The Same Damned Thing Over and Over

Photograph courtesy of J.D. Daniels.

I knew a girl. Her hobbies included telling me I was wrong about my own life. More than once she said to me, “You say that you feel trapped in your past, and everything is repeating. I don’t understand that. Everything feels new to me, all the time,” and she struck a heroic pose, despite the fact that we had already had this argument forty times.

Ladies and gentlemen, for your entertainment, we now present, snarling at each other, the world’s smartest ants.

“Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote Santayana, “are condemned to repeat it.” Not as impressive as it seems, because those who can remember the past are also condemned to repeat it. It’s the only thing that ever happens: the past repeats itself. Everyone is condemned to repeat the past. The question is whether you are able to admit it or not.

My mamaw used to say, “I thought life was just one damned thing after another until I realized it’s the same damned thing over and over.”

And my father says he has CRS disease: Can’t Remember Shit. (He also says he has furniture disease: his chest, he complains, has fallen into his drawers.) But CRS is not hereditary. I, his son, am jolted awake nightly by memories. I sleep in the electric chair.

“Everything feels new to me”: it helps if you don’t remember anything. Your life is a song you’ve got stuck in your head, playing over and over. But you can only get a song stuck in your head if you can hear it. For those who can’t or won’t pay attention, everything is always happening again, for the first time.

To notice repetition can be called pattern recognition. There is also such a thing as pattern projection, or apophenia, or hyperactive agency detection: seeing what is not there. That’s a Type I error, a false positive: the smoke detector goes off when there is no fire.

An ability to see patterns is related to the inability not to see them, even if or especially when they aren’t there. It’s true that thinking outside the box is easier once you’ve ripped a hole in your box. But if you don’t have some kind of box, a roof to keep the rain off your brain, it’s hard to think anything at all.

We hear a lot about the simpleton, but not much about his fraternal twin, the complexton.

Sometimes the pattern is there, but it’s in your perceptual apparatus, not in the perceived field. Luke 6:42—Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.

I had a friend named Cook. He was the screwiest kind of pattern-hunter: numerology, sham-schizo etymology—things like, a manuscript is “the man you script.” You name it, and Cook would lecture you on its secret meaning. Almost every time I saw him, he said the same thing: “Hey, man, I had a dream about you last night.” He wrote some good songs, though. When the Louisville police shot Breonna Taylor in 2020, I listened to his song “Hey Cops!” over and over: “Hey, cops, don’t beat the shit out of me! Do not kill me! Do not kill me!”

After I moved north, I heard Cook got his teeth knocked out in a drunk tank in Nashville: your life is a song you’ve got stuck in your head, the man you script. He’s been dead for twelve years now. Twelve apostles, twelve signs of the zodiac. “A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head”—that’s the Book of Revelation, chapter twelve.

Sometimes the pattern is there, but other parties strive with all their might to convince you it isn’t. Type II error: there is a fire, but the smoke detector doesn’t make a sound.

And sometimes you recognize a pattern or hear something repeat, but without quite understanding what it is you’ve heard.

For example: a year ago I was reading Suitable for Framing (1949) by James Atlee Phillips. I like my detective novels to include a lot of physical pain, as my real life does. I am tired of the myth of the indestructible body. Iron Man is the dumbest possible idea for a movie: the armored hot dog, the gold-plated asshole. Most movies are children’s movies. An experiment, I don’t recommend it, try getting hit by a car and then see if you feel like an Iron Man. Here’s a better name for that movie: Dog Food. From Suitable for Framing:

Pierce studied my face and murmured that somebody must have tried to cut me into a colony of midgets.

Shake the nobility out of your head, Barker, I told myself. You contracted to be a thief, and the big deal folded. You got your scalp retreaded several times while it was folding, and your face slashed with a gunsight.

And then:

The girl came in and sat down by me … I didn’t believe it. She was too perfect. After she had ordered a cup of coffee, she turned to me.

“Bless me, if it isn’t old Split-Ear, the battling coyote,” she said. “Where did you possibly get that face?”

The real stuff. You rarely find it, in our world of lies.

A year passed. I mail-ordered a box of paperbacks, sight unseen. Inside I found The Deadly Mermaid (1954) by James Atlee Phillips. And what to my wondering eyes should appear:

“It won’t run,” snapped Donner. “Let’s pour the coal on.”

“The coal is being applied,” answered Rusk, and laughed. “Look at old Split-Ear, the Battling Coyote,” he said.

Someone’s past is repeating. Let’s see how deep the coyote hole goes.

Turns out Split-Ear: A Battling Coyote is a 1925 children’s book by Thomas Clark Hinkle. I have a first edition here on my desk. It is one hundred years old. It smells better than I will when I am a hundred. I am not an armored hot dog. I am an ordinary hot dog.

It’s 269 pages long. They used to make children’s books differently, and they used to make children differently, too.

This little coyote, larger and far more adventuresome than the others, had no doubt been wondering what had become of his mother and, wanting his breakfast, had started off to find her. When she stepped on his ear one of her sharp claws cut a gash clear through the tender skin and flesh … to leave a mark that the little prairie wolf would carry always, and in his struggle for existence this was to set him apart from others of his kind.

Chapter Ten—WHEN SPLIT-EAR MET OLD KILLER WOLF.

No sooner did his gray body strike the frozen white snow than he was up, flashing in and out in a constant attack. Chop! chop! chop! chop!

And now Split-ear took one last desperate chance. He darted in quickly, low, then up. Quick as he had been he felt the slash on his neck, but at last he had found the monster’s throat and he held on like grim death.

Pure corn, containing insoluble fiber, vitamin C, folate, thiamine, magnesium, potassium, and iron. I like the way its chapters end.

He needed a still closer contact with gray wolves to complete his acquaintance with them, and that was near at hand.

Tired out, he slept soundly, little dreaming what the morrow would bring.

Before he again saw the home ranch an experience awaited him greater and more thrilling than any he had yet known.

All unknown to himself he was now on the eve of a coyote hunt that long was to be remembered in the annals of the hills.

Cliff-hanger techniques, however obvious, are an old-fashioned courtesy to the reader. At least it’s not some “novelist” stumbling and fumbling and mumbling for forty static pages about whether or not to put a pair of boots in his suitcase. I’ll be honest with you, I do not give a fuck about the outcome of that conflict. I would rather read about a coyote in a blizzard: I know just how he feels.

And that pattern you think you’re seeing? Maybe you’re imagining it, maybe it’s Maybelline.

William S. Burroughs wrote in 1986: “The Word is literally a virus … the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.” In 1981: “The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it—it will reassemble in the same form.”

Patterns in membership reflect patterns in management: the house leaks from the roof down. The current U.S. administration has just passed its One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Meanwhile, Emily Henry’s novel Great Big Beautiful Life has spent eleven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. And Sony Pictures has made a new rom-com starring Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell called A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.

Life is not hard to understand. It is hard to endure.

But what happened to the girl?

Girl? What girl?

The girl at the beginning of the story who was trapped in an I’m-not-trapped-in-a-loop loop.

Oh. She vanished. It happens all the time. Just close your eyes.

 

J.D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and the Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection The Correspondence was published in 2017. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, n+1, and elsewhere, including The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.