Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.20.1612061103250.9177@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: night thoughts, credo
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2016 11:05:41 -0500 (EST)
night thoughts, credo http://www.alansondheim.org/forcredo.jpg it comes down to this. i can move my fingers in a certain way, and a sound appears, and a sound remembered. i have made a movement and the movement has a result, draw out by the movement, in a causal nexus, not cause and effect, with the movement. now somewhere else a man sits and he presses a button, and he is breathing and his hands, his fingers, are moving, and the button is pressed, and a chain of events occurs, and many die, and many others suffer terribly, and perhaps are wounded or starve, perhaps are burned alive. both of these are inextricable, the pressing of the button, the appearance of the sound, both are actions, both have consequence. i say these are equal, that by saying they are equal, i retain my freedom, my sanity, my conscience. for i will not give one up to the other, or the other up to the one; as long as i am alive and capable of thought, i say in this regard, my action suffuses as does the action of the other, which i abhor, which i resist. but i must retain my action as a counting of countries while i am walking the walls of the prison, as the saying of prayers as the smoke rises from the chimneys, as the performing of songs as sirens scream in the distance. i will be found out, it is my desire to be found out, to be part of the world. as the world withdraws from me, i am diminished, as thoughtful as a slow suicide. as long as i make the gesture of the appearance of sound, to myself i am still alive, i am still among those who hear of the man who presses the button, with so much suffering and so much death, in its nexus and wake, the wake for the dead and the tortured. it is the sound that i make, it is the nestling, the rustling of this sound, but it is also the gesture and the thinking of this sound, and the tending, the stewardship of this instrument that i hold, that i will care of, and yet it is not in little things, but the greatest things of all, what might be and what could be and what would have been, that holds me in the skein of the world, the world with the man with the button, who i forget, who id o not think of forgetting, for whom i am one of the forgotten ones, for whom i am unaccountable, unaccounted-for, hardly worth the effort to remember a name or a sound or an instrument. and of him i think the same, and will not name him, he is more nameless than the others precisely because of his name, and now this gesture is over i think, what i have been saying, and the memory of the sound, each gesture has a sound, and all are equal or unequal, all are present in the world.