1908 FUTURIST MANIFESTO
F.T. Marinetti, "The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" 1908
We had been up all night, my friends and I, under the Oriental lamps with their pierced copper domes starred like our souls--for from them too burst the trapped lightning of an electric heart. We had tramped out at length on the luxurious carpets from the East our inherited sloth, disputing beyond the extremes of logic and blackening much paper with frenzied writing.
An immense pride swelled our chests because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alert and upright like magnificent beacons and advance guard posts confronting the army of enemy stars staring down from their heavenly encampments. Alone with the stokers working before the infernal fires of the great ships; one with the black phantoms that poke into the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched at mad speed; alone with the drunks reeling with their uncertain flapping of wings around the city walls.
Suddenly we started at the formidable sound of the enormous double-decked trams that jolted past, magnificent in multicolored lights like villages at holiday time that the flooded Po has suddenly rocked and wrenched from their foundations to carry over the cascades and through the whirlpools of a flood, down to the sea.
Then the silence became profound. But while we were listening to the interminable mumbled praying of the old canal and the creaking bones of the moribund palaces on their mossy, dank foundations, we suddenly heard automobiles roaring voraciously beneath our windows.
"Let's go!" I said, "Let's go, friends! Let's go out. Mythology and the
Mystic Ideal are finally overcome. We are about to witness the birth of
the centaur and soon we shall see the first angels fly! ... The doors of
life must be taken to test the hinges and bolts! ... Let's take off!
Behold the very first dawn on earth! There is nothing to equal the
splendor of the sun's rose-colored sword as it duels for the first time
in our thousand-year darkness! . . ."
We went up to the three snorting beasts to pat lovingly their torrid breasts. I stretched out on my machine like a corpse on a bier; but I revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that menaced my stomach.
The furious sweep of madness took us out of ourselves and hurled us through streets as rough and deep as stream beds. Here and there a sick lamp in a window taught us to mistrust the fallacious mathematics of our wasted eyes.
I cried, "The scent! The scent is enough for the beasts! . . ."
And we like young lions pursued Death with his black pelt spotted with pale crosses, streaking across the violet sky so alive and vibrant.
Yet we had no ideal lover reaching her sublime face to the clouds, nor a cruel queen to whom to offer our bodies, twisted in the forms of Byzantine rings! Nothing to die for except the desire to free ourselves at last from our too exigent courage!
And we sped on, squashing the watchdogs on their doorsteps who curled up under our scorching tires like starched collars under a flat-iron. Death, domesticated, overtook me at every turn to graciously offer me her paw, and from time to time she would stretch out on the ground with the sound of grinding teeth to cast up soft caressing glances from every puddle.
"Let's break away from rationality as out of a horrible husk and throw
ourselves like pride-spiced fruit into the immense distorted mouth of the
wind! Let's give ourselves up to the unknown, not out of desperation but
to plumb the deep pits of the absurd!"
I had hardly spoken these words when suddenly I spun around with a drunken lurch like a dog trying to bite his tail, and there all at once coming towards me were two cyclists, wavering in front of me like two equally persuasive but contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was being disputed right in my way .... What a nuisance! Auff!... I stopped short and-- disgusting--was hurled, wheels in the air, into a ditch....
"Oh! maternal ditch, almost to the top with muddy water! Fair factory
drainage ditch! I avidly savored your nourishing muck, remembering the
holy black breast of my Sudanese nurse .... When I got out from under the
upturned car--torn, filthy, and stinking--I felt the red hot iron of joy
pass over my heart!
A crowd of fishermen armed with their poles, and some gouty naturalists were already crowding around the wonder. With patient and meticulous care they put up a high framework and enormous iron nets to fish out my automobile like a great beached shark. The machine emerged slowly, shedding at the bottom like scales its heavy body so sound, and its soft upholstery so comfortable.
They thought it was dead, my fine shark, but the stroke of my hand was enough to restore it to life, and there it was living again, speeding along once more on its powerful fins.
So, with face smeared in good waste from the factories--a plaster of metal slag, useless sweat, and celestial soot-- bruised, arms bandaged, but undaunted, we declare our primary intentions to all living men of the earth:
It is in Italy that we hurl this overthrowing and inflammatory declaration, with which today we found Futurism, for we will free Italy from her numberless museums which cover her with countless cemeteries.
Museums, cemeteries! ... Identical truly, in the sinister promiscuousness of so many objects unknown to each other. Public dormitories, where one is forever slumbering beside hated or unknown beings. Reciprocal ferocity of painters and sculptors murdering each other with blows of form and color in the same museum.
That a yearly visit be paid there as one visits the grave of dead relatives, once a year! ... We are ready to grant it! ... That an annual offering of flowers be laid at the feet of the Gioconda, we conceive it! ... But to take for a daily walk through the museums our spleen, lack of courage, and morbid restlessness, we will not grant it! ... Why will you poison yourselves? Why will you decay?
What can one see in an old picture except the artist's laborious contortions, struggling to overcome the insuperable barriers ever resisting his desire to express his entire dream?
To admire an old picture is to pour our sentiment into a funeral urn instead of hurling it forth in violent gushes of action and productiveness. Will you thus consume your best strength in this useless admiration of the past from which you will forcibly come out exhausted, lessened, and trampled?
In truth, this daily frequenting of museums, libraries, and academies (those graveyards of vain efforts, those Mount Calvaries of crucified dreams, those registers of broken-down springs! ... ) is to the artist as the too-prolonged government of parents for intelligent young people, inebriated with their talent and ambitious will.
For the dying, invalids, and prisoners, let it pass. Perhaps the admirable past acts as a salve on their wounds, as they are forever debarred from the future. . . But we will have none of it, we the young, the strong, the living futurists! . . .
Therefore welcome the kindly incendiarists with the carbon fingers! Here they-are! ... Here! ... Away and set fire to the bookshelves! ... Turn the canals and flood the vaults of museums! ... Oh! Let the glorious old pictures float adrift! Seize pickax and hammer! Sap the foundations of the venerable towns!
The oldest among us are thirty; we have thus at least ten years in which to accomplish our task. When we are forty, let others--younger and more daring men--throw us into the wastepaper basket like useless manuscripts! ... They will come against us from far away, from everywhere, leaping on the cadence of their first poems, clawing the air with crooked fingers and scenting at the academy gates the good smell of our decaying minds already promised to the catacombs of libraries.
But we shall not be there. They will find us at least, on a winter's night, in the open country, in a sad, iron shed pitter- pattered by the monotonous rain, huddled round our trepidating airplanes, warming our hands at the miserable fire made with our present-day books flickering merrily in the sparkling flight of their images.
They will mutiny around us, panting with anguish and spite, exasperated one and all by our proud dauntless courage, they will rush to kill us, their hatred so much the stronger as their hearts will be overwhelmed with love and admiration for us! And powerful and healthsome Injustice will then burst radiantly in their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, and injustice.
The oldest among us are thirty, yet we have already squandered treasures, treasures of strength, love, daring, and eager will, hastily, raving, without reckoning, never stopping, breathlessly. Look at us! We are not exhausted .... Our heart is not in the least weary! For it has been nourished on fire, hatred, and speed! You are astonished? It is because you do not even remember living! ...
Erect on the pinnacle of the world, we once more hurl forth our defiance to the stars.
Your objections? Enough! Enough! I know them! I quite understand what our splendid and mendacious intelligence asserts. We are, it says, but the result and continuation of our ancestors. --Perhaps! Be it so! ... What of that? But we will not listen! Beware of repeating such infamous words! Rather hold your head up!
Erect on the pinnacle of the world we hurl forth once more our defiance to the stars! . . .
Originally published in Le Figaro (Paris) (20 February 1909). First English translation, made under Marinetti's direction, from Poesia (April-June 1909). Reprinted in the catalogue for the exhibition at Sackville Gallery, London, March 1912. First part, "Foundation," translated by Joshua C. Taylor.