MANIFESTO - FUTURISM

The following is an English translation of Marinetti's Manifesto on Futurism written in (1909).

The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

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F.T. Marinetti

We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with

domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with

the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic

ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and

blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.

An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that

hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries

against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial

encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone

with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives

launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded

birds along the city walls.

Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker

trams that rumbled by outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on

holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po and dragged over falls

and through gourges to the sea.

Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its

feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green

beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of

automobiles.

Lets go! I said. Friends, away! Lets go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are

defeated at last. Were about to see the Centaurs birth and, soon after, the first

flight of Angels!... We must shake at the gates of life, test the bolts and hinges.

Lets go! Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn! Theres nothing to match

the splendor of the suns red sword, slashing for the first time through our

millennial gloom!

We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid

breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once

under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach.

The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through

streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents. Here and there, sick

lamplight through window glass taught us to distrust the deceitful mathematics

of our perishing eyes.

I cried, The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts.

And like young lions we ran after Death, its dark pelt blotched with pale crosses

as it escaped down the vast violet living and throbbing sky.But we had no ideal Mistress raising her divine form to the clouds, nor any cruel

Queen to whom to offer our bodies, twisted like Byzantine rings! There was

nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at last from the

weight of our courage!

And on we raced, hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our

burning tires like collars under a flatiron. Death, domesticated, met me at every

turn, gracefully holding out a paw, or once in a while hunkering down, making

velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle.

Lets break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like prideripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Lets give ourselves

utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the deep wells

of the Absurd!

The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the

frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists

coming towards me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing

but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking

my wayDamn! Ouch!... I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch

with my wheels in the air...

O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down

your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black beast of my

Sudanese nurse... When I came uptorn, filthy, and stinkingfrom under the

capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!

A crowd of fishermen with handlines and gouty naturalists were already

swarming around the prodigy. With patient, loving care those people rigged a

tall derrick and iron grapnels to fish out my car, like a big beached shark. Up it

came from the ditch, slowly, leaving in the bottom, like scales, its heavy

framework of good sense and its soft upholstery of comfort.

They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough

to revive it; and there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins!

And so, faces smeared with good factory muckplastered with metallic waste,

with senseless sweat, with celestial sootwe, bruised, our arms in slings, but

unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth:

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----- Manifesto of Futurism

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We

intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racers stride, the

mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
4. We affirm that the worlds magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty:

the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like

serpents of explosive breatha roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is

more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit

across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell

the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive

character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on

unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look

back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the

Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute,

because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9. We will glorify warthe worlds only hygienemilitarism, patriotism, the

destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and

scorn for woman.

10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight

moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we

will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern

capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards

blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smokeplumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke;

bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a

glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested

locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel

horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter

in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

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It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting

incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we

want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists,

ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand

clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like

so many graveyards.Museums: cemeteries!... Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many

bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies

forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters

and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and lineblows, the length of the fought-over walls!

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard

on All Souls Day&151that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral

tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that... But I dont admit that our

sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily

conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?

And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an

artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his

dream completely?... Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our

sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off, in violent spasms of

action and creation.

Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile

worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten

down?

In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies

(cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of

aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision

by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious

wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for

the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner... But we want no part of it, the

past, we the young and strong Futurists!

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here

they are!... Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to

flood the museums!... Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing

adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!... Take up your pickaxes, your

axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!

The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work.

When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in

the wastebasket like useless manuscriptswe want it to happen!

They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every

quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked

claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our

decaying minds, which will have already been promised to the literary

catacombs.

But we wont be there... At last theyll find usone winters nightin open country,

beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. Theyll see us crouched

beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poorlittle blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the

flight of our images.

Theyll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them,

exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the

more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration

for us.

Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.

Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a

thousand treasures of force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw will-power; have

thrown them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly, breathless,

and unresting... Look at us! We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness

because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed!... Does that amaze you? It

should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of

the world, once again we hurl our defiance at the stars!

You have objections?Enough! Enough! We know them... Weve understood!... Our

fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our

ancestorsPerhaps!... If only it were so!But who cares? We dont want to

understand!... Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again!

Lift up your heads!

Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the stars!