There is a theme of resistance. I thought the beauty of free will is love and thought and, and struggle, and here is struggle, and my love for those that do so, for those who turn into the wind and push as hard as they can. Everywhere you see it here: tenacity, attrition…and it makes people glow. It makes me think if you took every person at any given moment and brought them together into a singular point of energy it…Jesus, well, can you imagine? Will this happen? When the universe reaches its apogee, piques, and instantly rewinds in on itself, time and space snapping back, collapsing back, for an instant will we all live our lives again in reverse, every person ever, the individual universe that each person is alight for this instant, a cold blue flame of this struggle and resistance and this love?

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

This isn’t a matter of romance; what it is a matter of motivation and purpose. The Existentialists gave the simple will too much credit I think. Or maybe they didn’t give the mechanisms we face in life enough. Sisyphus bears the rock for eternity, and that’s a beautiful thing, but the will cannot stand alone , the will needs to be bolstered with hope, love, defiance, with rage against that rock. Ennui and anomie are out of fashion right now.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

This isn’t a philosophy, or even an entire line of thought. What it is is part of an observation.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

And I think this struggle can near often the end in itself, the struggle and the love it’s based upon. We build constructs, artifices of reason to live and die for, love and religion and money and patriotism and art and… The truth of any of these is disputable, but the struggle for them, the resistance against what opposes them or for the fostering of them, it is indisputable.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Nietzsche:

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting and exploiting suffering and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness – was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

From Beyond Good and Evil, section 225, translated by Walter Kaufmann.