Manifesto

All that is solid melts into air.

To put out a manifesto, you must want A, B,

C to fulminate against 1, 2, 3.

To fly into a rage, and sharpen your wings

to conquer and disseminate little A, B, C's and big A,

B, C's, To sign, shout, swear.

To prove you're nonplus ultra.

To organize prose into a form of absolute

and irrefutable evidence.

I'm against action.

I'm for continuous contradiction,

for affirmation,.

Too I am neither for nor against.

And I do not explain because I hate common sense.

I'm writing a manifesto because I have nothing to say.

I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince.

I have no right to drag others into my river.

I oblige no one to follow me.

And everyone practices his art in his own way,

if he knows the joy that rises like arrows

to the astral layers, or that other joy

that goes down into the minds of corpse

flowers and fertile spasms.

Does anyone think he has found a psychic base

common to all mankind?

How can one expect to put order into the chaos

that constitutes that infinite and shapeless variation...

Man?

Want to do it again?

Do it again. Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

This is so much fun.

An old world is dying.

A new one is being born.

Capitalist civilization, which has dominated

the economic, political, and cultural life of continents,

is in the process of decay.

It is now breeding new and devastating wars.

The prevailing economic crisis is placing greater and greater

burdens upon the mass of the world's population,

upon those who work with hand or brain.

The present crisis has stripped capitalism naked.

It stands more revealed than ever

as a system of robbery and fraud, unemployment

and terror, starvation and war.

The general crisis of capitalism is reflected in its culture.

The economic and political machinery of the bourgeoisie

is in decay.

Its philosophy, its literature, and its art are bankrupt.

In this period of change, the role of the artist

can only be that of the revolutionary.

It is his duty to destroy the last remnants

of an empty, irksome aesthetic, arousing

the creative instinct still slumbering

unconscious in the human mind.

Our art is the art of a revolutionary period,

simultaneously the reaction of a world going under,

and the herald of a new era.

We glorify the revolution aloud

as the only engine of life.

We glorify the vibrations of the inventors.

Young and strong, they carry the flaming

torch of the revolution.

This is the place where the virtuous

of spirits, the and the..

Ah, be off with ya'.

My friends and I stayed up all night

debating at the utmost boundaries of logic

and filling up masses of paper with our frenetic writings.

At long last, all the myths and mystical ideas are behind us.

We believe that this Wonderful world has been further

enriched by a new beauty...

The beauty of speed.

We want to sing about the love of danger,

about the use of energy and recklessness

as common daily practice.

We intend to glorify aggressive action...

Life at the double, the slap, and the punching fist.

We wish to glorify war and beautiful ideas

worth dying for.

The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us

as the suffering of an electric lamp.

We will destroy the cult of the past, the obsession

with the ancients and academic formalism.

We want our country free from the endless number

of museums that everywhere cover her like countless graveyards.

Shit to Florence, Montmartre, Munich.

Shit to dictionaries, good tastisms, orientalism,

academicism.

Shit to Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Goethe,

beshitted dilettantisms.

Shit to Montagna, Wagner, Beethoven,

Whitnam and Baudelaire.

Look at us.

We're not exhausted yet.

Our hearts feel no weariness, for they feed on fire,

on hatred, and on speed.

Let the reign of a divine electric light begin at last.

Make room for youth, for violence, for daring.

How day will eventually break...

Who knows'?

But we can feel the morning.

We are no longer moonstruck Wanderers roaming dreamily

in the pale light of history.

A cool, early morning wind is blowing around us.

He who doesn't want to shiver must stride out.

And we, and all of those striding with us,

see, in the distance, the early light of the awakening morning.

Glassy and bright, a new world shines out in the early light.

It's sending out its first rays, the first gleam

of jubilant dawn.

Decades, generations, and the great sum of art

will begin its victorious course.

Today, more than ever, we believe

in our will, which creates for us the only life value.

And that value is ever lasting change.

Time to get up, love.

Se ya', love.

See ya', Mom.

We fight without respite

against traditionalist cowardice.

We no longer feel ourselves to be the men of the cathedrals,

the palaces, and the podiums.

We are the men of the great hotels,

luminous arcades, straight roads and beneficial demolitions.

Let us overturn monuments, pavements, flights of steps.

Let us sink the streets and squares.

Let us raze the level of the city.

We must invent and rebuild it, like an immense

and tumultuous shipyard...

Agile, mobile, dynamic in every detail.

And our houses must be like gigantic machines.

Above the tempest of our week days,

across the ashes and cinded homes of the past,

before the gates of the vacant future, I proclaim today,

to you artists...

Painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, poets-

to you people to whom art is no mere ground for conversation,

but the source of real exultation...

My word and deed.

I have transformed myself in the zero of form,

and have fished myself out of the rubbishy sloth

of academic art.

Objects have vanished like smoke.

I have destroyed the ring of the horizon,

and gone out of the circle of objects...

This accursed horizon ring that has imprisoned the artist,

and leads him away from the game of destruction.

Forms move and are born.

And we are forever making new discoveries.

What we discover must not be concealed.

It is absurd to force our age into the forms of a bygone age.

Life must be purified of the clutter of the past

so that it can be brought to its normal evolution.

Art should not advance towards abbreviation or simplification,

but towards complexity.

The Venus de Milo is a graphic example of decline.

It's not a real woman, but a parody.

Angela's David is a defamation.

All the masters of the Renaissance

achieved great results in anatomy.

But they did not achieve veracity in their impressions

of the body.

Those artists were officials making an inventory

of nature's property.

The living was turned into a motionless, dead state.

Come and find me.

Got you.

You're cheating.

Here, we cast anchor in rich ground.

Ghosts, drunk on energy, we dig the trident

into unsuspecting flesh.

We are a downpour of maledictions, as tropically

abundant as vertiginous vegetation.

Rubber and rain are our sweat.

We bleed and burn.

We thirst.

Our blood is vigor.

I say unto you, there is no beginning.

And we do not tremble.

We are not sentimental.

We are furious wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds

and prayers, preparing the spectacle of disaster, fire,

decomposition.

We will put an end to mourning, and replace

tears by sirens screeching from one continent to another.

Pavilions of intense joy and widowers

with the sadness of poison.

To lick the penumbra and float in the big mouth

filled with honey and excrement.

I spread demoralization wherever I

go, and cast my hand from heaven to hell,

my eyes from hell to heaven.

One dies as a hero or as an idiot, which is the same thing.

The only word that is not ephemeral is the word death.

You probably enjoy life, but you've got some bad habits.

You're too fond of what you've been taught to be fond of.

Cemeteries, melancholy, the tragic lover,

Venetian gondolas.