Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (48 page)

BOOK: Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben)

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What is this doctrine? Let us see.

1. “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and daring.” In the first proposition it seems to me that Futurism becomes Past-ism. Is all this not in Homer?

2. “The essential elements of our poetry shall be courage, audacity, and rebelliousness.” Is all that not already in the entire classic cycle?

3. “Literature having up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber, we intend to exalt aggressive motion, feverish insomnia, the gymnastic gait, the mortal leap, the punch, and the slap.” I think that many of these things are already in Homer, and that Pindar is an excellent poet of sports.

4. “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched with a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A race car, its hood adorned with thick tubes like serpents with fiery breath . . . a roaring automobile that seems to run on machine-gun bullets, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” I fail to understand the comparison. Which is more beautiful, a naked woman or a storm? A lily or a cannon-blast? Should one, as Mendès suggests, reread the preface to
Cromwell
?

5. “We intend to sing hymns to the man at the wheel, whose beautiful ideal is launched forth from the Earth into the circuit of its orbit.” If not in the modern way of understanding, one could always return to antiquity in search of Bellerophon or Mercury.

6. “The poet must spend himself in heat, light, and prodigality, in order to increase the enthusiastic light of the primordial elements.” Plausible. Of course this is an impulse of youth and consciousness, of one’s own vigor.

7. “There is no beauty except in struggle. There is no masterpiece that is not aggressive in nature. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, in order to impose on them the sovereignty of man.” Apollo and Anphion inferior to Herakles? The unknown forces are not tamed with violence. And at any rate, for the poet there
are
no unknown forces.

8. “We stand upon the last promontory of the centuries. . . . Why look behind us, since we must break through the doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We live now in the Absolute, for we have now created eternal, omnipotent speed.” Oh, Marinetti! The automobile is a poor carapaced thing in a dream before the eternal Destruction that is revealed, for example, in the recent horror of Trinacria.

9. “We intend to glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive work of anarchists, beautiful Ideas that kill, contempt for women.” The innovative poet has revealed himself to be Oriental, Nietzschean, and in thrall to an anarchistic and destructive violence. But why, then, all these articles and rules? As for War being the world’s best and only hygiene, there is always the Plague.

10. “We intend to demolish museums and libraries, to combat moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic, utilitarian forms of cowardice.”

11. “We shall sing hymns to the great multitudes stirred by work, pleasure, and uproar: the many-colored, polyphonic tides of revolutions in the capitals of the modern world, arsenals vibrating at night, shipyards under violent electric moons [...],
⁵⁵gluttonous stations that swallow smoking serpents, bridges leaping gymnastically over the diabolical cutlery of sunny rivers, adventurous steamers sniffing at the horizon, broad-chested locomotives pawing at the rails like huge iron steeds bridled with long tubes, and the sleek flight of aeroplanes with propellers that crack and clatter like flags and cheering multitudes.” All this is wondrously enthusiastic and, above all, wondrously juvenile. It is a platform of youth, and because it is, it has its inherent virtues and its inescapable, essential weaknesses.

The Futurists, speaking through their main leader, say that this manifesto has been proclaimed in Italy (though it is written in French, like all respectable manifestos must be) because they want to “free Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists,
ciceroni,
and antiquarians.” They say that Italy must no longer be the
grand marché des brocanteurs.
⁵⁶We are not, of course, in the full bloom of Futurism when it is Italian professors who call upon a Theodore Roosevelt or an Emilio Mitre to educate their respective nations.

It is very difficult to transform widely held ideas, and infiltration into human collectives must be done through successive layers. The museums are cemeteries, you say? Let us not
peladanicemos
⁵⁷too much. There are dead men in marble and bronze in parks and along boulevards, and although it is true that some aesthetic ideas resist the agglomeration that occurs in those official edifices, for the moment we have not been able to discover anything to replace those orderly catalogued exhibits. The
Salons
? That’s another thing.

Marinetti’s main idea is that everything lies in the future, and almost nothing in the past. In an old painting he sees nothing but “the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely.” But has modernity achieved complete expression? If it is at most a bouquet of flowers every year that one is to be allowed to take, funereally, to the
Gioconda,
what shall we do with the contemporary painters of golf and the automobile? And “Onward!” he says. But where? If Time and Space no longer exist, is it not the same to go Backward as Forward?

The oldest of us, says Marinetti, is thirty years old. That says it all. They give themselves ten years to do their work, and then they immediately turn themselves over to those that come next. “They will rise against us—
when the Futurists are forty!
—panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud and tireless courage, will rush to kill us, with a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts are drunken with love and admiration for us.”

And in that tone the ode continues—with the same speed and impetus!

Oh, how wonderful is youth! I feel a certain nostalgia for impulsive spring when I consider that I shall be among the devoured, for I am over forty now. And, in its violence, I applaud Marinetti’s intention, because I see it from the standpoint of a poet’s work—a poet anxious, yearning, courageous, who wants to ride the sacred horse off into new horizons. You will find in all these things a great deal of excess; the wound of war is too impetuous, but who besides young men, who have that first strength and that constant hope, can manifest impetuous and excessive attempts?

The only thing that I find worthless is the manifesto. Although Marinetti has, with his vehement works, proven that he has an admirable talent and is able to fill his mission with Beauty, I do not believe that his manifesto does anything but inspire a goodly number of imitators to do “Futurism” to an extreme—many of them, surely, as always happens, without the talent or the poetry of an innovator. In the good old days of Symbolism, there were also manifestos from leaders of schools, from Moreas to Ghil. And where did all that get us? The Naturalists also “manifested,” and several ephemeral schools, such as Positivism, found echo in Brazil. There have been other schools since, and other aesthetic proclamations. The oldest of all these literary revolutionaries has not been thirty.

Bald D’Annuzio, I don’t know how old he is now, and look, Marinetti—the glorious Italian still enjoys marvelous health after that lovely bomb that tried to demolish him. Gods depart, and that is all to the good. If they didn’t, there would be no room for us all in this poor world. D’Annuzio will be departing soon enough. And other gods will come, and they will go when their day comes, and so on, until the final cataclysm blows this ball we are all riding to eternity to bits, and with it all the dreams, all the hopes, all the impetus, and all the illusions of the ephemeral king of creation. The Future is the unending cycle of Life and Death. It is the past backward. We must take advantage of the energies in the moment, joined as we are in the process of universal existence. And afterward, we shall sleep quietly for ever and ever. Amen.

On Art

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

The Influence of the Sense of Beauty

... egli tenne lontano il volgo profano dal temple belisimo ed accesible al soli iniziati in cui sée compiaciutu de collocare la sua meravigliesa poesia.
—D. OLIVA

The English author Richard Le Gallienne, who is scandalized by the young men of the
Yellow Book,
has recently published a volume containing things quite miscellaneous: disheartening judgments on modern art, psychological digressions, something on Copernicus and on “humour,” and other pieces—a stew, a salad of things, all with a vague hue of scholarly sentimentalism. And in this book, one may read the following declaration:

It is quite curious that in our time, among those artists called
decadents,
the influence of the sense of Beauty is affirmed not as “spiritualizing” but rather, on the contrary, as
“materializ
ing” and degrading. Even when—as I dare say in its worst forms—decadent art is not the expression of a mental and
spir
itual disease, even when it retains a certain innocence and a
cer
tain health, it does all it can to wrap itself in pure sensuality.

It directs itself only to the sensual eye, the sensual ear, and it desperately attempts to limit beauty to form and color,
ignor
ing and disdaining the sensibilities of the heart and the spirit.

II.

These ideas—which seem so terribly unfair to one who knows the tendencies, the fundamental ideas of those seekers of the ideal who throughout the world (and especially in France) proclaim the kingdom of unified and sovereign Art—should surprise all those who have entered the sanctuary of the school rubber-stamped by journalists and official critics with the seal of Decadence. Without going so far as to the greater stars—to Poe and Wagner, the great, chaste beings who have given life to Ligeias and Parsifals—the penetrating observer who takes an unprejudiced, honest look at the matter will see that the work of these new writers occupies mainly the region of Pure Ideas, Daydream (some may say Fantasy), and Mystery. To whom do we owe the recent yearning after spiritual flight, the greater impulse toward the unknown, the tendency to the knowledge of first causes, the renaissance of mysticism, the renewal of the antique symbols, the exploration of the immense ancient forests of History in which the occult temples of past religions may be found?

The “Decadents,” it is true, have consecrated a great part of their concern to the excellencies of form, but they have not dwelled only in the marmoreal world of Greece, so beloved of the academic schools for its nature limited, linear, and comprehensive. No, they have sought everywhere for the profound manifestations of the universal soul; they have seen in the Orient a world of strange initiations; they have found in the North a vast region of dreams and mysteries; they have recognized and proclaimed the immanence and totality of Art; they have cast off all the ballast that weighed down the wings of the psyche; they have attempted to achieve a definitive form, and with it the immortal, triumphant life of the Work of Art. Never, since the times when the great works of mysticism flowered, has the soul had a greater number of priests and soldiers; never has there been such thirst for God, such desire to penetrate the unknowable and the arcane, as in these times, when there have appeared messengers of a high victory, worshipers of a supreme ideal, those great artists who have been called Decadents.

It is to them that the world owes the current triumph of Legend, by which forgotten visions of Poesy have been illuminated; to them is owed the holy impulse toward Faith, and today’s defenses and dikes against the perilous trials of science; to Wagner, the immaterial flowering of artistic ecstasy and the most profound understanding of the Mass; to Verlaine the Catholic, the most admirable liturgical hymns, the finest cantos since Jacopone da Todi to that purest and most august of symbols, the adorable Mystery of the Virgin; to Baudelaire, the unknown decorations of Sin, illuminated by the “new light” of his visionary lyrics; to Mallarmé, rare sensations of the immaterial life and graspable veils of the attire of dream. . . . Who but Poe and his followers have penetrated the night of Death? Who more than Léon Bloy has glimpsed the formidable and apocalyptic enigma of Prostitution?

III.

What repulses Le Gallienne in Decadent art is, no doubt, the inevitable appearance of carnal love in all its manifestations. Carnal love can turn even the head of St. John the Divine, when he contemplates one of his most portentous and terrible visions: “And there came one of the seven angels [and] he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration. And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns.”

Or Dante, to whom appears