Recursion HALP

Hey /prog/, I must say my understanding of recursion is shit (never really dealt with recursion in all my days of writing bad code). How should I go about thinking about it?

inb4 flaming: I understand the recursive concept in some contexts, such as when it is used in a factorial function, but when it starts getting more ambiguous (say, exercise 5, ch. 2 from ANSI Common Lisp) it's ugly.

inb4 RECURSE MY ANUS

>>34
You're too stupid for words. Even if you were trolling initially, you've clearly put enough effort into this such that you must believe yourself by now.
Obviously the representation chosen by >>7 is not language-independent.
Some languages treat a function as a variable.
>>20,25,32

Regarding the rest of >>34... Please refer to the first sentence in >>10.