is this deep blue-green, shade-grown tea, very expensive, that exhibits all the qualities traditional Japanese culture values most,

among them umami, that lingering savouriness which, in its intimation of rot, embodies the melancholy of weeds swaying in clear water or the world falling apart in autumn.

After pouring the water, the tea master turns to the off-camera interviewer and says, with zero pretentiousness: “While you wait for the tea to steep for 90 to 120 seconds, you can observe how the needle-shaped gyokuro leaves slowly unfold to their original shape."

Which is probably the most anti-modern suggestion anyone could make. I love how he presents it as something one would be naturally inclined to do while tea steeps. Not: “The steeping time gives you a few moments to scroll through your Twitter feed and maybe clean the countertop.”

But rather: “Shut up, sit still and watch the beauty of the leaves unfolding in the water. I’m telling you this as someone who has been making this fucking tea every day for years and still can’t get over the heartbreaking beauty of it.”

"Be still and know that I am God," the Psalmist wrote. I realize now that this is what the Japanese tea ceremony is all about. It’s not stubborn obduracy that has compelled tea ceremony practitioners to repeat the same gestures, the same motions, time after time over centuries.

It is rather the fact that only by staging an illusion of sameness, stillness, and stability can you truly attune your senses to the sudden emergence of the unrepeatable. The New isn’t the novel. The New is the difference that happens at the heart of repetition.

It’s what Nietzsche called the Eternal Return. Sub specie aeternitatis, only the New returns. Only the New repeats.