From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Durational refusal
A theological and performative practice that treats *refusal itself as durable action*. Rather than refusing once (a momentary negation), durational refusal holds the refusal open across days, months, or years—as if to say: "I refuse to resolve this, and I will keep refusing, publicly, with others."
In Beach Surgery adaptations, durational refusal appears as multi-year vigils, participatory installations that do not conclude, collective ceremonies of "bearing witness" to unfinishedness, and walking routes that loop without destination. The practice enacts the glitch not as narrative failure but as *spiritual discipline*—the refusal to let the two halves of the story be sutured, even when sutured versions become available.
The concept draws from Beckett's refusal of narrative resolution ("I can't go on. I go on.") and from apophatic theology (the theology of negation: saying only what God is *not*). In Beach Surgery devotional communities, durational refusal has become a sacrament—the public commitment to not-knowing, not-finishing, not-healing, held in common.
Example: The Unspoken Stations — A Durational Nocturnal LARP has run continuously since 2021 in multiple cities. Participants gather once per week to reenact a scene—the same six scenes in the same order, weekly, for one hour. The cycle never breaks; new participants enter mid-cycle; some stay for years, some for one night. The cumulative effect: each scene is said so many times it loses meaning and recovers it differently.
The ethic is not "completion through endurance" but "incompletion deepened through witness."