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Art as Anarchy
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With Dada modern poetic feeling comes to a head. As I have
already said rather jokingly, Dada consists of putting down
in writing things that cannot stand on their own feet. Dada
sets up a powerful negative logic. It radically reverses
the direction of intelligence. Dada has nothing in common
with anything you may think about it, as Dada cannot be
thought. Don't shrug it off. The very power of its negation
gives the Dada scandal a most far-reaching meaning.
Apparently it is a movement created by universal minds.
Today Pic de la Mirandole would probably be Dada. Dada is
not a phenomenon. It answers the philosophical requirements
of the age. It endeavours to ignore objective reality in
order to plunge into the ultra-realistic depths of the
unconscious. However negative the Dada movement may appear,
it is certainly born of transcendent investigations of the
human mind.
We have only to remember the mathematician Henri Poincare,
whose renowned theory of convenience puzzled the scientific
world. According to Henri Poincare, what appears to the
human mind to be most essentially true is what is most
eminently expected.
So mathematics and particularly Euclidian geometry can have
no meaning from an absolute point of view.
Our most rigorously accurate conceptions are in reality
approximate. The shortest path from one point to another is
not, if we examine it closely, the straight line. Similarly,
it is debatable whether the earth is a polyhedron rotating
around the sun. Certainly it is the most convenient thing
imagined by our senses, but we might possibly be motionless
with objective reality moving around us. Evidently we tend
to choose the principle that best corresponds with the
delicate disposition of our organs, and all our thoughts are
inevitably posed on our absurd conception of space.
Similarly, Bergson's philosophy is bound to the criticism of
the idea of time. Dada is a result of intuitive philosophy.
Bergson represents intelligence as strictly adapted to
matter and, therefore, incapable of perceiving duration and
extension as pure quality.
Only intuition is likely to resolve these paradoxes by
ignoring intelligence and preferring instinct.
As the brain cannot envisage time and space outside the
limits of matter, it is essential not to bow to the facts of
the tangible world, but to rely on what Bergson calls "the
immediate data of consciousness". It is by obeying this
deep-seated impulse that we can escape from the crude
concepts of human reason. Instead of being satisfied with
the common vision of the world, we should proceed to an
exploration of the unorganised world where everything is in
constant creation.
According to Bergson's philosophy, the individual is the
"variable combination of the past". The principle of
identity must give way to the "vital impulse", which
reflects the increasing changing of the universe and which
defies any attempt to canalise it.
Briefly, this is the philosophy compared with which so many
previous systems lose most of their meaning.
So Dada is simply this effort to free oneself from the
relative concepts of human reason. It intends to abolish
categories. That is why Dada wants to clear nothing up. All
it wants is occasional glimpses of the far-off glimmers of
the absolute in the moving wreckage left by the impulse of
life.
More recently still, Einstein's theories have aimed a final
blow at the philosophy of facts.
Einstein identifies the old entities of space and time in a
four dimensional conception of the universe, i.e. time is
only a fourth dimension of space.
The study of luminous radiations suggested to him unhoped
for results. The idea of infinity, which has tormented
human reason throughout all eternity, for the first time
perhaps seems to subside in the Einsteinian axiom: "Nothing
is faster than light". The existence of an absolute speed is
not beyond our understanding.
Einstein's mathematical research brings to science bases
that are less approximate than rectilinear geometry. The
straight line does not exist. Our error lies in taking the
geodesic line for one. Light is not propagated in a straight
line. We must endeavour to understand the universe as a
curve "that is infinite, but not without limits".
We are accustomed to envisaging only restricted space. In
the same way, the time we can imagine is a local time. "The
passing of time", said Einstein, "is not always the same".
The speed of light is an absolute speed, i.e. independent of
time, and Einstein's calculations lead to the result that,
if man could reach the speed of light, he would not grow
old.
"We record", says Einstein again, "only variations". Reality
is hidden from us by the intervention of our senses. We can
only judge movement with regard to a point that we suppose
to be fixed. So all movement is relative.
Einstein concludes that there exists a field of gravitation
where nothing is propagated in the void, but where
everything exists by reciprocal correspondences. He reduces
all phenomena to electro-magnetic laws.
The initial matter is identical; the bodies vary according
to the situation occupied by the other bodies in the
universe. Therefore all energy contains a sum of inertia,
and the ether, which for the modern philosopher represents
an imponderable milieu implying complete lack of motion, is
for Einstein an abolished postulate.
_But to come back to literature_-
Dada undoubtedly counts among its forerunners Alfred Jarry.
The creator of Pere Ubu shows a radical inadequation to the
common adhesiveness. He invented petaphysics, the science
of the particular. His object, he said, was "to study the
laws that govern exceptions".
In skirting the extreme limits of fantasy, Alfred Jarry
overtook the most lucid suggestions of abstract philosophy.
In the novel, we would recall the first style of Andre Gide.
The characters of the philosophical short stories, such as
"Paludes", singularly prepare the bent of mind proper to
Dada.
In "Paludes" Andre Gide represents life as a bog where we
wear ourselves out in useless efforts without being capable
of a completely independent action.
He understands the vanity of all construction and, to
sidetrack the surfeit of human semblances, he escapes into
the absurd and decides to take from each of our actions only
the obscure part of unconsciousness that it reveals to us.
This "absence of a smile" so peculiar to Andre Gide, which
however gives the worrying feeling of comedy, can be found
in Dada, and so can the neutral atmosphere where thought
evolves like a time-coloured bird.
Finally in poetry, besides Mallarme, who was the first to
try to achieve the freedom of words, should we mention the
rebel Rimbaud? And nearer to us the work of Guillaume
Appolinaire who, by his aspiration towards an intangible
reality, is the instigator of the worst literary impudence.
All forms of Dada can claim kinship with Appollinaire,
particularly phonetic Dada, whose bases he established in
the last poems of "Calligrammes", entitled "Victory".
O mouths man is searching for a new language
Where the grammarian of any language will have nothing to say
And these old languages are so close to death
That it is only out of habit and lack of daring
That we still use them in poetry
We want new sounds new sounds new sounds
We want vowel-less consonants
Consonants that fart loudly
Imitate the sound of the humming top
Let a continuous nasal sound crackle
Click your tongue
Use the champing sound of the ill-mannered eater
The aspirated rasping of spitting would make a fine sound
The different labial farts would trumpet out your speeches
Get accustomed to belching at will
Speak with your hands snap your fingers
Tap your cheek as if it were a drum
The word is sudden and it's a trembling God
Advance and bear with me up I regret the hands
of those who held them out and worshipped me together
What an oasis of arms will welcome me tomorrow
Do you know the joy of seeing new things.
Moreover the dreadful upheavals of recent years have
sufficiently enlightened us on the incalculable folly
engendered by the minds of reasonable men. And if these men
consider the attempt to upset the meaning of things is
insanity, Dada can answer them: "Take hold of the end of
your nose".
+++
Tristan Tzara must be quoted first of the group Dada, a
movement that has taken on an international aspect. Dada
does not pursue any form of art. Dada lays claim to pure
idiocy. We must not forget that the Dadas stripped words of
their usual character, and therefore they could not have a
disparaging meaning. This means that Dada does not proceed
along the usual paths of reason. Dada is a radical
disorientation of common sense. In this respect Dadas
display a veritable ingenuity in being idiots.
They carefully avoid everything that is not directly the
inverse of what we are used to considering morally as
values. Getting rid of every intellectual acquisition so s
to be no longer one's own dupe is the object pursued by
Dada. To upset our manner of seeing, the Dadas modify our
method of speaking. They want to detach the words that have
agglutinated by custom and which attract each other like
filings adhere to a magnet.
Tristan Tzara offers to shake all the words of the
vocabulary in a hat and to pick them out at random. In this
process the words will have acquired an intrinsic value. New
relation-ships will have formed between them. You will have
created the void and you will more easily find the part of
the unconscious that determines your actions. All writers
who have wanted to re-create a vocabulary for themselves
corresponding to their intimate vision of the world have
mentally practised this operation.
But Dada has a more general meaning. There is no field where
its negative influence does not extend. In reality, Dada is
an absurd state of mind that nobody escapes. "The real Dadas
are against Dada", and in fact who is not capering on his
dada - his hobbyhorse - at the moment? Francophilia,
Germanophilia are simply variations on Dada in the positive
state. Dada has tried everything and nothing has been able
to satisfy its need for diversity.
Dada is a virgin germ
Dada is against the high cost of living
Dada
Limited company for the exploitation of ideas
Dada has 391 different attitudes and colours according to
the sex of the
president.
It changes - affirms - says the opposite at the same time
- of no importance - shouts - goes fishing.
Dada is the chameleon of rapid and selfish change.
Dada is against the future. Dada is dead. Dada is idiotic.
Long live Dada. Dada is not a literary school yell.
_Tristan Tzara_
Pure idiocy is the universal panacea. Reasonable acts can
procure only disadvantage. This is what allows Tristan Tzara
to conclude: 'Subscribe to Dada the only investment that
pays nothing.'
+++
Andre Breton is another theoretician of Dada. For him Dada
corresponds to a need for liberty. He revolts against any
resignation. Any conviction seemed to him to be a form of
renouncement. By exploring the unconscious, he has obtained
the most disconcerting findings. He says: "Innocence is
tolerated only in its passive form." And, in fact,
innocence, which is a virtue in a virgin, is a crime in the
murderer. Andre Breton can no longer understand. And he
feels at ease only in the atmosphere of annulment created by
Dada. "What is beautiful, ugly, big, strong, weak, don't
know, don't know. What is Carpentier, Renan, Foch, don't
know, don't know."
The "Magnetic Fields" written in collaboration with Philippe
Soupalt, is in this respect a strange book. In spite of the
radical lack of coordination in the ideas, the Magnetic
Fields leaves a general impression that cannot be doubted.
Andre Breton no longer feels attracted to anything. Words
have rusted and things have lost all power of attraction for
him. He represents the world as a "waste land". He no longer
hungers for the "rotting sweetmeats" that life offers him.
Custom stales. He is weary of considering the universe
according to categories that lie, and takes refuge in the
absurd.
+++
Philippe Soupalt tries to free himself from the three
unities of number, space and time, but feels himself a
prisoner within the four cardinal points.
He calls his book "Rose des Vents" (Compass Card). He is
aiming at the lyrical ubiquity towards which Apollinaire's
orphism was tending.
Philippe Souplalt turns the compass dial on its axis. He
scorns the conception of the universe inflicted on him by
the grey matter of his brain. To resolve all opposition he
turns to Dada.
My ideas like germs
dance along my meninges
to the rythm of the exasperating pendulum
a revolver shot would be a sweet melody.
He wants to go outside himself. Free himself from
determinism. He scales horizons. "I have broken my static
ideas," he says. Modern discoveries show him glimpses of
metaphysical probabilities. The Eiffel Tower shoots its
beams to the four corners of the world. The idea of space is
an illusion imposed on our senses by matter. Everything
moves on the same level. He persuades himself that the
Gaurisanker is next door to Notre Dame. He is simultaneously
open to all sensations.
The thousand interpretation that words admit of meet in his
mind when he sees a common notice:
REMOVALS TO ALL COUNTRIES
This, I think, is how the Dada joke must be understood.
+++
Louis Aragon has not foresworn every scruple of art.
Sometimes he even seems to remain attached to the old
prosodic forms. Yet Loius Aragon has found his salvation in
Dada. He calls his book "Bonfire". It is a bonfire on which
he sacrifices all the vain acquisitions of his mind for a
new order of things that will arise from the absurd
suggestions of consciousness. A neutral colour - bitumen or
reseda - is not Aragon's favourite. We even find bright
colours the Dadas were generally not fond of.
In a piece called "Jolt", Aragon shows us how a sudden
change comes about in the orientation of his thought:
BROUF
Flight for ever from the bitterness
The wonderful flying meadows newly-painted turn
Stumbling fields
Standstill
My head rings and so many rattles
My heart is in pieces the scenery shattered
The poet remembers his adolescence, the years vexed with
latin and algebra and he sums up his youth in a poem, "life
of Jean Baptiste A."
Rosa the rose and that drop of ink oh my youth
Calculate Cos. &
in function of
tg. a/2
My Apero childhood hardly glimpsed
By the fly-blown windows fo a cafe
Youth and I didn't kiss every mouth
The first one to get to the end of the corridor
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 DEAD
A shade sleeps in the middle of the sun, it's your eye
But now that the poet has rid himself of the narrow human
conventions, a hope is aflame in his breast. By the light of
this bonfire he glimpses new constructions, salutary
transformations.
Then will rise the ponies
Youths
In bands by the hand by the town
Louis Aragon is the only Dada who seems to be preparing a
territory of conciliation between the suggestions of
consciousness and the demands of reason.
+++
Paul Eluard is aiming at a complete transformation of
language. "Let's try," he says, "it is difficult to remain
absolutely pure." Language as it reaches us by way of usage
no longer has any meaning. It is chatter which, according to
Paul Eluard, no longer has any raison d'etre, and he wants
to institute, in poetry, the most elementary simplicity.
In "Animals and their Men" he endeavours to refresh his
vision of the world by simplified images and initial
analogies: The fish in the air and the man in the water. The
grass in front of the cow, the child in front of the milk.
Paul Eluard wants to retain nothing of things but the
essential relation-ships in order to obtain a complete
purity of feeling. Here is an example of this elementary
poetry:
WET
The stone skims over the water
The smoke does not enter.
The water like a skin
That cannot be wounded
Is caressed
By man and by the fish
Snapping like a bow-string,
The fish, when the man catches it,
Dies, as it cannot swallow
This planet of air and light
And the man sinks to the bottom of the water
For the fish
Or for the bitter solitude
Of the supple ever-closed water.
What extremely shocks Paul Eluard's set purpose of
simplicity is the "distinguished allure". According to him,
poetry must be something "naive like a mirror". He conceives
of a poetry where "time does not pass". It is difficult, as
man moves in a thick atmosphere. In his Examples, he says:
"man, the air-diver". Yet he has a confused glimpse of a
universal unity that makes him say: "I have crossed through
life in one go".
+++
Francis Picabia is not concerned with practical
applications. He uses a systematic curtness to destroy
everything. It would be difficult to find a more complete
absence of morality elsewhere.
It is in the agitated state that follows on love that
Francis Picabia tries to formulate for himself a conception
of man stripped of all illusion.
Read my little book
after making love
in front of the rubber fireplace
He calls this little book "Thoughts without language". As he
does not want to be taken in by words.
He no longer distinguishes values. Love, art, religion:
chemical reactions. It is a quasi-psychological Dada. The
heart is like the prostate gland, the belly like the brain.
And Francis Picabia says:
The events of my life
Take place in the sauce
Of my heartbeats.
In "The Girl born without a Mother", poems accompanied by
drawings, he applies himself to seeing the erotic mechanism
work. He takes desire for the only reality, and there is
hardly anything he believes in other than seminal fluid.
Life, according to Picabia, is not a "cream cake"; it is an
"old music-box" that churns out the same tune over and over.
As for the price he puts on human knowledge? "Men thinh", he
says, "Like a free Chinaman."
Francis Picabia experiences an innocent pleasure in throwing
stink bombs in schools and academies. The smell of sodium
cacodylate does not put him off.
In "Jesus Christ Rastaquouere" Picabia's disillusioned
philosophy seems for an instant as if it is trying to escape
from its incoherence. But if Picabia expresses himself a
little more clearly than usual, it is to turn common sense
inside out like a glove. His deliberately disorientated mind
enjoys standing the scale of values upside down. "it's words
that don't exist", he says. "What doesn't have a name
doesn't exist." And by some kind of metaphysical spite he
uses a conjuror's skill to juggle with traditional
locutions.
I can only give my word of honour if I am lying. Cheat, but
don't hide
it. Cheat in order to lose, never to win, for a winner loses
himself,
etc.
And he sums up his opinion of life in a short story: The
story of a man who chewed a revolver!
"This man was already old, and all his life he had indulged
in this strange chewing; in fact his extraordinary weapon
would kill him if he stopped an instant; yet he had been
warned that, in any case, one day inevitably the revolver
would go off and kill him; however, with no sign of
wearying, he went on chewing..."
Francis Picabia, strange he may seem, is a tragic poet.
+++
Clement Pansears is the only representative of Dada in
Belguim and it is extremely unlikely that anyone here will
thank him for it. Yet nobody can let his mind roam on the
periphery of the world of reason, in the barely accessible
regions of the absurd, as easily as Pansears.
The "Pan-pan au cul du nu negre" is Clement Pansears' first
attempt. This title may mean the "nu negre" followed by the
"pan-pan", but I think that by pan-pan Clement Pansears
means a revolver. So it would be different then. Clement
Pansears listens to all the discordant noises that surround
us today. He seems to have surveyed all the ideas, as we can
see from certain things he says ("Une museliere au rheteur
de la surbrute", etc.) and in the end he gives the
impression of a disorganised gramophone that begins to sound
the all-clear when it comes to the end of the record.
Clement Pansears misuses scientific terminology. Now and
again, one thinks of Rabelais' Limousin scholar, but he
justifies himself by saying, "A useless chemist is as good
as a philosopher - who discovers principles by evaporating
vocables."
In "Bar Nicanor" Clement Pansears follows the same tendency,
but to a much greater degree. Clement Pansears launches into
heady delights. In the piece called "Aero" he upsets the
cardinal points. He drives in the void, executes "trapeze
turns". His ears tingle by dint of "browsing raw noises in
interplanetary scales". He exhausts his engine to get as
much as possible out of it.
Getting drunk procures the same incongruous feelings for
him. He puts his lips to every electuary and examines his
half-drunkenness to unveil the speck of immateriality that
throbs inside him. He praises the eminently cosmopolitan
nature of drunken orgies. Solving existence, according to
him, is to take a good one over the eight until the walls
knock into each other, while the principle of being pursues
the "motley race towards pure quality the infinite
denominator leading to zero pan-O."
Perverted feelings run through the erogeneous zones. He
destroys woman as a child would a toy, annoyed at not
getting something more wonderful. Clement Pansears makes one
think of a Des Esseintes corresponding to the wildest
audacity of the new man. In "The defence of laziness" a
morbid perturbation seems to result from the constant effort
of mental inversion. Sudden shocks like electric bells
crackle in his head. Clement Pansears has been, one after
the other, "a tamer of tribades", "a paria esdemolitions",
"a violator of human identity".
Men seem sexless to him. With an Erasmic indifference he
creates a defence of laziness. What is cynicism, if it is
not laziness? Laziness in the sovereign condition of human
reason.
It's annoying
My encephalus is out of tune.
Impossible to re-tune my understanding
to the tuning fork of the fashionable cosmic variations.
He resigns himself to sacrificing to laziness:
Do I revolt you?
All revolt aborts.
What is the point of rebelling? Let us do like the others
do. Instead of creating the revolutions, let us go on
general strike. Everything is there. In any case laziness
extends to the first terrestrial elements.
Spasmodic morbidness
Sea and land
Penetrate each other
and the commotion is comatose.
"Be lazy," Clement Pansears says to himself, possessed with
an orgiastic weariness. Clement Pansears is a modern man in
the most excessive meaning of this expression.
+++
These are the people who form the Dada Pleiad. But it is
difficult to be conclusive as regards Dada, as Dada is a
return to unorganised life, by a means of expression
stripped of any verbal habits. Dada makes fun of
onomatopoeia.
In ancient times they used to say that those who had lifted
the veil of physical phenomena had seen the great god Pan.
The upheavals of our time that have revealed a solution of
continuity in the evolution of mankind have given rise to a
panic literature. Dada is without doubt a pessimistic
movement. But its pessimism is based on the danger of human
ambitions. It is in de la Rochefoucald and Schopenhauer that
we must search for the preliminaries to an international
agreement. Dada is the only possible link between men since
its fundamental principle consists in being right about
nothing. Not to know Dada is not to know our time. In a
century when Lenin falls after Wilson, Dada has nothing that
can surprise us. Dadas are deliberately out of their depth.
But if they are fools they are not stupid. They say nothing
for a laugh and take nothing seriously.
Dada is a philosophy. Dada is a moral. Dada is an art, the
art of being likeable in a time when all superiority has
become unbearable and when all human grandeur seems a joke.
Dada is the flower of ruins, not the little blue flower of
optimism that poets want to pick amid the debris of a
civilisation, but an azalea, an arid azalea, which is not
begging for a downpour of blood, but is rather seeking to
slake its thirst in drought.
S.J.Welton