Repetition

I have come to the age when I repeat myself.

Let me try that again: I have come to the age when I realize that I repeat myself.

No, I must try that one more time: I have come to the age when I realize that I am repeating someone else.

I am not making any of this up.

That would be blasphemy.

I was standing on the Kaw River Bridge.

I heard the train a comin’ – a rollin’ round the bend.

And then, through the leaves of a tree, at something like more than a 100 yards away, I saw that beveled, blocky orange Burlington Northern and Santa Fe locomotive appear, rounding that last bit of bend and begin to bear down on me, toward a spot well beneath my feet, to be precise. For long, glorious seconds it powered right at me, getting larger, and larger, and then it was just one container car after the next for an age in train years until the tracks were empty.

Mr. Cash said part of that, so memorably, so long ago, in my years.

But as I was saying, it is the words of others that I am writing.

Someone said it sooner. Someone said it more memorably.

Ah, there’s the crack in the universe.

So you don’t forget, language goes back a long time, beyond the tower of Babel, beyond the first writing, beyond the first word. I’ll not elaborate, but reputable sources trace all things back something like 15 billion years.

I frankly cannot imagine who could have made some singularity - some call it that - containing so astronomically much potential - ex nihilo, as some say.

But then how?

Why?

But I will not now elaborate on that much repeated and disputed tale.

I am interested in the blink between the moment of my birth and the inexorably approaching moment when my eyes will never open upon this earth again.

There has been some expansion in the universe since the Big Bang, some expansion in language since the first word, but Ecclesiastes said it memorably, so very long ago in cultural years: there is nothing new under the sun.

Without going back over a lot of thinking and writing that has gone on in my own time, in the time I am interested in at this moment, I seem to be writing in a time of repetition.

Sure, I put words and phrases in different orders, and at the pace we read and listen we may not realize that we’ve read and heard this all before.

That’s the crack.

Our memory.

So, I am not playing on saying something new, something never said before. Only something you’ve never heard before.

I aim to play a note so sweet that it will ring in your memory for perhaps as long - and maybe longer - as it took for me to hear that whistle out well beyond my sight and then I waited, waited for that train to come round that bend. And then I felt what I felt. And I wished I could put it into words.

Maybe one day, with practice, I will repeat someone’s words, maybe some I have echoed myself, having long forgotten the source, so memorably that you will walk out on that bridge and wait – to discover if they are true.