The Awful Daring of a Moment’s Surrender (from 'Waste Land')

The Waste Land series closes with the symbolic vision of the ruined church folly in The Awful Daring of a Moment’s Surrender (2010), which suggests a resistance to idealized notions of matrimony, recalling the poem’s closing lines; “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” through a slow motion, dreamlike narrative. This performance video ‘acts out’ the emotional repercussions of Waterman’s parents marital breakdown through role-play, drawing upon the poem’s eerie references to the “tumbled graves” (l.387) around “the empty chapel” (l.388) where “only the wind’s home” (l.388).