'La bouche de Nadja', André Breton 1928
MANIFIESTO INAUGURAL DE LA PRIMERA VELADA DADÁ
Hugo Ball (leído en el primer evento Dadá en el Cabaret Voltaire en Zurich el 14 de Julio de 1916)
Dadá es una nueva tendencia en el arte. Uno puede decir esto desde el hecho de que hasta ahora nadie sabía nada al respecto, y mañana todo el mundo en Zurich hablará de ello. Dadá viene del diccionario. Es terriblemente sencillo. En francés significa "caballo de juguete". En alemán significa "adiós", "¡Deja de molestarme!", "Te veré en algún momento". En rumano: "Sí, de hecho, tienes razón, eso es todo. Pero por supuesto, sí, definitivamente, correcto”. Etcétera.
Una palabra internacional. Sólo una palabra, y la palabra un movimiento. Muy fácil de entender. Terriblemente sencillo. Para hacer de ella una tendencia artística debe significar que se está anticipando complicaciones. Dadá psicología, Dadá Alemania indigestión y en la niebla paroxismo, Dadá literatura, Dadá burguesía, y ustedes mismos, poetas homenajeados, que siempre están escribiendo con palabras pero nunca escriben con la palabra en sí, que siempre están escribiendo alrededor del punto real. Dadá guerra mundial sin fin, Dadá revolución sin comienzo, Dadá, ustedes, amigos y también poetas, señores estimados, fabricantes, y evangelistas. Dadá Tzara, Dadá Huelsenbeck, Dadá soy dadá, Dadá soy dadá mmh, dadá dera dadá, dadá Hue, dadá Tza.
¿Cómo se puede alcanzar la felicidad eterna? Diciendo Dadá. ¿Cómo se llega a ser famoso? Diciendo Dadá. Con un noble gesto y delicado decoro. Hasta que uno se vuelve loco. Hasta que uno pierde la conciencia. ¿Cómo puede uno deshacerse de todo lo que huela a periodismo, gusanos, todo lo bueno y correcto, de miras estrechas, moralista, europeizado, enervado? Diciendo Dadá. Dadá es el alma del mundo, Dadá es la casa de empeño. Dadá es el mejor jabón de leche de lirio del mundo. Dadá Sr. Rubiner, Dadá Sr. Korrodi. Dadá Sr. Anastasio Lilienstein. En lenguaje llano: la hospitalidad de los suizos es algo que debe ser profundamente apreciado. Y en cuestiones de estética la clave es la calidad.
Voy a estar leyendo poemas que están destinados a prescindir del lenguaje convencional, nada menos. Dadá Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dadá Stendhal. Dadá Dalai Lama, Buda, Biblia y Nietzsche. Dadá soy Dadá. Dadá mmh dadá da. Es una cuestión de conexiones y de aflojar un poco para comenzar. No quiero palabras que otros han inventado. Todas las palabras son invenciones de otras personas. Quiero mis propias cosas, mi propio ritmo, y vocales y consonantes también, acoplando el ritmo y todo lo mío. Si esta pulsación es de siete yardas de largo, quiero para ella palabras de siete yardas. Las palabras del Sr. Schulz son sólo dos centímetros y medio.
Servirá para mostrar cuán articulado viene el lenguaje a ser. Dejo que las vocales den vueltas por ahí. Dejo que las vocales simplemente ocurran, como maullidos de gato… Las palabras emergen, hombros de palabras, piernas, brazos, manos de palabras. Au, oi, uh. No hay que dejar demasiadas palabras fuera. Una línea de poesía es una oportunidad para deshacerse de toda la suciedad que se adhiere a este lenguaje maldito, como si lo hubieran puesto ahí las manos de corredores de bolsa, manos desgastadas por monedas. Quiero la palabra donde termina y comienza. Dadá es el corazón de las palabras.
Cada cosa tiene su palabra, pero la palabra se ha convertido en una cosa por sí misma. ¿Por qué no la puedo encontrar? ¿Por qué no puede un árbol llamarse Pluplusch, y Pluplubasch cuando está lloviendo? La palabra, la palabra, la palabra fuera de tu dominio, tu asfixia, esta impotencia ridícula, tu petulancia estupenda, fuera de todo el psitacismo de tu obviedad ilimitada. La palabra, señores, es una preocupación pública de primera importancia.
MANIFIESTO SOBRE EL AMOR DÉBIL Y EL AMOR AMARGO
Tristan Tzara (1920)
Tomad un periódico.
Tomad unas tijeras.
Elegid en el periódico el artículo que tenga
la longitud que queráis dar a vuestro poema.
Recortad el artículo.
Recortad con todo cuidado cada palabra de las
que forman tal artículo y ponedlas en un saquito.
Agitad dulcemente.
Sacad las palabras una detrás de otra,
colocándolas en el orden en que las habéis sacado.
Copiadlas concienzudamente.
El poema está hecho.
Ya os habéis convertido en un escritor
infinitamente original y dotado
de una sensibilidad encantadora.
PRIMER MANIFIESTO DADÁ
Tristan Tzara (1918)
La magia de una palabra —DADÁ— que ha puesto a los periodistas ante la puerta de un mundo imprevisto, no tiene para nosotros ninguna importancia.
Para lanzar un manifiesto es necesario: A, B,C.
fulminar contra 1, 2 , 3
Irritarse y aguzar las alas para conquistar y propagar muchos pequeños abecés y grandes ABECÉS y afirmar, gritar, blasfemar, acomodar la prosa en forma de obviedad absoluta, irrefutable, probar el propio non plus ultra y sostener esa novedad se asemeja a la vida como la última aparición de una prostituta prueba la esencia de Dios. En efecto, su existencia ya fue demostrada por el acordeón, por el paisaje y por la palabra dulce. Imponer el propio ABECÉ es algo natural, y, por ello, deplorable. Pero todos lo hacen bajo la forma de cristal-bluff-madonna o sistema monetario, de producto farmacéutico o de piernas desnudas incitantes a la primavera ardiente y estéril. El amor por lo nuevo es la cruz simpática que revela un amiquemeimportismo pueril, positivo signo sin causa.
Pero también esta necesidad ha quedado obsoleta. Es necesario documentar el arte con la suprema simplicidad: novedad, se es humano y auténtico por diversión, se es impulsivo y vibrante para crucificar el aburrimiento. En las encrucijadas de las luces, vigilantes y atentas, espiando los años en el bosque. Yo escribo un manifiesto y no quiero nada y, sin embargo, digo algunas cosas y por principio estoy contra los manifiestos, como, por lo demás, también estoy contra los principios (decilitros para medir el valor moral de cada frase demasiado demasiado cómodo: la aproximación fue inventada por los impresionistas). Escribo este manifiesto para demostrar cómo se pueden llevar a cabo al mismo tiempo las acciones más contradictorias con un único y fresco aliento; estoy contra la acción y a favor de la contradicción continua, pero también estoy por la afirmación. No estoy ni por el pro ni por el contra y no quiero explicar a nadie por qué odio el sentido común.
fulminar contra 1, 2 , 3
Irritarse y aguzar las alas para conquistar y propagar muchos pequeños abecés y grandes ABECÉS y afirmar, gritar, blasfemar, acomodar la prosa en forma de obviedad absoluta, irrefutable, probar el propio non plus ultra y sostener esa novedad se asemeja a la vida como la última aparición de una prostituta prueba la esencia de Dios. En efecto, su existencia ya fue demostrada por el acordeón, por el paisaje y por la palabra dulce. Imponer el propio ABECÉ es algo natural, y, por ello, deplorable. Pero todos lo hacen bajo la forma de cristal-bluff-madonna o sistema monetario, de producto farmacéutico o de piernas desnudas incitantes a la primavera ardiente y estéril. El amor por lo nuevo es la cruz simpática que revela un amiquemeimportismo pueril, positivo signo sin causa.
Pero también esta necesidad ha quedado obsoleta. Es necesario documentar el arte con la suprema simplicidad: novedad, se es humano y auténtico por diversión, se es impulsivo y vibrante para crucificar el aburrimiento. En las encrucijadas de las luces, vigilantes y atentas, espiando los años en el bosque. Yo escribo un manifiesto y no quiero nada y, sin embargo, digo algunas cosas y por principio estoy contra los manifiestos, como, por lo demás, también estoy contra los principios (decilitros para medir el valor moral de cada frase demasiado demasiado cómodo: la aproximación fue inventada por los impresionistas). Escribo este manifiesto para demostrar cómo se pueden llevar a cabo al mismo tiempo las acciones más contradictorias con un único y fresco aliento; estoy contra la acción y a favor de la contradicción continua, pero también estoy por la afirmación. No estoy ni por el pro ni por el contra y no quiero explicar a nadie por qué odio el sentido común.
DADÁ— he aquí la palabra que lleva las ideas a la caza; todo burgués se siente dramaturgo, inventa distintos discursos y, en lugar de poner en su lugar a los personajes convenientes a la calidad de su inteligencia, crisálidas en sus sillas, busca las causas y los fines (según el método psicoanalítico que practique) para dar consistencia a su trama, historia que habla y se define.
Todo espectador que trata de explicar una palabra es un intrigante: (¡conocer!). Desde el refugio enguantado de las complicaciones serpentinas hace manipular sus propios instintos. De aquí nacen las desgracias de la vida conyugal.
Todo espectador que trata de explicar una palabra es un intrigante: (¡conocer!). Desde el refugio enguantado de las complicaciones serpentinas hace manipular sus propios instintos. De aquí nacen las desgracias de la vida conyugal.
Ser limitado: diversión de los vientres rojos con los molinos de los cráneos vacíos.
DADÁ NO SIGNIFICA NADA
Si alguien lo considera inútil, si alguien no quiere perder tiempo por una palabra que no significa nada….El primer pensamiento que se agita en estas cabezas es de orden bacteriológio: hallar su origen etimológico, histórico o psicológico por lo menos. Por los periódicos sabemos que los negros Kru llaman al rabo de la vaca sagrada DADÁ. El cubo y la madre en una cierta comarca de Italia reciben el nombre de DADÁ. Un caballo de madera, la nodriza, la doble afirmación en ruso y en rumano DADÁ. Sabios periodistas ven en todo ello un arte para niños, otros santones jesúsdejadquelosniñosseacerquenamí, el retorno a un primitivismo seco y estrepitoso, estrepitoso y monótono. No es posible construir la sensibilidad sobre una palabra. Todo sistema converge hacia una aburrida perfección, estancada idea de una ciénaga dorada, relativo producto humano. La obra de arte no debe ser la belleza en sí misma porque la belleza ha muerto; ni alegre; ni alegre ni triste, ni clara ni oscura, no debe divertir ni maltratar a las personas individuales sirviéndoles pastiches de santas aureolas o los sudores de una carrera en arco a través de las atmósferas. Una obra de arte nunca es bella por decreto, objetivamente y para todos. Por ello, la crítica es inútil, no existe más que subjetivamente, sin el mínimo carácter de generalidad. ¿Hay quien cree haber encontrado la base psíquica común a toda la humanidad? El texto de Jesús y la Biblia recubren con sus amplias y benévolas alas: la mierda, las bestias, los días. ¿Cómo se puede poner orden en el caos de las infinitas e informes variaciones que es el hombre? El principio «ama a tu prójimo» es una hipocresía. «Conócete a ti mismo» es una utopia más aceptable porque también contiene la maldad. Nada de piedad. Después de la matanza todavía nos queda la esperanza de una humanidad purificada. Yo hablo siempre de mí porque no quiero convencer. No tengo derecho a arrastrar a nadie a mi río, yo no obligo a nadie a que me siga. Cada cual hace su arte a su modo y manera, o conociendo el gozo de subir como una flecha hacia astrales reposos o el de descender a las minas donde brotan flores de cadáveres y de fértiles espasmos. Estalactitas: buscarlas por doquier, en los pesebres ensanchados por el dolor, con los ojos blancos como las liebres de los ángeles.
Así nació DADÁ, de una necesidad de independencia, de desconfianza hacía la comunidad. Los que están con nosotros conservan su libertad. No reconocemos ninguna teoría. Basta de academias cubistas y futuristas, laboratorios de ideas formales. ¿Sirve el arte para amontonar dinero y acariciar a los gentiles burgueses? Las rimas acuerdan su tintineo con las monedas y la musicalidad resbala a lo largo de la línea del vientre visto de perfil. Todos los grupos de artistas han ido a parar a este banco a pesar de cabalgar distintos cometas. Mientras la puerta permanece abierta a la posibilidad de revolcarse entre almohadones y un buen banquete.
Aquí estamos echando el ancla en tierra fértil.
Aquí tenemos derecho a proclamar esto porque hemos conocido los escalofríos y el despertar. Fantasmas ebrios de energía, hincamos el tridente en la carne distraída. Rebosamos de maldiciones en la tropical abundancia de vertiginosas vegetaciones: goma y lluvia es nuestro sudor, sangramos y quemamos la sed. Nuestra sangre es vigorosa.
Aquí tenemos derecho a proclamar esto porque hemos conocido los escalofríos y el despertar. Fantasmas ebrios de energía, hincamos el tridente en la carne distraída. Rebosamos de maldiciones en la tropical abundancia de vertiginosas vegetaciones: goma y lluvia es nuestro sudor, sangramos y quemamos la sed. Nuestra sangre es vigorosa.
El cubismo nació del simple modo de mirar un objeto: Cezanne pintaba una taza veinte centímetros más abajo de sus ojos, los cubistas la miran desde arriba, otros complican su aspecto ejecutando una sección perpendicular que sitúan a un lado con habilidad. (No olvido a los creadores y las grandes razones de la materia que hicieron definitivas). El futurismo ve la misma taza en movimiento, una sucesión de objetos uno al lado del otro, añadiéndole maliciosamente alguna líneas duras. Eso no evita que la pintura buena o mala sea siempre una inversión de capitales intelectuales.
El nuevo pintor crea un mundo cuyos elementos son sus mismos medios, una obra sobria y definida, sin argumento. El artista nuevo protesta: ya no pinta (reproducción simbólica e ilusionista), sino que crea directamente en piedra, madera, hierro, estaño, bloques de organismos móviles a los que el límpido viento de las inmediatas sensaciones hace dar vueltas en todos los sentidos. Toda obra pictórica o plástica es inútil; que sea un monstruo capaz de dar miedo a los espíritus serviles y no algo dulzarrón para servir de ornamento a los refectorios de esos animales vestidos de paisano que ilustran tan bien esa fabula triste de la humanidad.
Un cuadro es el arte donde se encuentran dos lineas geométricas que se ha comprobado que son paralelas, hacer que se encuentren en un lienzo, ante nuestros ojos, en una realidad que nos traslada a un mundo de otras condiciones y posibilidades. Este mundo no esta especificado ni definido en la obra, pertenece en sus innumerables variaciones al espectador. Para su creador la obra carece de causa y de teoría. Orden = desorden; ego = no-ego; afirmación = negación; éstos son los fulgores supremos de un arte absoluto. Absoluto en la pureza de lo cósmico y su ordenado caos, eterno en el instante globular sin duración, sin respiración, sin luz y sin control. Amo una obra antigua por su novedad. Tan sólo el contraste nos liga al pasado. Los escritores que enseñan la moral y discuten o mejoran la base psicológica, tienen, aparte del deseo oculto del beneficio, un conocimiento ridículo de la vida que ellos han clasificado, subdividido y canalizado. Se empeñan en querer ver danzar las categorías apenas se ponen a marcar el compás. Sus lectores se carcajean y siguen adelante: ¿con qué fin?
Hay una literatura que no llega a la masa voraz. Obras de creadores nacidas de una auténtica necesidad del autor y sólo en función de sí mismo. Consciencia de un supremo egoísmo, en el que cualquier otra ley queda anulada. Cada página debe abrirse con furia, ya sea por serios motivos, profundos y pesados, ya sea por el vórtice y el vértigo, lo nuevo y lo eterno, la aplastante espontaneidad verbal, el entusiasmo de los principios, o por su tipografía. He ahí un mundo vacilante que huye, atado a los cascabeles de la gama infernal, y he ahí, por otro lado, los hombres nuevos, rudos, cabalgando a lomos de sus espasmos. He ahí un mundo mutilado y los medicuchos literarios preocupados por mejorarlo.
Yo os digo: no hay un comienzo y nosotros no temblamos, no somos unos sentimentales. Nosotros desgarramos como un furioso viento la ropa de las nubes y de las plegarias y preparamos el gran espectáculo del desastre, el incendio, la descomposición. Preparamos la supresión del dolor y sustituimos las lágrimas por sirenas tendidas de un continente a otro. Banderas de intensa alegría viudas de la tristeza del veneno. DADÁ es la enseñanza de la abstracción; la publicidad y los negocios también son elementos poéticos.
Hay una literatura que no llega a la masa voraz. Obras de creadores nacidas de una auténtica necesidad del autor y sólo en función de sí mismo. Consciencia de un supremo egoísmo, en el que cualquier otra ley queda anulada. Cada página debe abrirse con furia, ya sea por serios motivos, profundos y pesados, ya sea por el vórtice y el vértigo, lo nuevo y lo eterno, la aplastante espontaneidad verbal, el entusiasmo de los principios, o por su tipografía. He ahí un mundo vacilante que huye, atado a los cascabeles de la gama infernal, y he ahí, por otro lado, los hombres nuevos, rudos, cabalgando a lomos de sus espasmos. He ahí un mundo mutilado y los medicuchos literarios preocupados por mejorarlo.
Yo os digo: no hay un comienzo y nosotros no temblamos, no somos unos sentimentales. Nosotros desgarramos como un furioso viento la ropa de las nubes y de las plegarias y preparamos el gran espectáculo del desastre, el incendio, la descomposición. Preparamos la supresión del dolor y sustituimos las lágrimas por sirenas tendidas de un continente a otro. Banderas de intensa alegría viudas de la tristeza del veneno. DADÁ es la enseñanza de la abstracción; la publicidad y los negocios también son elementos poéticos.
Yo destruyo los cajones del cerebro y los de la organización social: desmoralizar por doquier y arrojar la mano del cielo al infierno, los ojos del infierno al cielo, restablecer la rueda fecunda de un circo universal en las potencias reales y en la fantasía individual.
La filosofia, he ahí el problema: por qué lado hay que empezar a mirar la vida, Dios, la idea y cualquier otra cosa. Todo lo que se ve es falso. Yo no creo que el resultado negativo sea más importante que la elección entre el dulce y las cerezas como postre. El modo de mirar con rapidez la otra cara dc una cosa para imponer directamente la propia opinión se llama dialéctica, o sea, el modo de regatear el espíritu de las patatas fritas bailando a su alrededor una danza del método.
Si yo grito:
Idealismo, idealismo, idealismo
conocimiento, conocimiento, conocimiento
bumbúm, bumbúm, bumbúm,
registro con suficiente exactitud el progreso, la ley, la moral y todas las demás bellas cualidades que tantas personas inteligentes han discutido en tantos libros para llegar, al fin, a confesar que cada uno, del mismo modo, no ha hecho más que bailar al compás de su propio y personal bumbúm y que, desde el punto de vista de tal bumbúm, tiene toda la razón: satisfacción de una curiosidad morbosa, timbre privado para necesidades inexplicables; baño; dificultades pecuniarias; estómago con repercusiones en la ida; autoridad de la varita mística formulada en el grupo de una orquesta fantasmal de arcos mudos engrasados con filtros a base de amoniaco animal. Con los impertinentes azules de un ángel han enterrado la interioridad por cuatro perras de unánime reconocimiento. Si todos tienen razón, y si todas las píldoras son píldoras Pínk., tratemos de no tener razón. En general, se cree poder explicar racionalmente con el pensamiento lo que se escribe. Todo esto es relativo. El pensamiento es una cosa bonita para la filosofia, pero es relativo. El psicoanálisis es una enfermedad dañina, que adormece las tendencias antirreales del hombre y hace de la burguesía un sistema. No hay una Verdad definitiva. La dialéctica es una máquina divertida que nos ha llevado de un modo bastante trivial a las opiniones que hubiéramos tenido de otro modo. ¿Hay alguien que crea, mediante el refinamiento minucioso de la lógica,, haber demostrado la verdad de sus opiniones? La lógica constreñida por los sentidos es una enfermedad orgánica. A este elemento los filósofos se complacen en añadir el poder de observación. Pero justamente esta magnífica cualidad del espíritu es la prueba de su impotencia. Se observa, se mira desde uno o varios puntos de vista y se elige un determinado punto entre millones de ellos que igualmente existen. La experiencia también es un resultado del azar y de las facultades individuales. La ciencia me repugna desde el momento en que se transforma en sistema especulativo y pierde su carácter de utilidad, que, aun siendo inútil, es, sin embargo, individual. Yo odio la crasa objetividad y la armonía, esta ciencia que halla que todo está en orden: continuad, muchachos, humanidad . . . La ciencia nos dice que somos los servidores de la naturaleza: Todo está en orden, haced el amor y rompeos la cabeza; continuad, muchachos, hombres, amables burgueses, periodistas vírgenes... Yo estoy contra los sistemas: el único sistema todavía aceptable es el de no tener sistemas. Completarse, perfeccionarse en nuestra pequeñez hasta colmar el vaso de nuestro yo, valor para combatir en pro y en contra del pensamiento, misterio de pan, desencallamiento súbito de una hélice infernal hacia lirios baratos.
LA ESPONTANEIDAD DADAÍSTA
Yo llamo amíquémeimportismo a una manera de vivir en la que cada cual conserva sus propias condiciones respetando, no obstante, salvo en caso de defensa, las otras individualidades, la tonada que se convierte en himno nacional, las tiendas de antigüallas, el T.S.H., el teléfono sin hilos, que transmite las fugas de Bach, los anuncios luminosos, los carteles de prostíbulos, el órgano que difunde claveles para el buen Dios y todo esto, todo junto, y realmente sustituyendo a la fotografia y al catecismo unilateral.
La simplicidad activa.
La impotencia para discernir entre los grados de claridad: lamer la penumbra y flotar en la gran boca llena de miel y de excrementos. Medida con la escala de lo Eterno, toda acción es vana (si dejamos que el pensamiento corra una aventura cuyo resultado sería infinitamente grotesco; dato, también éste, importante para el conocimiento de la humana impotencia). Pero si la vida es una pésima farsa sin fin ni parto inicial, y como creemos salir de ella decentemente como crisantemos lavados, proclamamos el arte como única base de entendimiento. No importa que nosotros, caballeros del espiritu, le dediquemos desde siglos nuestros refunfuños. El arte no aflige a nadie y a aquellos que sepan interesarse por él recibirán, con sus caricias, una buena ocasión de poblar el pais con su conversación. El arte es algo privado y el artista lo hace para sí mismo; una obra comprensible es el producto de periodistas, y porque me gusta mezclar en este momento con tal monstruosidad los colores al óleo: un tubo de papel de plata, que, si se aprieta, vierte automáticamente odio, cobardia, y villania. El artista, el poeta aprecian el veneno de la masa condensada en un jefe de sección de esta industria. Es feliz si se le insulta: eso es como una prueba de su coherencia. El autor, el artista elogiado por los periódicos, comprueba la comprensibilidad de su obra: miserable forro de un abrigo destinado a la utilidad pública: andrajos que cubren la brutalidad, meadas que colaboran al calor de un animal que incuba sus bajos instintos, fofa a insípida carne que se multiplica con la ayuda de los microbios tipográficos.
Hemos tratado con dureza nuestra inclinación a las lágrimas infantiles. Toda filtración de esa naturaleza no es más que diarrea almibarada. Alentar un arte semejante significa digerirlo. Nos hacen falta obras fuertes, rectas, precisas y, más que nunca, incomprensibles. La logica es una complicación. La lógica siempre es falsa. Ella guia los hilos de las nociones, las palabras en su forma exterior hacia las conclusiones de los centros ilusorios. Sus cadenas matan, ciempiés gigante que asfixia a la independencia. Ligado a la lógica, el arte viviria en el incesto, tragándose su propia cola, su cuerpo, fornicando consigo mismo, y el genio se volveria una pesadilla alquitranada de protestantismo, un monumento, una marcha de intestinos grisáceos y pesados. Pero la soltura, el entusiasmo y la misma alegria de la injusticia, esa pequeña verdad que nosotros practicamos con inocencia y que nos hace bellos (somos sutiles, nuestros dedos son maleables y resbalan como las ramas de esta planta insinuante y casi liquida) caracterizan nuestra alma, dicen los cinicos. También ese es un punto de vista, pero no todas las flores, por fortuna, son sagradas, y lo que hay de divino en nosotros es el comienzo de la acción antihumana. Se trata, aquí, de una flor de papel para el ojal de los señores que frecuentan el baile de disfraces de la vida, cocina de la gracia, con blancas primas ágiles o gordas. Esa gente comercia con lo que hemos seleccionado. La contradicción y unidad de las estrellas polares en un solo chorro pueden ser verdad, suponiendo que alguien insista en pronunciar esta banalidad, apéndice de una moralidad libidinosa y maloliente. La moral consume, como todos los azotes de la inteligencia. El control de la moral y de la lógica nos ha impuesto la impasibilidad ante los agentes de policia, causa de nuestra esclavitud, pútridas ratas de las que está repleto el vientre de la burguesía, y que han infectado los únicos corredores de nítido y transparente cristal que aún seguían abiertos a los artistas.
Hemos tratado con dureza nuestra inclinación a las lágrimas infantiles. Toda filtración de esa naturaleza no es más que diarrea almibarada. Alentar un arte semejante significa digerirlo. Nos hacen falta obras fuertes, rectas, precisas y, más que nunca, incomprensibles. La logica es una complicación. La lógica siempre es falsa. Ella guia los hilos de las nociones, las palabras en su forma exterior hacia las conclusiones de los centros ilusorios. Sus cadenas matan, ciempiés gigante que asfixia a la independencia. Ligado a la lógica, el arte viviria en el incesto, tragándose su propia cola, su cuerpo, fornicando consigo mismo, y el genio se volveria una pesadilla alquitranada de protestantismo, un monumento, una marcha de intestinos grisáceos y pesados. Pero la soltura, el entusiasmo y la misma alegria de la injusticia, esa pequeña verdad que nosotros practicamos con inocencia y que nos hace bellos (somos sutiles, nuestros dedos son maleables y resbalan como las ramas de esta planta insinuante y casi liquida) caracterizan nuestra alma, dicen los cinicos. También ese es un punto de vista, pero no todas las flores, por fortuna, son sagradas, y lo que hay de divino en nosotros es el comienzo de la acción antihumana. Se trata, aquí, de una flor de papel para el ojal de los señores que frecuentan el baile de disfraces de la vida, cocina de la gracia, con blancas primas ágiles o gordas. Esa gente comercia con lo que hemos seleccionado. La contradicción y unidad de las estrellas polares en un solo chorro pueden ser verdad, suponiendo que alguien insista en pronunciar esta banalidad, apéndice de una moralidad libidinosa y maloliente. La moral consume, como todos los azotes de la inteligencia. El control de la moral y de la lógica nos ha impuesto la impasibilidad ante los agentes de policia, causa de nuestra esclavitud, pútridas ratas de las que está repleto el vientre de la burguesía, y que han infectado los únicos corredores de nítido y transparente cristal que aún seguían abiertos a los artistas.
Todo hombre debe gritar: hay una gran tarea destructiva, negativa, por hacer. Barrer, asear. La plenitud del individuo se afirma a continuación de un estado de locura, de locura agresiva y completa de un mundo confiado a las manos de los bandidos que desgarran y destruyen los siglos. Sin fin ni designio, sin organización: la locura indomable, la descomposición. Los fuertes sobrevivirán gracias a su voz vigorosa, pues son ávidos en su defensa. La agilidad de los miembros y de los sentimientos flamea en sus flancos prismáticos.
La moral ha determinado la caridad y la piedad, dos bolas de sebo que han crecido, como elefantes, como astros, y que, aún hoy, son consideradas válidas. Pero la bondad no tiene nada que ver con ellas. La bondad es lúcida, clara y decidida, despiadada con el compromiso y la política. La moralidad es como una infusión de chocolate en las venas de los hombres. Esto no fue impuesto por una fuerza sobrenatural, sino por las corporaciones de los mercaderes de ideas, por los acaparadores universitarios. Sentimentalidad: viendo un grupo de hombres que se pelean y se aburren, ellos inventaron el calendario y el medicamento de la sabiduría. Pegando etiquetas se desencadenó la batalla de los filósofos (mercantilismo, balanza, medidas meticulosas y mezquinas) y por segunda vez se comprendió que la piedad es un sentimiento, como la diarrea en relación con el asco que arruina la salud, inmunda tarea de carroñas para comprometer al sol.
Yo proclamo la oposición de todas las facultades cósmicas a tal blenorragia de pútrido sol salido de las fábricas del pensamiento filosófico, y proclamo la lucha encarnizada con todos los medios del
ASCO DADAÍSTA
Toda forma de asco suceptible de convertirse en negación de la familia es Dadá; la protesta a puñetazos de todo el ser entregado a una acción destructiva es Dadá; el conocimiento de todos los medios hasta hoy rechazados por el pudor sexual, por el compromiso demasiado cómodo y por la cortesía es Dadá; la abolición de la lógica, la danza de los impotentes de la creación es Dadá; la abolición de la lógica, la danza de los impotentes de la creación es Dadá; la abolición de toda jerarquía y de toda ecuación social de valores establecida entre los siervos que se hallan entre nosotros es Dadá; todo objeto, todos los objetos, los sentimientos y las oscuridades, las apariciones y el choque preciso de las lineas paralelas son medios de lucha Dadá; abolición de la memoria: Dadá; abolición del futuro: Dadá; confianza indiscutible en todo dios producto inmediato de la espontaneidad: Dadá; salto elegante y sin prejuicios de una armonía a otra esfera; trayectoria de una palabra lanzada como un disco, grito sonoro; respeto de todas las individualidades en la momentánea locura de cada uno de sus sentimientos, serios o temerosos, timidos o ardientes, vigorosos, decididos, entusiastas; despojar la propia iglesia de todo accesorio inútil y pesado; escupir como una cascada luminosa el pensamiento descortés o amoroso, o bien, complaciéndose en ello, mimarlo con la misma identidad, lo que es lo mismo, en un matorral puro de insectos para una noble sangre, dorado por los cuerpos de los arcángeles y por su alma. Libertad: DADÁ, DADÁ, DADÁ, aullido de colores encrespados, encuentro de todos los contrarios y de todas las contradicciones, de todo motivo grotesco, de toda incoherencia:
LA VIDA.
LA VIDA.
MANIFIESTO SURREALISTA
André Breton (1924)
Tanta fe se tiene en la vida, en la vida en su aspecto más precario, en la vida real, naturalmente, que la fe acaba por desaparecer. El hombre, soñador sin remedio, al sentirse día en día más descontento de su sino, examina con dolor los objetos que le han enseñado a utilizar, y que ha obtenido a través de su indiferencia o de su interés, casi siempre a través de su interés, ya que ha consentido someterse al trabajo o, por lo menos no se ha negado a aprovechar las oportunidades... ¡Lo que él llama oportunidades! Cuando llega a este momento, el hombre es profundamente modesto: sabe cómo son las mujeres que ha poseído, sabe cómo fueron las risibles aventuras que emprendió, la riqueza y la pobreza nada le importan, y en este aspecto el hombre vuelve a ser como un niño recién nacido; y en cuanto se refiere a la aprobación de su conciencia moral, reconozco que el hombre puede prescindir de ella sin grandes dificultades. Si le queda un poco de lucidez, no tiene más remedio que dirigir la vista hacia atrás, hacia su infancia que siempre le parecerá maravillosa, por mucho que los cuidados de sus educadores la hayan destrozado. En la infancia la ausencia de toda norma conocida ofrece al hombre la perspectiva de múltiples vidas vividas al mismo tiempo; el hombre hace suya esta ilusión; sólo le interesa la facilidad momentánea, extremada, que todas las cosas ofrecen. Todas las mañanas los niños inician su camino sin inquietudes. Todo está al alcance de la mano, las peores circunstancias materiales parecen excelentes. Luzca el sol o esté negro el cielo, siempre seguiremos adelante, jamás dormiremos.
Pero no se llega muy lejos a lo largo de este camino; y no se trata solamente de una cuestión de distancia. Las amenazas se acumulan, se cede, se renuncia a una parte del terreno que se debía conquistar. Aquella imaginación que no reconocía límite alguno ya no puede ejercerse sino dentro de los límites fijados por las leyes de un utilitarismo convencional; la imaginación no puede cumplir mucho tiempo esta función subordinada, y cuando alcanza aproximadamente la edad de veinte años prefiere, por lo general, abandonar al hombre a su destino de tinieblas.
Pero si más tarde el hombre, fuese por lo que fuere, intenta enmendarse al sentir que poco a poco van desapareciendo todas las razones para vivir, al ver que se ha convertido en un ser incapaz de estar a la altura de una situación excepcional,como la del amor, difícilmente logrará su propósito.Y ello es así por cuanto el hombre se ha entregado, en cuerpo y alma al imperio de unas necesidades prácticas que no toleran el olvido. Todos los actos del hombre carecerán de altura, todas sus ideas, de profundidad. De todo cuanto le ocurra o cuanto pueda llegar a ocurrirle, el hombre solamente verá aquel aspecto del conocimiento que lo liga a una multitud de acontecimientos parecidos, acontecimientos en los que no ha tomado parte, acontecimientos que se ha perdido. Más aún, el hombre juzgará cuanto le ocurra o pueda ocurrirle poniéndolo en relación con uno de aquellos acontecimientos últimos, cuyas consecuencias sean más tranquilizadoras que las de los demás. Bajo ningún pretexto sabrá percibir su salvación.
Amada imaginación, lo que más amo en vos es que jamás perdonas.
Únicamente la palabra libertad tiene el poder de exaltarme. Me parece justo y bueno mantener indefinidamente este viejo fanatismo humano. Sin duda alguna, se basa en mi única aspiración legítima. Pese a tantas y tantas desgracias como hemos heredado, es preciso reconocer que se nos ha legado una libertad espiritual suma. A nosotros corresponde utilizarla sabiamente. Reducir la imaginación a la esclavitud, cuando a pesar de todo quedará esclavizada en virtud de aquello que con grosero criterio se denomina felicidad, es despojar a cuanto uno encuentra en lo más hondo de sí mismo del derecho a la suprema justicia. Tan sólo la imaginación me permite llegar a saber lo que puede llegar a ser, y esto basta para mitigar un poco su terrible condena; y esto basta también para que me abandone a ella, sin miedo al engaño (como si pudiéramos engañarnos todavía más). ¿En qué punto comienza la imaginación a ser perniciosa y en qué punto deja de existir la seguridad del espíritu? ¿Para el espíritu, acaso la posibilidad de errar no es sino una contingencia del bien?
Queda la locura, la locura que solemos recluir, como muy bien se ha dicho. Esta locura o la otra... Todos sabemos que los locos son internados en méritos de un reducido número de actos reprobables, y que, en la ausencia de estos actos, su libertad (y la parte visible de su libertad) no sería puesta en tela de juicio. Estoy plenamente dispuesto a reconocer que los locos son, en cierta medida, víctimas de su imaginación, en el sentido que ésta le induce a quebrantar ciertas reglas, reglas cuya trasgresión define la calidad de loco, lo cual todo ser humano ha de procurar saber por su propio bien. Sin embargo, la profunda indiferencia de los locos da muestra con respecto a la crítica de que les hacemos objeto, por no hablar ya de las diversas correcciones que les infligimos, permite suponer que su imaginación les proporciona grandes consuelos, que gozan de su delirio lo suficiente para soportar que tan sólo tenga validez para ellos. Y, en realidad, las alucinaciones, las visiones, etcétera, no son una fuente de placer despreciable. La sensualidad más culta goza con ella, y me consta que muchas noches acariciaría con gusto aquella linda mano que, en las últimas páginas de L’Intelligence, de Taine, se entrega a tan curiosas fechorías. Me pasaría la vida entera dedicado a provocar las confidencias de los locos. Son como la gente de escrupulosa honradez, cuya inocencia tan sólo se pude comparar a la mía. Para poder descubrir América, Colón tuvo que iniciar el viaje en compañía de locos. Y ahora podéis ver que aquella locura dio frutos reales y duraderos.
No será el miedo a la locura lo que nos obligue a bajar la bandera de la imaginación...
DADA MANIFESTO
Hugo Ball (read at the first public Dada soiree in Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, July 14th 1916)
Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means "hobby horse". In German it means "good-bye", "Get off my back", "Be seeing you sometime". In Romanian: "Yes, indeed, you are right, that's it. But of course, yes, definitely, right". And so forth.
An International word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.
How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world's best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr Rubiner, dada Mr Korrodi. Dada Mr Anastasius Lilienstein.
In plain language: the hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated. And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality.
I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m'dada. Dada mhm dada da. It's a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz's words are only two and a half centimetres long.
It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat miaows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn't let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.
Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.
DADA MANIFESTO
Tristan Tzara (23rd March 1918)
The magic of a word – Dada – which has brought journalists to the gates of a world unforeseen, is of no importance to us.
To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC
to fulminate against 1, 2, 3
to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big ABCs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latest-appearance of some whore proves the essence of God. His existence was previously proved by the accordion, the landscape, the wheedling word. To impose your ABC is a natural thing - hence deplorable. Everybody does it in the form of crystalbluff-madonna, monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring. The love of novelty is the cross of sympathy, demonstrates a naive je m'enfoutisme, it is a transitory, positive sign without a cause.
But this need itself is obsolete. In documenting art on the basis of the supreme simplicity: novelty, we are human and true for the sake of amusement, impulsive, vibrant to crucify boredom. At the crossroads of the lights, alert, attentively awaiting the years, in the forest. I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet 1 say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles (half-pints to measure the moral value of every phrase too too convenient; approximation was invented by the impressionists). I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense.
DADA - this is a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down; every bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects and who, instead of situating suitable characters on the level of his own intelligence, like chrysalises on chairs, tries to find causes or objects (according to whichever psychoanalytic method he practices) to give weight to his plot, a talking and self-defining story.
Every spectator is a plotter, if he tries to explain a word (to know!) From his padded refuge of serpentine complications, he allows his instincts to be manipulated. Whence the sorrows of conjugal life.
To be plain: The amusement of redbellies in the mills of empty skulls.
DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING
If you find it futile and don't want to waste your time on a word that means nothing ... The first thought that comes to these people is bacteriological in character: to find its etymological, or at least its historical or psychological origin. We see by the papers that the Kru Negroes call the tail of a holy cow Dada. The cube and the mother in a certain district of Italy are called: Dada. A hobby horse, a nurse both in Russian and Rumanian: Dada. Some learned journalists regard it as an art for babies, other holy Jesuscallingthelittlechildrenuntohims of our day, as a relapse into a dry and noisy, noisy and monotonous primitivism. Sensibility is not constructed on the basis of a word; all constructions converge on perfection which is boring, the stagnant idea of a gilded swamp, a relative human product. A work of art should not be beauty in itself, for beauty is dead; it should be neither gay nor sad, neither light nor dark to rejoice or torture the individual by serving him the cakes of sacred aureoles or the sweets of a vaulted race through the atmospheres. A work of art is never beautiful by decree, objectively and for all. Hence criticism is useless, it exists only subjectively, for each man separately, without the slightest character of universality. Does anyone think he has found a psychic base common to all mankind? The attempt of Jesus and the Bible covers with their broad benevolent wings: shit, animals, days. How can one expect to put order into the chaos that constitutes that infinite and shapeless variation: man? The principle: "love thy neighbor" is a hypocrisy. "Know thyself" is utopian but more acceptable, for it embraces wickedness. No pity. After the carnage we still retain the hope of a purified mankind. 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 everybody practices his art in his own way, if be knows the joy that rises like arrows to the astral layers, or that other joy that goes down into the mines of corpse-flowers and fertile spasms. Stalactites: seek them everywhere, in managers magnified by pain, eyes white as the hares of the angels.
And so Dada was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity. Those who are with us preserve their freedom. We recognize no theory. We have enough cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas. Is the aim of art to make money and cajole the nice nice bourgeois? Rhymes ring with the assonance of the currencies and the inflexion slips along the line of the belly in profile. All groups of artists have arrived at this trust company utter riding their steeds on various comets. While the door remains open to the possibility of wallowing in cushions and good things to eat.
Here we are dropping our anchor in fertile ground.
Here we really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening. Drunk with energy, we are revenants thrusting the trident into heedless flesh. We are streams of curses in the tropical abundance of vertiginous vegetation, resin and rain is our sweat, we bleed and burn with thirst, our blood is strength.
Cubism was born out of the simple way of looking at an object: Cezanne painted a cup 20 centimetres below his eyes, the cubists look at it from above, others complicate appearance by making a perpendicular section and arranging it conscientiously on the side. (I do not forget the creative artists and the profound laws of matter which they established once and for all.) The futurist sees the same cup in movement, a succession of objects one beside the others and maliciously adds a few force lines. This does not prevent the canvas from being a good or bad painting suitable for the investment of intellectual capital.
The new painter creates a world, the elements of which are also its implements, a sober, definite work without argument. The new artist protests: he no longer paints (symbolic and illusionist reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, boulders—locomotive organisms capable of being turned in all directions by the limpid wind of momentary sensation. All pictorial or plastic work is useless: let it then be a monstrosity that frightens servile minds, and not sweetening to decorate the refectories of animals in human costume, illustrating the sad fable of mankind.
A painting is the art of making two lines, which have been geometrically observed to be parallel, meet on a canvas, before our eyes, in the reality of a world that has been transposed according to new conditions and possibilities. This world is neither specified nor defined in the work, it belongs, in its innumerable variations, to the spectator. For its creator it has neither case nor theory. Order = disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation - negation: the supreme radiations of an absolute art. Absolute in the purity of its cosmic and regulated chaos, eternal in that globule that is a second which has no duration, no breath, no light and no control. I appreciate an old work for its novelty. It is only contrast that links us to the past. Writers who like to moralise and discuss or ameliorate psychological bases have, apart from a secret wish to win, a ridiculous knowledge of life, which they may have classified, parcelled out, canalised; they are determined to see its categories dance when they beat time. Their readers laugh derisively, but carry on: what's the use?
There is one kind of literature which never reaches the voracious masses. The work of creative writers, written out of the author's real necessity, and for his own benefit. The awareness of a supreme egoism, wherein laws become significant. Every page should explode, either because of its profound gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness, eternity, or because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography. On the one hand there is a world tottering in its flight, linked to the resounding tinkle of the infernal gamut; on the other hand, there are: the new men. Uncouth, galloping, riding astride on hiccups. And there is a mutilated world and literary medicasters in desperate need of amelioration.
I assure you: there is no beginning, and we are not afraid; we aren't sentimental. We are like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration and decomposition. Preparing to put an end to mourning, and to replace tears by sirens spreading from one continent to another. Clarions of intense joy, bereft of that poisonous sadness. DADA is the mark of abstraction; publicity and business are also poetic elements.
I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organisation: to sow demoralisation everywhere, and throw heaven's hand into hell, hell's eyes into heaven, to reinstate the fertile wheel of a universal circus in the Powers of reality, and the fantasy of every individual.
Philosophy is the question: from which side shall we look at life, God, the idea or other phenomena. Everything one looks at is false. I do not consider the relative result more important than the choice between cake and cherries after dinner. The system of quickly looking at the other side of a thing in order to impose your opinion indirectly is called dialectics, in other words, haggling over the spirit of fried potatoes while dancing method around it.
If I shout:
Ideal, Ideal, Ideal
Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge
Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom
I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity a private bell for inexplicable needs; a bath; pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with repercussions in tile; the authority of the mystic wand formulated as the bouquet of a phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased with filters made of chicken manure. With the blue eye-glasses of an angel they have excavated the inner life for a dime's worth of unanimous gratitude. If all of them are right and if all pills are Pink Pills, let us try for once not to be right. Some people think they can explain rationally, by thought, what they think. But that is extremely relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of man and systematizes the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he had demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease. To this element philosophers always like to add: the power of observation. But actually this magnificent quality of the mind is the proof of its impotence. We observe, we regard from one or more points of view, we choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also a product of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon as it becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility that is so useless but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order. Carry on, my children, humanity... Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins... I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own littleness, to fill the vessel with one's individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies.
DADAIST SPONTANEITY
What I call the I-don't-give-a-damn attitude of life is when everyone minds his own business, at the same time as he knows how to respect other individualities, and even how to stand up for himself, the two-step becoming a national anthem, a junk shop, the wireless (the wire-less telephone) transmitting Bach fugues, illuminated advertisements for placards for brothels, the organ broadcasting carnations for God, all this at the same time, and in real terms, replacing photography and unilateral catechism.
Active simplicity.
Inability to distinguish between degrees of clarity: to lick the penumbra and float in the big mouth filled with honey and excrement. Measured by the scale of eternity, all activity is vain - (if we allow thought to engage in an adventure the result of which would be infinitely grotesque and add significantly to our knowledge of human impotence). But supposing life to be a poor farce, without aim or initial parturition, and because we think it our duty to extricate ourselves as fresh and clean as washed chrysanthemums, we have proclaimed as the sole basis for agreement: art. It is not as important as we, mercenaries of the spirit, have been proclaiming for centuries. Art afflicts no one and those who manage to take an interest in it will harvest caresses and a fine opportunity to populate the country with their conversation. Art is a private affair, the artist produces it for himself, an intelligible work is the product of a journalist, and because at this moment it strikes my fancy to combine this monstrosity with oil paints: a paper tube simulating the metal that is automatically pressed and poured hatred cowardice villainy. The artist, the poet rejoice at the venom of the masses condensed into a section chief of this industry, he is happy to be insulted: it is a proof of his immutability. When a writer or artist is praised by the newspapers, it is a proof of the intelligibility of his work: wretched lining of a coat for public use; tatters covering brutality, piss contributing to the warmth of an animal brooding vile instincts. Flabby, insipid flesh reproducing with the help of typographical microbes.
We have thrown out the cry-baby in us. Any infiltration of this kind is candied diarrhoea. To encourage this act is to digest it. What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding. Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and centres. Its chains kill, it is an enormous centipede stifling independence. Married to logic, art would live in incest, swallowing, engulfing its own tail, still part of its own body, fornicating within itself, and passion would become a nightmare tarred with protestantism, a monument, a heap of ponderous grey entrails. But the suppleness, enthusiasm, even the joy of injustice, this little truth which we practice innocently and which makes its beautiful: we are subtle and our fingers are malleable and slippery as the branches of that sinuous, almost liquid plant; it defines our soul, say the cynics. That too is a point of view; but all flowers are not sacred, fortunately, and the divine thing in us is to call to anti-human action. I am speaking of a paper flower for the buttonholes of the gentlemen who frequent the ball of masked life, the kitchen of grace, white cousins lithe or fat. They traffic with whatever we have selected. The contradiction and unity of poles in a single toss can be the truth. If one absolutely insists on uttering this platitude, the appendix of a libidinous, malodorous morality. Morality creates atrophy like every plague produced by intelligence. The control of morality and logic has inflicted us with impassivity in the presence of policemen who are the cause of slavery, putrid rats infecting the bowels of the bourgeoisie which have infected the only luminous clean corridors of glass that remained open to artists..
Let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits, who rend one another and destroy the centuries. Without aim or design, without organization: indomitable madness, decomposition. Those who are strong in words or force will survive, for they are quick in defence, the agility of limbs and sentiments flames on their faceted flanks.
Morality has determined charity and pity, two balls of fat that have grown like elephants, like planets, and are called good. There is nothing good about them. Goodness is lucid, clear and decided, pitiless toward compromise and politics. Morality is an injection of chocolate into the veins of all men. This task is not ordered by a supernatural force but by the trust of idea brokers and grasping academicians. Sentimentality: at the sight of a group of men quarrelling and bored, they invented the calendar and the medicament wisdom. With a sticking of labels the battle of the philosophers was set off (mercantilism, scales, meticulous and petty measures) and for the second time it was understood that pity is a sentiment like diarrhoea in relation to the disgust that destroys health, a foul attempt by carrion corpses to compromise the sun. I proclaim the opposition of all cosmic faculties to this gonorrhoea of a putrid sun issued from the factories of philosophical thought, I proclaim bitter struggle with all the weapons of –
DADAIST DISGUST
Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: DADA; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: DADA; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: DADA: every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: DADA; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: DADA; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of eve ry useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least - with the same intensity in the thicket of core's soul pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: DADA DADA DADA, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies:
LIFE.
DADA MANIFESTO ON FREE LOVE AND BITTER LOVE
Tristan Tzara (c1920)
VI
It seems that this exists: more logical, very logical, too logical, less logical, not very logical, really logical, fairly logical.
Well then, draw the consequences.
"I have"
Now think of the creatures you love most.
"Done?"
Tell me the number and I'll tell you the lottery.
VIII
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake Gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
MANIFESTO OF SURREALISM
André Breton (1924)
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.
But it is true that we would not dare venture so far, it is not merely a question of distance. Threat is piled upon threat, one yields, abandons a portion of the terrain to be conquered. This imagination which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility; it is incapable of assuming this inferior role for very long and, in the vicinity of the twentieth year, generally prefers to abandon man to his lusterless fate.
Though he may later try to pull himself together on occasion, having felt that he is losing by slow degrees all reason for living, incapable as he has become of being able to rise to some exceptional situation such as love, he will hardly succeed. This is because he henceforth belongs body and soul to an imperative practical necessity which demands his constant attention. None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas generous or far-reaching. In his mind’s eye, events real or imagined will be seen only as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which he has not participated, abortive events. What am I saying: he will judge them in relationship to one of these events whose consequences are more reassuring than the others. On no account will he view them as his salvation.
Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.
There remains madness, "the madness that one locks up," as it has aptly been described. That madness or another…. We all know, in fact, that the insane owe their incarceration to a tiny number of legally reprehensible acts and that, were it not for these acts their freedom (or what we see as their freedom) would not be threatened. I am willing to admit that they are, to some degree, victims of their imagination, in that it induces them not to pay attention to certain rules – outside of which the species feels threatened – which we are all supposed to know and respect. But their profound indifference to the way in which we judge them, and even to the various punishments meted out to them, allows us to suppose that they derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its validity does not extend beyond themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. The best controlled sensuality partakes of it, and I know that there are many evenings when I would gladly that pretty hand which, during the last pages of Taine’s L’Intelligence, indulges in some curious misdeeds. I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own. Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and endured.
It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled...
Hugo Ball (read at the first public Dada soiree in Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, July 14th 1916)
Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means "hobby horse". In German it means "good-bye", "Get off my back", "Be seeing you sometime". In Romanian: "Yes, indeed, you are right, that's it. But of course, yes, definitely, right". And so forth.
An International word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.
How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world's best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr Rubiner, dada Mr Korrodi. Dada Mr Anastasius Lilienstein.
In plain language: the hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated. And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality.
I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m'dada. Dada mhm dada da. It's a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz's words are only two and a half centimetres long.
It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat miaows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn't let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.
Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.
DADA MANIFESTO
Tristan Tzara (23rd March 1918)
The magic of a word – Dada – which has brought journalists to the gates of a world unforeseen, is of no importance to us.
To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC
to fulminate against 1, 2, 3
to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big ABCs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latest-appearance of some whore proves the essence of God. His existence was previously proved by the accordion, the landscape, the wheedling word. To impose your ABC is a natural thing - hence deplorable. Everybody does it in the form of crystalbluff-madonna, monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring. The love of novelty is the cross of sympathy, demonstrates a naive je m'enfoutisme, it is a transitory, positive sign without a cause.
But this need itself is obsolete. In documenting art on the basis of the supreme simplicity: novelty, we are human and true for the sake of amusement, impulsive, vibrant to crucify boredom. At the crossroads of the lights, alert, attentively awaiting the years, in the forest. I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet 1 say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles (half-pints to measure the moral value of every phrase too too convenient; approximation was invented by the impressionists). I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense.
DADA - this is a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down; every bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects and who, instead of situating suitable characters on the level of his own intelligence, like chrysalises on chairs, tries to find causes or objects (according to whichever psychoanalytic method he practices) to give weight to his plot, a talking and self-defining story.
Every spectator is a plotter, if he tries to explain a word (to know!) From his padded refuge of serpentine complications, he allows his instincts to be manipulated. Whence the sorrows of conjugal life.
To be plain: The amusement of redbellies in the mills of empty skulls.
DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING
If you find it futile and don't want to waste your time on a word that means nothing ... The first thought that comes to these people is bacteriological in character: to find its etymological, or at least its historical or psychological origin. We see by the papers that the Kru Negroes call the tail of a holy cow Dada. The cube and the mother in a certain district of Italy are called: Dada. A hobby horse, a nurse both in Russian and Rumanian: Dada. Some learned journalists regard it as an art for babies, other holy Jesuscallingthelittlechildrenuntohims of our day, as a relapse into a dry and noisy, noisy and monotonous primitivism. Sensibility is not constructed on the basis of a word; all constructions converge on perfection which is boring, the stagnant idea of a gilded swamp, a relative human product. A work of art should not be beauty in itself, for beauty is dead; it should be neither gay nor sad, neither light nor dark to rejoice or torture the individual by serving him the cakes of sacred aureoles or the sweets of a vaulted race through the atmospheres. A work of art is never beautiful by decree, objectively and for all. Hence criticism is useless, it exists only subjectively, for each man separately, without the slightest character of universality. Does anyone think he has found a psychic base common to all mankind? The attempt of Jesus and the Bible covers with their broad benevolent wings: shit, animals, days. How can one expect to put order into the chaos that constitutes that infinite and shapeless variation: man? The principle: "love thy neighbor" is a hypocrisy. "Know thyself" is utopian but more acceptable, for it embraces wickedness. No pity. After the carnage we still retain the hope of a purified mankind. 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 everybody practices his art in his own way, if be knows the joy that rises like arrows to the astral layers, or that other joy that goes down into the mines of corpse-flowers and fertile spasms. Stalactites: seek them everywhere, in managers magnified by pain, eyes white as the hares of the angels.
And so Dada was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity. Those who are with us preserve their freedom. We recognize no theory. We have enough cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas. Is the aim of art to make money and cajole the nice nice bourgeois? Rhymes ring with the assonance of the currencies and the inflexion slips along the line of the belly in profile. All groups of artists have arrived at this trust company utter riding their steeds on various comets. While the door remains open to the possibility of wallowing in cushions and good things to eat.
Here we are dropping our anchor in fertile ground.
Here we really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening. Drunk with energy, we are revenants thrusting the trident into heedless flesh. We are streams of curses in the tropical abundance of vertiginous vegetation, resin and rain is our sweat, we bleed and burn with thirst, our blood is strength.
Cubism was born out of the simple way of looking at an object: Cezanne painted a cup 20 centimetres below his eyes, the cubists look at it from above, others complicate appearance by making a perpendicular section and arranging it conscientiously on the side. (I do not forget the creative artists and the profound laws of matter which they established once and for all.) The futurist sees the same cup in movement, a succession of objects one beside the others and maliciously adds a few force lines. This does not prevent the canvas from being a good or bad painting suitable for the investment of intellectual capital.
The new painter creates a world, the elements of which are also its implements, a sober, definite work without argument. The new artist protests: he no longer paints (symbolic and illusionist reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, boulders—locomotive organisms capable of being turned in all directions by the limpid wind of momentary sensation. All pictorial or plastic work is useless: let it then be a monstrosity that frightens servile minds, and not sweetening to decorate the refectories of animals in human costume, illustrating the sad fable of mankind.
A painting is the art of making two lines, which have been geometrically observed to be parallel, meet on a canvas, before our eyes, in the reality of a world that has been transposed according to new conditions and possibilities. This world is neither specified nor defined in the work, it belongs, in its innumerable variations, to the spectator. For its creator it has neither case nor theory. Order = disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation - negation: the supreme radiations of an absolute art. Absolute in the purity of its cosmic and regulated chaos, eternal in that globule that is a second which has no duration, no breath, no light and no control. I appreciate an old work for its novelty. It is only contrast that links us to the past. Writers who like to moralise and discuss or ameliorate psychological bases have, apart from a secret wish to win, a ridiculous knowledge of life, which they may have classified, parcelled out, canalised; they are determined to see its categories dance when they beat time. Their readers laugh derisively, but carry on: what's the use?
There is one kind of literature which never reaches the voracious masses. The work of creative writers, written out of the author's real necessity, and for his own benefit. The awareness of a supreme egoism, wherein laws become significant. Every page should explode, either because of its profound gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness, eternity, or because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography. On the one hand there is a world tottering in its flight, linked to the resounding tinkle of the infernal gamut; on the other hand, there are: the new men. Uncouth, galloping, riding astride on hiccups. And there is a mutilated world and literary medicasters in desperate need of amelioration.
I assure you: there is no beginning, and we are not afraid; we aren't sentimental. We are like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration and decomposition. Preparing to put an end to mourning, and to replace tears by sirens spreading from one continent to another. Clarions of intense joy, bereft of that poisonous sadness. DADA is the mark of abstraction; publicity and business are also poetic elements.
I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organisation: to sow demoralisation everywhere, and throw heaven's hand into hell, hell's eyes into heaven, to reinstate the fertile wheel of a universal circus in the Powers of reality, and the fantasy of every individual.
Philosophy is the question: from which side shall we look at life, God, the idea or other phenomena. Everything one looks at is false. I do not consider the relative result more important than the choice between cake and cherries after dinner. The system of quickly looking at the other side of a thing in order to impose your opinion indirectly is called dialectics, in other words, haggling over the spirit of fried potatoes while dancing method around it.
If I shout:
Ideal, Ideal, Ideal
Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge
Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom
I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity a private bell for inexplicable needs; a bath; pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with repercussions in tile; the authority of the mystic wand formulated as the bouquet of a phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased with filters made of chicken manure. With the blue eye-glasses of an angel they have excavated the inner life for a dime's worth of unanimous gratitude. If all of them are right and if all pills are Pink Pills, let us try for once not to be right. Some people think they can explain rationally, by thought, what they think. But that is extremely relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of man and systematizes the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he had demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease. To this element philosophers always like to add: the power of observation. But actually this magnificent quality of the mind is the proof of its impotence. We observe, we regard from one or more points of view, we choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also a product of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon as it becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility that is so useless but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order. Carry on, my children, humanity... Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins... I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own littleness, to fill the vessel with one's individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies.
DADAIST SPONTANEITY
What I call the I-don't-give-a-damn attitude of life is when everyone minds his own business, at the same time as he knows how to respect other individualities, and even how to stand up for himself, the two-step becoming a national anthem, a junk shop, the wireless (the wire-less telephone) transmitting Bach fugues, illuminated advertisements for placards for brothels, the organ broadcasting carnations for God, all this at the same time, and in real terms, replacing photography and unilateral catechism.
Active simplicity.
Inability to distinguish between degrees of clarity: to lick the penumbra and float in the big mouth filled with honey and excrement. Measured by the scale of eternity, all activity is vain - (if we allow thought to engage in an adventure the result of which would be infinitely grotesque and add significantly to our knowledge of human impotence). But supposing life to be a poor farce, without aim or initial parturition, and because we think it our duty to extricate ourselves as fresh and clean as washed chrysanthemums, we have proclaimed as the sole basis for agreement: art. It is not as important as we, mercenaries of the spirit, have been proclaiming for centuries. Art afflicts no one and those who manage to take an interest in it will harvest caresses and a fine opportunity to populate the country with their conversation. Art is a private affair, the artist produces it for himself, an intelligible work is the product of a journalist, and because at this moment it strikes my fancy to combine this monstrosity with oil paints: a paper tube simulating the metal that is automatically pressed and poured hatred cowardice villainy. The artist, the poet rejoice at the venom of the masses condensed into a section chief of this industry, he is happy to be insulted: it is a proof of his immutability. When a writer or artist is praised by the newspapers, it is a proof of the intelligibility of his work: wretched lining of a coat for public use; tatters covering brutality, piss contributing to the warmth of an animal brooding vile instincts. Flabby, insipid flesh reproducing with the help of typographical microbes.
We have thrown out the cry-baby in us. Any infiltration of this kind is candied diarrhoea. To encourage this act is to digest it. What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding. Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and centres. Its chains kill, it is an enormous centipede stifling independence. Married to logic, art would live in incest, swallowing, engulfing its own tail, still part of its own body, fornicating within itself, and passion would become a nightmare tarred with protestantism, a monument, a heap of ponderous grey entrails. But the suppleness, enthusiasm, even the joy of injustice, this little truth which we practice innocently and which makes its beautiful: we are subtle and our fingers are malleable and slippery as the branches of that sinuous, almost liquid plant; it defines our soul, say the cynics. That too is a point of view; but all flowers are not sacred, fortunately, and the divine thing in us is to call to anti-human action. I am speaking of a paper flower for the buttonholes of the gentlemen who frequent the ball of masked life, the kitchen of grace, white cousins lithe or fat. They traffic with whatever we have selected. The contradiction and unity of poles in a single toss can be the truth. If one absolutely insists on uttering this platitude, the appendix of a libidinous, malodorous morality. Morality creates atrophy like every plague produced by intelligence. The control of morality and logic has inflicted us with impassivity in the presence of policemen who are the cause of slavery, putrid rats infecting the bowels of the bourgeoisie which have infected the only luminous clean corridors of glass that remained open to artists..
Let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits, who rend one another and destroy the centuries. Without aim or design, without organization: indomitable madness, decomposition. Those who are strong in words or force will survive, for they are quick in defence, the agility of limbs and sentiments flames on their faceted flanks.
Morality has determined charity and pity, two balls of fat that have grown like elephants, like planets, and are called good. There is nothing good about them. Goodness is lucid, clear and decided, pitiless toward compromise and politics. Morality is an injection of chocolate into the veins of all men. This task is not ordered by a supernatural force but by the trust of idea brokers and grasping academicians. Sentimentality: at the sight of a group of men quarrelling and bored, they invented the calendar and the medicament wisdom. With a sticking of labels the battle of the philosophers was set off (mercantilism, scales, meticulous and petty measures) and for the second time it was understood that pity is a sentiment like diarrhoea in relation to the disgust that destroys health, a foul attempt by carrion corpses to compromise the sun. I proclaim the opposition of all cosmic faculties to this gonorrhoea of a putrid sun issued from the factories of philosophical thought, I proclaim bitter struggle with all the weapons of –
DADAIST DISGUST
Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: DADA; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: DADA; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: DADA: every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: DADA; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: DADA; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of eve ry useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least - with the same intensity in the thicket of core's soul pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: DADA DADA DADA, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies:
LIFE.
DADA MANIFESTO ON FREE LOVE AND BITTER LOVE
Tristan Tzara (c1920)
VI
It seems that this exists: more logical, very logical, too logical, less logical, not very logical, really logical, fairly logical.
Well then, draw the consequences.
"I have"
Now think of the creatures you love most.
"Done?"
Tell me the number and I'll tell you the lottery.
VIII
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake Gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
MANIFESTO OF SURREALISM
André Breton (1924)
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.
But it is true that we would not dare venture so far, it is not merely a question of distance. Threat is piled upon threat, one yields, abandons a portion of the terrain to be conquered. This imagination which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility; it is incapable of assuming this inferior role for very long and, in the vicinity of the twentieth year, generally prefers to abandon man to his lusterless fate.
Though he may later try to pull himself together on occasion, having felt that he is losing by slow degrees all reason for living, incapable as he has become of being able to rise to some exceptional situation such as love, he will hardly succeed. This is because he henceforth belongs body and soul to an imperative practical necessity which demands his constant attention. None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas generous or far-reaching. In his mind’s eye, events real or imagined will be seen only as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which he has not participated, abortive events. What am I saying: he will judge them in relationship to one of these events whose consequences are more reassuring than the others. On no account will he view them as his salvation.
Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.
There remains madness, "the madness that one locks up," as it has aptly been described. That madness or another…. We all know, in fact, that the insane owe their incarceration to a tiny number of legally reprehensible acts and that, were it not for these acts their freedom (or what we see as their freedom) would not be threatened. I am willing to admit that they are, to some degree, victims of their imagination, in that it induces them not to pay attention to certain rules – outside of which the species feels threatened – which we are all supposed to know and respect. But their profound indifference to the way in which we judge them, and even to the various punishments meted out to them, allows us to suppose that they derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its validity does not extend beyond themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. The best controlled sensuality partakes of it, and I know that there are many evenings when I would gladly that pretty hand which, during the last pages of Taine’s L’Intelligence, indulges in some curious misdeeds. I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own. Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and endured.
It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled...
