Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Futuristic Manifesto"
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, into the wealthy family of a successful lawyer. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) studied law at Italian universities but devoted his energies to literary pursuits. He is considered the founder of Futurism, a movement that spanned literature, art, and politics and glorified speed, force, and power and advocated the destruction of tradition and the past. He set forth his anarchic views in the 1909 publication of his Manifesto of Futurism. In 1918 Marinetti founded the Futurist Political Party. Soon thereafter he folded it into the Fascist Party and avidly supported Benito Mussolini. Source: Eugen Weber, trans., F.T. Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism, in Paths to the Present (Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., 1960).
FUTURISTIC MANIFESTO
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of danger and of temerity.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, daring, and revolt.
3. Literature having up to now magnified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, we want to exalt the aggressive gesture, the feverish insomnia, the athletic step, the perilous leap, the box on the ear, and the fisticuff.
4. We declare that the world's wonder has been enriched by a fresh beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car with its trunk adorned by great exhaust pipes like snakes with an explosive breath...a roaring car that seems to be driving under shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man who holds the steering wheel, whose ideal stem pierces the Earth, itself launched on the circuit of its orbit.
6. The poet must expend himself with warmth, refulgence, and prodigality, to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. There is no more beauty except in struggle. No masterpiece without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent attack against the unknown forces, summoning them to lie down before man.
8. We stand on the far promontory of centuries!...What is the use of looking behind us, since our task is to smash the mysterious portals of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We live already in the absolute, since we have already created the eternal omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war - the only hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the anarchist's destructive gesture, the fine Ideas that kill, and the scorn of woman.
10. We want to demolish museums, libraries, fight against moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian cowardices.
11. We shall sing the great crowds tossed about by work, by pleasure, or revolt; the many-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals; the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the yards under their violent electrical moons; the gluttonous railway stations swallowing smoky serpents; the factories hung from the clouds by the ribbons of their smoke; the bridges leaping like athletes hurled over the diabolical cutlery of sunny rivers; the adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; the broad-chested locomotives, prancing on the rails like great steel horses curbed by long pipes, and the gliding flight of airplanes whose propellers snap like a flag in the wind, like the applause of an enthusiastic crowd.
It is in Italy that we launch this manifesto of tumbling and incendiary violence, this manifesto through which today we set up Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, of archaeologists, of guides, and of antiquarians.
Italy has been too long a great secondhand brokers' market. We want to rid it of the innumerable museums that cover it with innumerable cemeteries.
Museums, cemeteries!...Truly identical in the sinister jostling of bodies that do not know each other. Great public dormitories where one sleeps forever side by side with beings hated or unknown. Reciprocal ferocity of painters and of sculptors killing each other with line and color in the same gallery.
They can be visited once a year as the dead are visited once a year...We can accept that much! We can even conceive that flowers may once a year be left for la Gioconda! [Note: The “Mona Lisa”] ...But we cannot admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our anxiety may be taken through there every day!...Do you want to be poisoned? Do you want to rot?
What can one find in an old painting beside the embarrassing contortions of the artist trying to break the barriers that are impassable to his desire to wholly express his dream?
To admire an old painting is to pour our sensitiveness into a funeral urn, instead of throwing it forward by violent casts of creation and action. Do you mean thus to waste the best of you in a useless admiration of the past that must necessarily leave you exhausted, lessened, trampled?
As a matter of fact the daily frequentation of museums, of libraries and of academies (those cemeteries of wasted efforts, those calvaries of crucified dreams, those catalogues of broken impulses!...) is for the artist what the prolonged tutelage of parents is for intelligent young men, drunk with their talent and their ambitious will.
For the dying, the invalid, the prisoner, it will do. Since the future is forbidden them, there may be a salve for their wounds in the wonderful past...But we want nothing of it - we the young, the strong, the living Futurists!
Let the good incendiaries come with their carbonized fingers!...Here they are! Here they are!...Set the library stacks on fire! Turn the canals in their course to flood the museum vaults!...There go the glorious canvases, floating adrift! Take up the picks and the hammers! Undermine the foundations of the venerable cities!
The oldest among us are not yet thirty; this means that we have at least ten years to carry out our task. When we are forty, let those younger and more valiant than we kindly throw us into the waste basket like useless manuscripts!...They will come after us from afar, from everywhere, prancing on the light rhythm of their first poems, clawing the air with their crooked fingers, sniffing at academy gates the good scent of our rotting intellects already intended for the catacombs of libraries.
But we shall not be there. They will find us at last, on some winter night, out in the country, under a sad hangar on which the monotonous rain strums, crouching by our trembling planes, warming our hands over the miserable fire of our books of today gaily blazing under the scintillating flight of their images.
They will gather in a mob around us, panting with anguish and spite, and all exasperated by our untiring courage will bound forward to kill us with the more hatred for the love and admiration in their hearts. And Injustice, strong and wholesome, will glitter radiantly in their eyes. For art can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice.
The oldest among us are not yet thirty and yet we have already squandered great treasures, treasures of energy, of love, of courage and eager will, hastily, deliriously, countlessly, breathlessly, with both hands.
Look at us! We are not out of breath...Our heart is not in the least tired! For it feeds on fire, on hatred, on speed!...You find it surprising? That is because you do not even remember having lived! Up on the crest of the world, once more we hurl our challenge to the stars!
Your objections? Enough! Enough! I know them! Fair enough! We know well enough what our fine, false intelligence asserts - We are only, it says, the summary and the extension of our forebears - Perhaps! Let it be so!...What does it matter?...But we don't want to listen! Beware of repeating these infamous words! Rather, look up!
Up on the crest of the world, once more we hurl our challenge to the stars!