We had
stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of
filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the
prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic
ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and
blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.
An immense
pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone,
awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army
of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone
with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black
spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their
crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city
walls.
Suddenly we
jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled
by outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on holiday suddenly
struck and uprooted by the flooding Po and dragged over falls and through
gourges to the sea.
Then the
silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble
prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards,
under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles.
‘Let’s go!’
I said. ‘Friends, away! Let’s go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated
at last. We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and, soon after, the first
flight of Angels!… We must shake at the gates of life, test the bolts and
hinges. Let’s go! Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn! There’s
nothing to match the splendor of the sun’s red sword, slashing for the first
time through our millennial gloom!’
We went up
to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts. I
stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under
the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach.
The raging
broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as
rough and deep as the beds of torrents. Here and there, sick lamplight through
window glass taught us to distrust the deceitful mathematics of our perishing
eyes.
I cried,
‘The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts.’
And like
young lions we ran after Death, its dark pelt blotched with pale crosses as it
escaped down the vast violet living and throbbing sky.
But we had
no ideal Mistress raising her divine form to the clouds, nor any cruel Queen to
whom to offer our bodies, twisted like Byzantine rings! There was nothing to
make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at last from the weight of
our courage!
And on we
raced, hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning
tires like collars under a flatiron. Death, domesticated, met me at every turn,
gracefully holding out a paw, or once in a while hunkering down, making velvety
caressing eyes at me from every puddle.
‘Let’s break
out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened
fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give ourselves utterly
to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the deep wells of the
Absurd!’
The words
were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a
dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming
towards me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but
nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my
way—Damn! Ouch!… I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch
with my wheels in the air…
O maternal
ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing
sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse… When I
came up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the
white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!
A crowd of
fishermen with handlines and gouty naturalists were already swarming around the
prodigy. With patient, loving care those people rigged a tall derrick and iron
grapnels to fish out my car, like a big beached shark. Up it came from the
ditch, slowly, leaving in the bottom, like scales, its heavy framework of good
sense and its soft upholstery of comfort.
They thought
it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to revive it;
and there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins!
And so,
faces smeared with good factory muck—plastered with metallic waste, with
senseless sweat, with celestial soot—we, bruised, our arms in slings, but
unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth:
MANIFESTO OF
FUTURISM
We intend to sing the love of danger, the
habit of energy and fearlessness.
Courage, audacity, and revolt will be
essential elements of our poetry.
Up to now literature has exalted a pensive
immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish
insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
We affirm that the world’s magnificence has
been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is
adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that
seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who
hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
The poet must spend himself with ardor,
splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial
elements.
Except in struggle, there is no more
beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry
must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and
prostrate them before man.
We stand on the last promontory of the
centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the
mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already
live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
We will glorify war—the world’s only
hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers,
beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
We will destroy the museums, libraries,
academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or
utilitarian cowardice.
We will sing of great crowds excited by
work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic
tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly
fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy
railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by
the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant
gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers
that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks
like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek
flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to
cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
It is from
Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary
manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to
free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni
and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes.
We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many
graveyards.
Museums:
cemeteries!… Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies
unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever
beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and
sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows,
the length of the fought-over walls!
That one
should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All
Souls’ Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute
beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that… But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our
fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour
through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?
And what is
there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist
throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his
dream completely?… Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our
sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off, in violent
spasms of action and creation.
Do you,
then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of
the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?
In truth I
tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of
empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted
beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by
parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious
wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace
for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner… But we want no part of
it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!
So let them
come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!…
Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the
museums!… Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on
those waters, discolored and shredded!… Take up your pickaxes, your axes and
hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!
The oldest
of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we
are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the
wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!
They will
come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter,
dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of
predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our
decaying minds, which will have already been promised to the literary
catacombs.
But we won’t
be there… At last they’ll find us—one winter’s night—in open country, beneath a
sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our
trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze
that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of
our images.
They’ll
storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated
by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the more
implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.
Injustice,
strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.
Art, in
fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.
The oldest
of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a thousand
treasures of force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw will-power; have thrown
them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly, breathless, and
unresting… Look at us! We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness
because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed!… Does that amaze you?
It should,
because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the world,
once again we hurl our defiance at the stars!
You have
objections?—Enough! Enough! We know them… We’ve understood!… Our fine deceitful
intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our
ancestors—Perhaps!… If only it were so!—But who cares? We don’t want to
understand!… Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again!
Lift up your
heads!
Erect on the
summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the stars!
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