David Osnoe / The Oldest Fear

The Oldest Fear

David Osnoe

I have learned that minds cannot be made to bend-not for folk so fragile as us. We who live stubborn, clinging to cliffs, riding the whirling sea-This is man's perilous flight and it stretches back from the ancient into the new, from blistered animal skin stretched taut over drums to the cold thumps and groans of digitized symphonies. Inside each human lives a great fear of change: we hold ourselves too tight-we are too afraid to say that it is allowable: to be made back into clay.