We had stayed awake all night — my friends and I — beneath mosque lamps with domes of pierced brass, starry like our souls, and like them glowing with the shuttered brilliance of an electric heart. We had long trampled upon opulent oriental carpets our ancestral sloth, arguing all the way to the outermost limits of logic and blackening many pages with frenzied writing.
An immense pride swelled our chests, for we felt ourselves alone, in that hour, awake and upright, like magnificent beacons or like sentinels thrust forward, facing the army of enemy stars that peered down from their celestial encampments. Alone with the stokers who thrash before the infernal furnaces of great ships, alone with the black phantoms who rummage in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched at wild speed, alone with the drunkards reeling with uncertain wingbeats along the city walls.
We gasped suddenly at the formidable noise of the enormous double-decker tramways that jolted past, blazing with multicolored lights, like villages in festival that the Po, overflowing its banks, uproots without warning and drags to the sea, over cascades and through the whirlpools of a flood.
Then the silence grew deeper still. But as we listened to the exhausted muttering of prayers from the old canal and the creaking of the bones of dying palaces upon their beards of damp greenery, we suddenly heard the ravenous automobiles roaring beneath the windows.
“Let us go,” I said, “let us go, friends! Partiamo! At last, mythology and the mystic ideal are surpassed. We are about to witness the birth of the Centaur and soon we shall see the first Angels fly! We must shake the gates of life to test their hinges and their bolts! Let us go! Here, upon the earth, is the first dawn! Nothing can equal the splendor of the red sword of the sun, fencing for the first time in our millennial darkness!”
We approached the three snorting beasts, to caress lovingly their burning breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse in its coffin, but I was immediately revived beneath the steering wheel, a guillotine blade menacing my belly.
The furious broom of madness tore us from ourselves and swept us through streets as steep and deep as riverbeds. Here and there a sickly lamp behind a window pane taught us to despise the lying mathematics of our dying eyes.
I shouted, “Scent, scent alone is enough for wild beasts!”
And we, like young lions, pursued Death, her dark pelt spotted with pale crosses, who ran on before us through the vast violet sky, alive and throbbing.
And yet we had no ideal Lover who raised her sublime figure to the clouds, nor a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses, twisted in the shape of Byzantine rings! Nothing, except the desire to free ourselves at last from the too-heavy burden of our own courage!
And we sped on, crushing upon the doorsteps of houses the watchdogs that curled up under our scorching tires, flat as shirt collars under a hot iron. Death, tamed, overtook me at every turn, gracefully extending her paw to me, and now and then she would stretch out on the ground with a noise of grinding jaws, sending me, from every puddle, velvety and caressing glances.
“Let us abandon wisdom as from a horrible shell, and hurl ourselves, like fruits spiced with pride, into the immense and twisted mouth of the wind! Let us give ourselves as food to the Unknown, not out of desperation, but simply to fill up the deep wells of the Absurd!”
I had barely spoken these words when I spun sharply back upon myself, with the same drunken frenzy as dogs trying to bite their own tails, and there, all at once, two cyclists came toward me, wavering before me like two arguments, both persuasive and nevertheless contradictory. Their stupid dilemma was being debated on my ground… What a bore! Uff! I cut short, and, in disgust, I hurled myself — wheels in the air — into a ditch.
Oh! Maternal ditch, nearly full of muddy water! Beautiful factory ditch! I savored avidly your nourishing muck, which recalled to me the sacred black breast of my Sudanese wet nurse. When I hauled myself up — a filthy, stinking rag — from beneath the overturned car, I felt the red-hot iron of joy pass deliciously through my heart!
A crowd of fishermen armed with lines and gouty naturalists already thronged in uproar around the marvel. With patient and meticulous care, those people set up tall scaffoldings and enormous iron nets to fish out my automobile, which lay like a great beached shark. The machine emerged slowly from the ditch, leaving behind on the bottom, like scales, its heavy coachwork of good sense and its supple padding of comfort.
They believed my beautiful shark was dead, but one caress from me was enough to reanimate it, and there it was, resurrected, racing once more on its powerful fins!
And so, our faces smeared with the good factory muck — a paste of metallic slag, of useless sweat, of celestial soot — we, bruised and bandaged but undaunted, we dictated our first intentions to all the living men on earth:
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and of recklessness.
Courage, audacity, and rebellion will be essential elements of our poetry.
Literature has up to now glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to glorify aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the running stride, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch.
We affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its hood adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath… a roaring automobile that seems to ride on grapeshot, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
We intend to sing of the man at the wheel, whose ideal shaft pierces the Earth, itself hurtling upon the circuit of its orbit.
The poet must expend himself with ardor, splendor, and munificence, to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
There is no more beauty except in struggle. No work can be a masterpiece that lacks an aggressive character. Poetry must be conceived as a violent assault against the unknown forces, to reduce them to prostration before man.
We stand on the outermost promontory of the centuries! Why should we look behind us, when we want to 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 velocity.
We intend to glorify war — the sole hygiene of the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the libertarians, beautiful ideas to die for, and contempt for woman.
We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every kind, and to combat moralism, feminism, and every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
We shall sing of the great crowds moved by work, by pleasure, or by revolt; we shall sing of the multicolored and polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we shall sing of the vibrant nocturnal fervor of arsenals and shipyards ablaze with violent electric moons; the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung from clouds by the twisted threads of their smoke; bridges that leap like gymnasts over the diabolical cutlery of sun-bathed rivers; adventurous steamers scenting the horizon; barrel-chested locomotives pawing at the rails like enormous steel horses bridled with tubing; and the gliding flight of airplanes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to applaud like a zealous crowd.
It is from Italy that we launch upon the world this manifesto of overwhelming and incendiary violence, by which we found today Futurism, because we want to free this country from its fetid gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and antiquarians.
For too long Italy has been a market of secondhand dealers. We want to free her from the innumerable museums that cover her like so many cemeteries.
Museums: cemeteries! Identical, truly, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies that do not know each other. Museums: public dormitories where one sleeps forever alongside beings that are hated or unknown! Museums: absurd slaughterhouses of painters and sculptors who go on ferociously butchering each other with blows of color and line, along disputed walls!
That people should go there on pilgrimage once a year, as one goes to the cemetery on the Day of the Dead… that I grant you. That once a year a wreath of flowers should be laid before the Mona Lisa, that too I grant you… But I do not accept that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be paraded daily through the museums. Why do you wish to poison yourselves? Why do you wish to rot?
And what can one ever see in an old painting, if not the laborious contortion of the artist who struggled to break the insuperable barriers opposed to his desire to express his dream entirely? To admire an old painting is to pour our sensibility into a funerary urn, instead of projecting it far off, in violent jets of creation and action.
Do you then wish to waste all your best energies in this eternal and useless admiration of the past, from which you emerge inevitably exhausted, diminished, and trampled?
In truth I declare to you that the daily frequentation of museums, of libraries, and of academies (cemeteries of wasted effort, calvaries of crucified dreams, ledgers of surges cut short!) is, for artists, as harmful as the prolonged tutelage of parents for certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious will. For the dying, for the infirm, for the prisoners, so be it: the admirable past is perhaps a balm for their ills, since the future is barred to them. But we want nothing to do with the past, we young and strong Futurists!
So let them come, the merry arsonists with their charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are! Come on! Set fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the course of the canals, to flood the museums! Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases drifting, torn and discolored, upon those waters! Take up your pickaxes, your axes and your hammers, and demolish, demolish without pity the venerated cities!
The oldest among us are thirty: so we have at least a decade to accomplish our work. When we are forty, let other men, younger and more capable, throw us in the bin like useless manuscripts. We desire it so!
They will come against us, our successors; they will come from far off, from everywhere, dancing upon the winged cadence of their first poems, reaching out the hooked fingers of predators, sniffing like dogs at the doors of the academies the good scent of our putrefying minds, already promised to the catacombs of libraries.
But we will not be there. They will find us at last — on a winter’s night — in open country, under a sad roof drummed upon by monotonous rain, and they will see us crouched beside our trembling airplanes, warming our hands at the meager fire that our books of today will give off, blazing beneath the flight of our images.
They will storm around us, panting with anguish and spite, and all of them, exasperated by our proud, untiring audacity, will hurl themselves upon us to kill us, driven by a hatred all the more implacable because their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.
Strong and wholesome Injustice will burst radiantly in their eyes. Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice!
The oldest among us are thirty: and yet we have already squandered treasures, a thousand treasures of strength, of love, of audacity, of cunning, and of raw will; we have flung them away impatiently, in fury, without counting, without ever hesitating, without ever resting, breathlessly. Look at us! We are not yet spent! Our hearts feel no weariness, for they are nourished on fire, on hatred, and on speed! Does that astonish you? It is logical, since you do not even remember having lived! Standing on the summit of the world, we hurl once more our challenge to the stars!
You raise objections? Enough! Enough! We know them. We have understood! Our fine and false intelligence tells us that we are the summary and the extension of our ancestors. Perhaps! But what does it matter? We do not want to hear it! Woe to anyone who repeats these infamous words to us!
Look up!
Standing on the summit of the world, we hurl once more our challenge to the stars!