FT Marinetti Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (Feb. 11, 1909)
We stayed up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose copper domes pierced our souls also had electric hearts yet . And while trampling our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we discussed border extremes of logic and scratched the paper demented writings.
An immense pride swelled our chests, to feel standing alone, like lighthouses or like sentinels, facing the army of the enemy star, camped in their celestial bivouacs. Only with the engineers in the infernal boilers of large vessels, only with the black ghosts that forage in the red-bellied locomotives terrified, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls!
And here we are suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that pass a start, colorful lights, such as hamlets party that undermines the Po overflowed suddenly uprooted and, for cause, over the waterfalls and eddies of a deluge, until the sea
Then the silence grew worse. As we listened to the prayers of the old canal and exhausted crunching the bones of palaces moribund in their green beard, suddenly roared beneath our windows hungry automobiles.
- Come, I say, my friends! Let's go! Finally mythology and mysticism are the Ideal surpassed. We will attend the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! - It will shake the gates of life to try out the hinges and locks! ... Let's go! Surely the first sunrise on earth! ... Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which fenced for the first time in our darkness millennia.
We approached the three snorting machines to flatter their breasts. I lay down on mine like a corpse in his coffin, but I suddenly resurrected under the steering wheel - blade of the guillotine - that threatened my stomach.
The big broom of madness we tore ourselves and we drove through the streets as steep and deep streams dried up. Here and there, lights unfortunate, windows, taught us to despise our mathematical eyes.
- The flair, I cried, enough flair to beasts! ...
And we hunted, like young lions, Death in black fur dappled pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast mauve sky, palpable and alive.
And yet we had no ideal Mistress raising its height to the clouds, no cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into Byzantine rings! ... Die for nothing except the desire to finally rid us of our courage too heavy!
We were crushing on the doorsteps watchdogs, who rounded flattened under our tires burning, like a collar on an iron iron.
Death coaxed me was ahead at every turn to offer me gently paw, and in turn went down to ground level with a shrill noise in my jaw looks velvety flowing from the bottom of puddles.
- Get out of Wisdom as a matrix and enter hideous, like fruit spiced with pride, the huge mouth and torso of the wind! ...
Give us food to the Unknown, not despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd! As I said
these words, I suddenly tacked on myself with the mad intoxication of poodles who bite the tail, that is all to I hit two cyclists disapproved, staggering in front of me and two arguments persuasive and yet contradictory. Their rippling discussing stupid on my property ... How boring! Ugh! ... I cut short, and disgust, I flanked it - wham! - Head over heels into a ditch ...
Oh! maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! Ditch the factory! I enjoyed your mouth full invigorating mud reminds me of the holy black teat of my Sudanese nurse!
As I drew my body, muddy and smelly mop, I felt the hot iron of joy deliciously pierce my heart.
A crowd of fishermen line and gouty naturalists had stirred up with terror around the prodigy. In a patient soul and finicky, they erected huge hawks very high iron, for catching my car, like a large shark stuck. She emerged slowly dropping into the ditch, like scales, its heavy body and his sense of comfort upholstery.
We thought he was dead, my good shark, but I woke up one stroke on his back all-powerful, and he is risen, running at full speed on its fins.
Then the masked good mud plants, full of metal slag, unnecessary sweating and soot celestial trampled on our arms in slings, from the lament of the wise anglers and naturalists sorry, we dittany our first wills all men live Earth:
Futurist Manifesto
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and sleep, we want to exalt movements aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the punch.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car that seems to run on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man holding the steering wheel, whose ideal stem crosses the Earth, launched itself on the circuit of its orbit.
6. Let the poet spends with warmth, sparkle and extravagance, to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. There is more beauty in the struggle. No masterpiece without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault against the unknown forces, to warn her to bed before the man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! ... What good look behind us, the moment that we must break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, since we have already created eternal omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt of women.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We sing the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure or revolt, and the multicolored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of arsenals and shipyards under their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations Eaters snakes who smoke ; factories hung on clouds by the strings of their smoke; bridges the bounds of gymnasts started on the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: the adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; locomotives in large chest, which prancing on the rails, like huge steel horses bridled with long tubes, and the gliding flight airplanes, including the propeller slamming flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
is in Italy that we launch this manifesto of violence and upsetting incendiary, by which we base today Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, Cicero and antique shops.
Italy has too long been the largest market of junk. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover the countless cemeteries.
museums, graveyards ... Really identical in their sinister jostling of bodies that do not know. Public dormitories where you sleep forever side by side with the hated or unknown beings. Reciprocal ferocity painters and sculptors killing each other with blows of line and color in the same museum.
That makes a visit there every year as we see his dead once a year ... We can admit it! ... Is deposited even flowers once a year to feet from the Mona Lisa, we understand! ... But we go walking every day in museums our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety, we do not admit! ... Do you want to poison you? Do you want to rot?
What can we find good in an old picture except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break the insurmountable barriers to his desire to express his dream completely?
Admiring an old picture is to pay our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of the forward jet launch violent creation and action. Do you wish to spoil your best forces in and admiration useless in the past, you always come out exhausted, diminished, trampled? In truth
daily attendance of museums, libraries and academies (those cemeteries of wasted effort, these crosses of crucified dreams, registers of these impulses broken !...) is for artists what the guardianship extended relatives for bright young people, drunk with their talent and their ambitious desire.
For the dying, the disabled and prisoners, still happening. That may be a balm to their wounds that the admirable past, at the time that the future is forbidden ... But we want not we, the young, strong and living Futurists!
come so good arsonists burnt fingers! ... Here they are! Here they are! ... So fire and tips to library shelves! Divert the flow channels to flood the museum vaults! ... Oh! they swim to drift, the glorious stars! To you the picks and hammers! Sapez the foundation of venerable towns!
The older among us thirty years, so we at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we have forty years, as younger and more courageous as we please throw us the basket like useless manuscripts! ... They will against us from afar, from everywhere, jumping on the light cadence of their first poems, clawing the air with their crooked fingers, and sniffing at the gates of the academies, the smell of rotting our minds, already promised to the catacombs of libraries.
But we will not be there. They will find us at last, for a winter night in the countryside, in a sad hangar by rain strums monotonous, crouching close to our airplanes hectic, warming up our hands on the wretched fire which our books will TODAY 'hui brand sparkling merrily in the theft of their images. They
rioting around us, panting with anxiety and resentment, and all exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage will set off to kill us with more hatred than their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong and healthy Injustice will burst radiantly in their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty and injustice.
The older among us thirty years, and yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage and fierce will, hastily, in delirium, without counting, arm circumference, breathlessly.
Look at us! We are not out of breath ... Our heart has not the slightest tired! Because it was nourished by fire, hatred and speed! ... That surprises you! Is that you do not even remember having lived! Standing on top of the world, we launch once again the challenge to the stars!
Your objections? Enough! Enough! I know! Of course! We know what our beautiful false intelligence affirms us. - We are, she says, that the summary and extension of our ancestors. - Maybe! Let! ... Who cares? ... But we do not want to hear! Beware of repeating these infamous words! Raise your head instead!
Standing on top of the world, we launch Once again the challenge to the stars!
FT Marinetti
Director Poesia
Milan - Via Senato, 2
Posted by Le Figaro, February 20, 1909 and Poesia , No. 1-2, February-March 1909.
