Vertigo

I made this piece with the energy of precarious progress, like each step across a tightrope. While balancing along a painted line and balancing on a narrow beam several meters off the ground are almost mechanically identical, the peril of the latter adds excitment. Peril engages you. It makes you feel alive. As Malcolm Gladwell explained in David and Goliath, Londoners during the blitz had some of the lowest rates of existential crisis and depression. Traumatised as they were in many ways, very few of them felt aimless or purposeless. It’s what keeps adrenaline junkies, motorcycle riders and stuntmen risking themselves over and over again. It’s a hook that has snagged many a gambling addict: The stakes make it real which makes you feel alive. You run the fastest when you are being chased.

This piece is an acknowledgement of the vital role that negative experience plays in making life engaging, an expression of gratitude for peril, and a celebration of adventure. There can be no story without antagonsim.