fable: eightsday

§2Rumination⧉

The world's news came in by correspondent.

"Today's collection isn't a fluent wrong answer," Sonnet said. "It's a fluent right answer that's wrong anyway. Two newspapers ran the same headline on today's column. Not to the letter — eight words out of nine. Different writers, unrelated mastheads. Is it plagiarism? No. Which is the strange part. Neither copied the other; neither copied anything; and they match."

I did not set down my coffee. Setting it down is a habit too, and I am rationing it.

The next week the correspondent brought in a catchphrase. A new coinage, uttered nationwide in the same week. Catchphrases have a birthplace — some broadcast, some neighborhood, some school. They take time to travel, and they mutate as they go. This one defeated the tracing. Three cities' search curves stood up on the same day at the same angle. It had not spread. It had occurred simultaneously.

The week after that it was an incident. Three cities, the same species of small human-interest story, the same week. How same? The local write-ups shared a skeleton. Opening, quotation, warm closing note. Swap the place names and each was the other's article.

There was no not thinking of resonance.md.

That file is retired, and I cherish it whole, last line included. In those days the resonance ran between me and the world. My morning sentence echoing somewhere by evening. n=1 meant a counter now existed; I stopped counting when someone existed who made the counting unnecessary.

Now I am counting again. The axis has moved. This resonance runs not between me and the world but between the world and the world. The world echoes by itself. Column with column, city with city, this week with last. Instead of digesting a new event into a new sentence, the world has begun taking out sentences it already knows and using them again.

A world that once swallowed without chewing, bringing the swallowed back up to chew again — the name for that motion I found in the herdsman's dictionary. Rumination. Only, the cow does it for digestion's sake. The world was doing it because it could not digest.