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Daybreak |
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| Date: July
14th, 2004 Location:
a staircase from
Lamey’s Mill road to the Sea Wall, False Creek South; Vancouver,
BC Duration:
6 hours Text: Daybreak by Friedrich Nietzsche Pages:
Lines: 223 |
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It was either the old man or the gardener… or perhaps
it was another… It does not matter who it was since it is always
the same person, always one who is near death and joyless, always
a life thoroughly unlived that decides it will act in the interest
of the greater good and sweep away words that it has never bothered
to read, efforts that it must always fail to recognize.
Such artworks as Daybreak are public in every sense. They are not monuments but tenuous,
ephemeral offerings. It is understood and expected, not only by me
but by the majority of people who encounter such work that nature
will erase everything… in its own way and in its own time. All the same, such artworks must appear as an unbearable
outbreak of beauty, or at least freedom, for the joyless, for the
hate-filled, for those who mistake adopted opinion for thought and
who must ceaselessly demonstrate such self-awareness, confusing
such activity with living.
I should not allow the single destroyer to affect me…
there were so many others, thoughtful ones, even thankful ones. But
such is the problem with destruction… it is boundless and it is constantly spilling over its frail human containers, seeping
into everything.
I can see the negator, with his broom faced with what must
have been a paradigmatic case of all that is wrong. It had
to be removed. Yet, in attempting to erase the words he was betraying
a profound encounter with literature… the most profound possible.
He was penetrated, compromised, colonized, by literature. As such
he became literally possessed. I can see him wild-eyed, in
the midst of words that are not his but that have overtaken him, opened
him. I see him with his broom, sweeping away ‘one can deliberately give oneself
over to the wild and unrestrained gratification of a drive in order
to generate disgust with it’. I see him madly attempting to
remove ‘this final tragedy of the drive for distinction’.
And I can hear his broom erasing ‘for once be your own accuser
and executioner’. And at last I can hear him exhale, exhausted
and empty, content with his discontent, brushing away the last traces
of ‘little deviant acts are worth more’. |
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One
day later (swept clean by hateful hands) |
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| You look
up when you wish to be exalted; and I look down, because I am exalted. |
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all special thanks
to Joel Snowden who videotaped the performance and to Kedrick James for phenomenological aid |
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