The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism
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F.T. Marinetti
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.
Lets go! I said. Friends, away! Lets go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal
are defeated at last. Were about to see the Centaurs birth and, soon
after, the first flight of Angels!... We must shake at the gates of life,
test the bolts and hinges. Lets go! Look there, on the earth, the very
first dawn! Theres nothing to match the splendor of the suns 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.
Lets break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like
pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Lets 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 wayDamn! 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 beast of my
Sudanese nurse... When I came uptorn, filthy, and stinkingfrom 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 muckplastered with metallic waste,
with senseless sweat, with celestial sootwe, bruised, our arms in slings,
but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth:
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Manifesto of Futurism
1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and
fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and
sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the
racers stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
4. We affirm that the worlds 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 breatha roaring car that seems
to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. 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.
6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to
swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. We will glorify warthe worlds only hygienemilitarism, patriotism,
the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth
dying for, and scorn for woman.
10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will
fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
11. 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.
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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&151that I grant. That once a year one should leave a
floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that... But I dont 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 manuscriptswe 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 wont be there... At last theyll find usone winters nightin open
country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. Theyll 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.
Theyll 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... Weve understood!...
Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and
extension of our ancestorsPerhaps!... If only it were so!But who cares? We
dont 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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