Dust of the Dust
“What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence.
The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon?
Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?”
(Friedrich Nietzsche – German Philosopher, 1844-1900.)
This is another picture from the series shot in my street in Varanasi (Benaras) while four men were emptying plaster bags from a truck.
It was very dusty, although they reminded me “butoh” dancers performing with white-body makeup.
This japanese contemporary dance came after the second world war and among several things the choreography is a remembrance of the suffering of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb.
It raises the question of how is it still possible to dance after such a thing and in some ways it is easy to compare this concept of art to those workers living in dust.
