Roost

[Alan Sondheim]

Roost

This _has_ to be the animal in-itself, however one wants to think of it -
other than time-stretch and minor audio modification, very little was
http://www.asondheim.org/roost.mp4 done. Over and over again, tricks were
attempted - all sorts of things, nothing worked. The animal remained.
"Perhaps," I thought, "I should leave things well enough alone." Somewhere
I'm positive, Han Shan was silent, or here, I'm not sure about these
things - I don't know how, for example, to answer a koan to anyone's
satisfaction. (And for myself, why bother? I've absorbed everything except
the time-stretch of meditation.) I need this. And seeing it, now, it seems
as if one would wait for catastrophe, slaughter, injury - fright at the
very least. This however is farthest from the truth, at least this truth.
What remains, inhabits. These moments hold the world together. They roost.

"But even when a hypothesis occurs in logic, the fact that it can be
framed does not itself belong to logic." (Whitehead and Russell, Principia
Mathematica.)