Over and Over Again

Over and Over Again ©

By Michael Casey

Some things we like to do over and over again, it gives us pleasure, bowling perhaps if you are Obama. Or we like them though we are rubbish but we enjoy doing it, pick your own thing. Now the obvious question is why do we like doing things over and over again?

We may suck our thumb when nobody is watching, it gives us reassurance it makes us feel safe, it reminds us of our mother’s nipple, or lover’s. It’s the comfort and repetition that sooths us, just like Status Quo music, down down dederum down, if I can remember it right. I can actually remember 1973 and hearing Caroline for the first time.

I listen to a lot of music, it was my companion when my brother left home and I was alone in the homework room, 1974. I’m listening to Peter Gabriel right  now, Steam. The beat repeats and the audience claps along to it. I suppose the drums that Native man started with continue with drums and beat in modern music. Though cannibals probably started by bashing a skull with an arm bone after dinner, which was  the slowest and oldest man in the tribe.

We whistle in the dark to comfort ourselves, we are not alone if we can keep a tune going, and why can’t girls whistle. Is it because girls never feel alone, creation is inside them, so they are never alone in a way.

Cricket players rub the ball, they have their routine as they run up to the crease. The batter has his routine too, the touching of this and the touching of that. Golf players have their pretend swing before they do the real thing. Why do they need to have to do things twice or with a certain order?

When my dad came home from the pub on a weekend one of the men always used to say bye three times before he went up the road to his own house. Nobody ever says bye and goes away without ever looking back. Why exactly is that?

Could it be because our heart beat is a rhythm, boom  boom, boom boom, so a rhythm is in us, is part of us. Nature is a cycle, the sun sets and rises in a rhythm, the moon sets and appears again in a rhythm too. The tide by force of the moon rises and falls, falls and rises. So we all have got this music in us. So anything that replicates the forces of nature is soothing to us.

We sing when we are happy, we sing to our new born  as he is at the breast, we are one, mother and babe, in harmony. We sing stirring songs as we march to war, we are trying to create the rhythm of war. We are trying to up the tempo in our hearts, we are trying to make warriors of ourselves, so we can kill each other.

And when we are dead the beat ends, slow songs sad songs are sung as we are carried to our graves. And after death, does the beat go on, I hope so, but each of us will find out that for ourselves.