This has carried me through, this act of making.
For my work I hope to embody the wonder of being. The total unspeakable wonder of being, something beyond magic or god … a project that is doomed to fail and yet to undertake that which is futile with absolute optimism.
There are heroes truly of life who strive though striving is in vain. Doing so because adherence to an ethic demands it.
Profoundly did Martin Luther King, jr. stand and deliver his last speech. Who would have begrudged him the right to live to fight another day? Who would have denied him the right to step aside in the face of threats? What reasonable person would have denied him the right to salvage his own being? History would not have blamed him.
Most personal to me is knowing Derrida tended to his work, the act of thinking of venir in the face of his own extinction … his own erasure. A ghost already, he dwelled on and spoke of what was to come … in spite of knowing we would have been reasonable and excused him to tend rather to his illness and his own death. He did not accept the release from the responsibility of his ethic that our reasonable understanding would have granted him.
With nothing to serve but the standing for an ethic in the face of assured failure but nothing to reward this act but the absolute optimism of believing in this ethic. To stand and deliver because it is what you live for. It is the thing that is meaning, the thing that solves the existentialist crisis.
In my small way let me be like them. When confronted with failure, without promise of personal benefit, in fact in the face of assured loss … in some small way let me make the case for my optimism. It is through these drips and drabs that our goal is accomplished … an unattainable something, a thing that cannot be achieved.
Let me make this case for the sentimental, romantic and beautiful. Yes save the world but let us make a world worth saving punctuated by moments of an internal understanding something more than this doing …
Martin Luther King jr
