💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › renzo-novatore-toward-the-creative-nothing.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:42:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Toward the Creative Nothing Author: Renzo Novatore Date: 1924 Language: en Topics: egoist, nihilist Source: Retrieved on February 21st, 2009 from http://www.omnipresence.mahost.org/creativenothing.htm
In order to preserve the poetic integrity of this text, I did not
conform it to contemporary standards of “political correctness”. I have
also translated the introduction to the 1993 Italian edition of Verso il
Nulla Creatore, which was the basis of my translation. A brief
biographical note and a reminiscence from Novatore’s comrade, Enzo
Martucci are included to give a feel for the man and his life.
It is difficult to find anarchist works in English that are at the same
time “individualist” and explicitly revolutionary, that emphasize the
centrality of the aim of individual self-determination to a revolution
that will “communalize material wealth” as it will “individualize
spiritual wealth”. For this and other reasons I chose to translate
Toward the Creative Nothing by Renzo Novatore and publish several of his
shorter pieces. Written shortly after World War I, as a revolution was
occurring in Russia and uprisings were happening in Germany and Italy,
this poetic text responds to the upheaval of its time with a call for a
revolution that could truly move the human race beyond the spiritual
impoverishment, the equality in baseness that democracy and socialism
offered. Bourgeois society seemed to have reached its dusk, and Novatore
saw the hope for a new dawn only in such a revolution — one that went
beyond the mere economic demands of the socialists and communists — a
revolution moved by great ideas and great passions that would break with
the low values of bourgeois democratic civilization.
Novatore recognized that the war had simply reinforced the lowest and
most cowardly of bourgeois values. The “proletarian frogs” just let
themselves be led to the slaughter — killing each other for the cause of
those who exploited them — because, in spite of their exploitation, they
continued to share the values of their masters, the “bourgeois toads” —
the values of the belly, the democratic values of equality in baseness,
the rule of survival over life.
In our time when the “great dusk” of bourgeois democratic society that
is heralded in this text seems to have become an eternal dusk making the
entire world a dull grey nightmare of survival, Novatore’s call to a
destructive revolution based on great passions and ideas, on the dreams
and desires of a mighty and strong-willed “I” seems more necessary than
ever if we are to move beyond this pathetic swamp of mediocrity. Of
course, no revolution can go very far without the insurrection of the
exploited against their condition. But this is precisely the point: when
the proletarians rise up against their proletarianization, this means
taking their revolt beyond the demand for full bellies to the active
appropriation of full lives.
Novatore recognized that one could not struggle against this order alone
— that revolution was necessary, not just individual revolt. If he
mocked the proletarians of his time, it is because they did not lift
themselves above the bourgeois hordes with great dreams and great will.
So, as Novatore could have predicted, the “great proletarian revolution”
in Russia came to embrace the worst of bourgeois values and created a
monstrous machine of exploitation. Starting from the bourgeois values of
the belly that place productivity above all else, that anti-individual
egalitarianism of survival above all, how could it do otherwise?
Now more than ever we need an anti-democratic, anti-capitalist,
anti-state revolutionary movement which aims at the total liberation of
every individual from all that prevents her from living his life in
terms of her most beautiful dreams — dreams freed from the limits of the
market. Such a movement must, of course, find ways to intervene in the
real struggles of all the exploited, to move class conflict toward a
real rupture with the social order and its survivalist values. These are
matters we must wrestle now analyzing our present situation to find the
openings for our insurrectional project. Novatore’s text is a light of
poetry and passion — one light among many — which may help us to pierce
through the gloom of the capitalist technological dusk that surrounds us
— a ray of singularity breaking through the dinginess of the present
mediocrity with its call for the revolution of the mightiest dreams.
Renzo Novatore is the pen-name of Abele Rizieri Ferrari who was born in
Arcola, Italy (a village of La Spezia) on May 12, 1890 to a poor peasant
family. Unwilling to adapt to scholastic discipline, he only attended a
few months of the first grade of grammar school and then left school
forever. Though his father forced him to work on the farm, his strong
will and thirst for knowledge led him to become a self-taught poet and
philosopher. Exploring these matters outside the limits imposed by the
educational system, as a youth he read Stirner, Nietzsche, Wilde, Ibsen,
Baudelaire, Schopenauer and many others with a critical mind.
From 1908 on, he considered himself an anarchist. In 1910, he was
charged with the burning of a local church and spent three months in
prison. A year later, he went on the lam for several months because the
police wanted him for theft and robbery. On September 30, 1911, the
police arrested him for vandalism. In 1914, he began to write for
anarchist papers. He was drafted during the first World War. He deserted
his regiment on April 26, 1918 and was sentenced to death by a military
tribunal for desertion and high treason on October 31. He left his
village and went on the lam, propagating the armed uprising against the
state.
On June 30, 1919, a farmer sold him to the police after an uprising in
La Spezia. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but was released in
a general amnesty a few months later. He rejoined the anarchist movement
and took part in various insurrectionary endeavors. In 1920, the police
arrested him again for an armed assault on an arms depository at the
naval barracks in Val di Fornola. Several months later, he was free, and
participated in another insurrectionary endeavor that failed because of
a snitch.
In the summer of 1922, three trucks full of fascists stopped in front of
his home, where he lived with his wife and two sons. The fascists
surrounded the house, but Novatore used grenades against them and was
able to escape. He went underground one more time.
On November 29, 1922, Novatore and his comrade, Sante Pollastro, went
into a tavern in Teglia. Three carabinieri (Italian military police)
followed them inside. When the two anarchists tried to leave, the
carabinieri began shooting. The warrant officer killed Novatore, but was
then killed by Pollastro. One carabiniere ran away, and the last begged
Pollastro for mercy. The anarchist escaped without shooting him.
Renzo Novatore wrote for many anarchist papers (Cronaca Libertaria, Il
Libertario, Iconoclasta!, Gli Scamiciati, Nichilismo, Pagine Libere)
where he debated with other anarchists (among them Camillo Berneri). He
published a magazine, Vertice, that has unfortunately been lost. In
1924, an individualist anarchist group published two pamphlets of his
writings: Al Disopra dell’Arco and Verso il Nulla Creatore.
Anarchiche e Libertarie
About 70 years since its first publication, Toward the Creative Nothing
seems to really maintain its destructive force intact. This
characteristic of unchanging timeliness, in spite of every upsetting
social occurrence and beyond the literary form, is common to a great
many of the writings of individualist anarchists, that is to say, of
those who did not base their lives on a social and economic program that
was to be realized — the validity of which could only be determined by
History — but on the individual, on being a real human being in flesh
and bone. (This very probably explains the recent revival of enthusiasm
for the work of Stirner.)
But the enhanced value of the individual cannot and must not decay into
the constitution of a new school, a new ideology which in a time of
uncertainty like the one that we are going through could attract all
those — and they are many — who go in search of a point of unshakeable
support. One cannot substitute the Individual for the Party merely
because it is considered exempt from every critique in relation to
social reality. In conclusion the greatest risk is that of enclosing
oneself in the classic ivory tower, as many individualist anarchists in
the past had, in fact, done.
Many, but not all. Here then is the reprint of the work by Renzo
Novatore that allows us to rediscover his figure under several aspects
that are exceptional in the individualist anarchist, since it not only
gets rid of possible speculations about individualism, but is, at the
same time, a call to struggle with a timeliness that is at times
amazing.
Among those who declare themselves to be individualist anarchists, Renzo
Novatore undoubtedly occupies a place of remark, being one of the
greatest examples of that which in past epochs was called “heroic and
iconoclastic anarchism”. Man of thought and action, in the course of his
life, Novatore had a way most of the time of showing his own uniqueness.
During the First World War, when interventionism picked up not a few
followers among the anarchists, particularly within the ranks of the
individualists, Novatore lined himself up resolutely against the war,
deserting with arms in hand and being condemned to death for it by the
tribunal in La Spezia. Unlike the great portion of other individualists
who amused themselves with academic meditations on the “I”. Novatore
live as an outlaw committing attentats and expropriations and actively
participating in numerous insurrectional endeavors until he was killed
in a gun battle with carabinieri in 1922.
Anti-dogmatic, he entered into polemics with both the muscle-bound
anarchist organizers of the UAI (Union of Italian Anarchists) — he had a
most violent argument with Camillo Berneri — and with the spokespeople
of a certain type of anarchist individualism (like Carlo Molaschi) often
and willingly. For Novatore — a reader of Stirner, but not for that a
disciple of stirnerism — the affirmation of the individual, the
continuous tension toward freedom, led inevitably to the struggle
against the existent, to the violent battle against authority and
against every type of “wait — and see” attitude.
Written around 1921, Toward the Creative Nothing, which visibly feels
the effects of Nietzsche’s influence on the author, attacks
christianity, socialism, democracy, fascism one after the other, showing
the material and spiritual destitution in them. All that which has led
to the decadence of the individual, that which subjected it under
various pretexts to “social phantoms” is assailed with iconoclastic
fury. With this critique of that which belittles the uniqueness of the
individual — which is still valid now — Novatore demolishes all the
widespread commonplaces on the worth of individuals. At times with a
smile on his lips and at other times with rage, Novatore refutes anyone
who imagines him closed in the cloister of philosophical speculation; he
drives back the accusations of those who believe him to be a blind
negator, one deprived of projectuality; he shows the absurdity of those
who believe him to be opposed to the revolution and favorable only to
individual revolt. All of this without ever missing an opportunity to
affirm the uniqueness of the individual, the greatness of the dream. The
force of desire, the beauty of anarchy. In other words, here is what
today has come to be considered out-of-date, but which perhaps is more
simply out of fashion.
Certainly, a lot of time has passed since the writing of this text. But
the triumph of democracy, the survival of stalinism, the rebirth of
fascism, the deluge of technology, the universalization of commodities,
the validation carried out by the mass media, the reduction of language,
the contempt for utopia; this is what conspires to drown the individual
in a sea of mediocrity, to tame its uniqueness, to placate every
instinct of revolt within it, to render it incapable of love as well as
hatred, impotent in its quiet life — all this is frighteningly current.
Here this is because it renders that which can serve to desecrate and
combat this situation equally current.
One thing is certain, only one who prefers the stormy sea to stagnant
water will surely know how to appreciate the iconoclastic work of Renzo
Novatore.
M.S.
By Enzo Martucci (revised from a translation by Stephen Marietta)
These words written in 1920, give us a glimpse of the promethean being
of Renzo Novatore.
Novatore was a poet of the free life. Intolerant of every chain and
limitation, he wanted to follow every impulse that rose within him. He
wanted to understand everything and experience all sensations — those
which lead to the abyss and those which lead to the stars. And then at
death to melt into nothingness, having lived intensely and heroically so
as to reach his full power as a complete man.
The son of a poor farmer from Arcola, Italy, Abile Riziero Ferrari
(Renzo Novatore) soon showed his great sensibility and rebelliousness.
When his father wanted him to plow the fields he would flee, stealing
fruit and chickens to sell so that he could buy books to read under a
tree in the forest. In this way he educated himself and quickly
developed a taste for non-conformist writers. In these he found reasons
for his instinctive aversion to oppression and restriction, to the
principles and institutions that reduce men to obedience and
renunciation.
As a young man he joined the Arcola group of anarcho-communists, but he
was not satisfied with the harmony and limited freedom of the new
society they awaited so eagerly. “I am with you in destroying the
tyranny of existing society,” he said, “but when you have done this and
begun to build anew, then I will oppose and go beyond you.”
Until he was fifteen years old, Renzo included the church in his poetry.
After that, freed and unprejudiced, he never planted any roots in the
gregarious existence of his village, but often found himself in conflict
with both men and the law. He scandalized his respectable family, who
wondered what they had done to deserve such a devil...
... Novatore, who was influenced by Baudelaire and Nietzsche, asserted
that we had needs and aspirations that could not be satisfied without
injury to the needs and aspirations of others. Therefore we must either
renounce them and become slaves, or satisfy them and come into conflict
with Society, whatever kind it may be, even if it calls itself
anarchist. Novatore:
Anarchy is not a social form, but a method of individuation. No society
will concede to me more than a limited freedom and a well-being that it
grants to each of its members. But I am not content with this and want
more. I want all that I have the power to conquer. Every society seeks
to confine me to the august limits of the permitted and the prohibited .
But I do not acknowledge these limits, for nothing is forbidden and all
is permitted to those who have the force and the valor.
Consequently, anarchy, which is the natural liberty of the individual
freed from the odious yoke of spiritual and material rulers, is not the
construction of a new and suffocating society.’ It is a decisive fight
against all societies — christian, democratic, socialist, communist,
etc., etc. Anarchism is the eternal struggle of a small minority of
aristocratic outsiders against all societies which follow one another on
the stage of history.
Those were the ideas expressed by Novatore in Il Libertario of La
Spezia, L’Iconoclasta of Pistoia, and other anarchist journals. And
these were the ideas that then influenced me as I was well prepared to
receive them.
During World War I Novatore refused to fight for a cause that was not
his own and took to the mountains. Astute, courageous, vigilant, his
pistol at the ready the authorities failed at every attempt to capture
him. At the end of the war the deserters were amnestied and he was able
to return to his village where his wife and son were waiting for him.
I was sixteen years old and had run away from home and my studies,
freeing myself from my bourgeois family, who had done everything they
could to stop my anarchist activities. Passing through Saranza on my way
to Milan, I stopped to get to know Novatore, having read his article “My
Iconoclastic Individualism”. Renzo came at once to meet me together with
another anarchist called Lucherini.
We passed unforgettable hours together. Our discussions were long and he
helped me fill gaps in my thinking, setting me on my way to the solution
of many fundamental problems. I was struck by his enthusiasm.
His appearance was impressive. Of medium height he was athletic in
build, and had a large forehead. His eyes were vivacious and expressed
sensibility, intelligence and force. He had an ironic smile that
revealed the contempt of a superior spirit for men and the world. He was
thirty-one years old, but already had the aura of genius.
After two months wandering around Italy with the police at my heels, I
returned to Arcola to see Renzo again. But Emma, his wife, told me that
he was also hunted and that I could only meet him at night in the
forest.
Once again we had long discussions and I was able to appreciate his
exceptional qualities as a poet, philosopher and man of action even
more. I valued the power of his intellect and his fine sensitivity which
was like that of a Greek god or a divine beast. We parted for the last
time at dawn.
Both of us were existing under terrible conditions. We were in open
struggle against Society, which would have liked to throw us in jail.
Renzo had been attacked in his house at Fresonaro by a band of armed
fascists who intended to kill him, but he had driven them off with
home-made grenades. After that he had to keep a safe distance from the
village.
Despite being an outlaw, he continued to develop his individualist
anarchist ideas in libertarian papers. I did the same and we aroused the
anger of the theoreticians of anarcho-communism. One of them, Professor
Camillo Berneri, described us in the October, 1920 issue of
L’Iconoclasta as “Paranoid megalomaniacs, exalters of a mad philosophy
and decadent literature, feeble imitators of the artists of opium and
hashish, sirens at so much an hour.”
I could not reply because in the meantime I had been arrested and shut
up in a House of Correction. But Renzo replied for both of us and took
“this bookworm in whom it is difficult to find the spirit and fire of a
true anarchist” to task.
More than a year later I was provisionally released from prison, but I
could find out nothing regarding the whereabouts of Renzo. Finally I
received the terrible news that he had been killed.
He was at an inn in Bolzaneto, near Genova, along with the intrepid
illegalist S.P., when a group of carabinieri arrived disguised as
hunters. Novatore and S. P. immediately opened fire and the police
responded. The tragic result was two dead, Renzo and Marasciallo Lempano
of the carabinieri, and one policeman wounded. This was in 1922: a few
months before the fascist march on Rome.
So a great and original poet, who, putting his thoughts and feelings
into action, attacked the mangy herd of sheep and shepherds, died at the
age of thirty three. He showed that life can be lived in intensity, not
in duration as the cowardly mass want and practice.
After his death it was discovered that, together with a few others, he
was preparing to strike at society and tear from it that which it denies
the individual. And in the Assizes Court where his accomplices were
tried, a prosecuting counsel acknowledged his bravery and called him “a
strange blend of light and darkness, love and anarchy, the sublime and
the criminal.”
A few friends collected some of his writings and posthumously published
them in two volumes: Above Authority (Al Disopra dell’Arco) and Toward
the Creative Nothing (Verso il Nulla Creatore). Other writings remained
with his family or were lost.
So an exceptional man lived and died — the man I felt was closest to me
in his ideals and aspirations. He described himself as “an atheist of
solitude.” He wanted to “ravish the impossible” and embraced life like
an ardent lover. He was a lofty conquistador of immortality and power,
who wanted to bring all to the maximum splendor of beauty.
Our epoch is an epoch of decadence. Bourgeois-christian-plebeian
civilization arrived at the dead end of its evolution a long time ago.
Democracy has arrived!
But under the false splendor of democratic civilization, higher
spiritual values have fallen, shattered.
Willful strength, barbarous individuality, free art, heroism, genius,
poetry have been scorned, mocked, slandered.
And not in the name of “I”, but of the “collective”. Not in the name of
“the unique one”, but of society.
Thus christianity — condemning the primitive and wild force of the
virgin instinct — killed the vigorously pagan “concept” of the joy of
the earth. Democracy — its offspring — glorified itself making the
justification for this crime and reveling in its grim and vulgar
enormity.
Already we knew it!
Christianity had brutally planted the poisoned blade in the healthy,
quivering flesh of all humanity; it had goaded a cold wave of darkness
with mystically brutal fury to dim the serene and festive exultation of
the dionysian spirit of our pagan ancestors.
In one cold evening, winter fatally fell upon a warm midday of summer.
It was christianity that, substituting the phantasm of “god” for the
vibrant reality of “I”, declared itself the fierce enemy of the joy of
living and avenged itself knavishly on earthly life.
With christianity Life was sent to mourn in the frightful abysses of the
most bitter renunciations; she was pushed toward the glacier of
disavowal and death. And from this glacier of disavowal and death,
democracy was born.
Thus democracy — the mother of socialism — is the daughter of
christianity.
With the triumph of democratic civilization the spiritual mob was
glorified. With its fierce anti-individualism — democracy — being
incapable of understanding such a thing — trampled all the heroic beauty
of the anti-collectivist and creative “I”.
The bourgeois toads and the proletarian frogs clasped each other's hands
in a common spiritual baseness, piously receiving communion from the
lead cup containing the slimy liquor of the very social lies that
democracy handed to each of them.
And the songs that bourgeois and proletarian raised at their spiritual
communion were a common and noisy “Hurrah!” to the victorious and
triumphant Goose.
And while the “Hurrah!”’s burst forth high and frenzied, she — democracy
— pressed the plebeian cap on her forehead, proclaiming — grim and
savage irony — the equal rights... of Man!
It was then that the Eagle, in his prudent awareness, beat his titanic
wings more swiftly, soaring — disgusted by the trivial performance —
toward the peak of meditation.
Thus, the democratic Goose remained queen of the world and lady of all
things, imperial mistress and sovereign.
But since something waiting above her laughed, she — by means of
socialism, her only true son — moved to hurl a stone and a word, in the
low swampy realm where the toads and frogs croaked, to raise a
materialistic fistfight in order to make it pass through a titanic war
to superb ideas and to spirituality. And in the marshes, the fistfight
happened. It happened in such a plebeian manner as to spray mud so high
that it stained the stars.
Thus, everything was contaminated with democracy.
Everything!
Even that which was best here.
Even that which was worst here.
In the reign of democracy, the struggles that were opened between
capital and labor were stunted struggles, impotent ghosts of war,
deprived of all content of high spirituality and of brave revolutionary
greatness, unable to create a different concept of life, stronger and
more beautiful.
Bourgeois and proletarian, though clashing over questions of class, of
power and of the belly, still always remained united in common hatred
against the great vagabonds of the spirit, against the solitaries of the
idea. Against all those stricken by thought, against all those
transfigured by a superior beauty.
With democratic civilization, Christ has triumphed.
In addition to paradise in heaven, “the poor in spirit” had democracy on
earth.
If the triumph has not yet been completed, socialism will complete it.
In its theoretical conception, it has already announced itself for a
long time. It aims to “level” all human worth.
Listen, oh youthful spirits!
The war against the human individual was begun by Christ in the name of
god, was developed by democracy in the name of society and threatens to
complete itself in socialism in the name of humanity.
If we do not know in time how to destroy these three absurd as well as
dangerous phantoms, the individual will be inexorably lost.
It is necessary that the revolt of the “I” expands itself, broadens
itself, generalizes itself!
We — the forerunners of the time — have already lit the beacons!
We have lit the torches of thought.
We have brandished the ax of action.
And we have smashed.
And we have unhinged.
But our individual “crimes” must be the fatal announcement of a great
social storm.
The great and dreadful storm that will smash all the structures of the
conventional lies, that will unhinge the walls of all hypocrisy, that
will reduce the old world to a heap of ruins and smoking rubble!
Because it is from these ruins of god, of society, of family and of
humanity that the new human mind could be born flourishing and festive,
that new human mind which — on the rubble of all the past — will sing
the birth of the liberated man: the free and great “I”.
Christ was a paradoxical misunderstanding from the gospels. He was a sad
and sorrowful phenomenon of decadence, born of pagan fatigue.
The Antichrist is the healthy son of all the bold hatred that Life has
bred in the secrecy of its own fecund breast, during the twenty and more
centuries of christian order.
Because history returns.
Because eternal return is the law that rules the universe.
It is the destiny of the world!
It is the axis around which life itself turns!
To perpetuate itself.
To run itself back.
To contradict itself.
To pursue itself.
To not die.
Because life is a movement, an action.
That pursues thought.
That yearns for thought.
That loves thought.
And this being walks, runs, bustles around.
Life wants to stir in the kingdom of ideas.
But when the way is impractical, then, thought weeps.
It weeps and despairs...
Then weariness makes it weak, renders it christian.
Then it takes its sister life in hand and seeks to confine her in the
realm of death.
But the Antichrist — the spirit of the most mysterious and profound
instinct — calls Life back to himself, shouting barbarically to her:
Let’s begin again!
And Life begins again!
Because it does not want to die.
And if Christ symbolizes the weariness of life, the sunset of thought:
the death of the idea!
The Antichrist symbolizes the instinct of life.
He symbolizes the resurrection of thought.
The Antichrist is the symbol of a new dawn.
If the dying democratic (bourgeois-christian-plebeian) civilization
succeeded in leveling the human mind, denying every high spiritual value
that stands out above it, it — fortunately — did not succeed in leveling
the differences of class, of privilege, and of caste, which — as we have
already said — remained divided only over a question of the belly.
Since — for the one class as for the other — the belly remained — it is
necessary to confess it and not only to confess it as the supreme ideal.
And socialism understood all this.
It understood it, and since it was a skillful — and at last, perhaps,
practically useful — speculator, it cast the poison of its coarse
doctrine of equality (equality of lice before the sacred majesty of the
sovereign state) into the wells of slavery where innocence blissfully
quenched its thirst.
But the poison that socialism spread was not the powerful poison capable
of giving heroic virtue to anyone who drank it. No: it was not the
radical poison capable of performing the miracle that elevates the human
mind — transfiguring it and freeing it. Rather it was a hybrid blend of
“yes” and “no”. A livid mixture of “authority” and “faith”, of “state”
and of “the future”.
So that, through socialism, the proletarian mob once again felt close to
the bourgeois mob and together they turned toward the horizon,
faithfully awaiting the Sun of the Future!
And this because, while socialism was not able to transform the
shivering hands of the slaves into so many iconoclastic, pitiless and
rapacious claws, it was also incapable of transforming the mean avarice
of the tyrants into the high and superior virtue of generosity.
With socialism, the corrupt and viscous circle created by christianity
and developed by democracy was not broken. Instead it consolidated
itself better.
Socialism remained as a dangerous and impractical bridge between the
tyrant and the slave; as a false link of conjunction; as the ambiguity
of the “yes” and the “no” from which its absurd underlying principle is
mixed.
And, once again, we saw the fatally obscene joke that disgusted us. We
saw socialism, proletariat and bourgeoisie, together reenter the orbit
of the lowest spiritual poverty to worship democracy. But democracy —
being the people that governed the people by beatings with cudgels — for
the love of the people as Oscar Wilde one day quipped — it was logical
that true free spirits, great vagabonds of the idea, more strongly felt
the need to push decisively toward the extreme boundary of their
iconoclasm of the solitary in order to prepare the trained phalanxes of
the human eagles in the silent desert, those who will furiously take
part in the tragic celebration of the social dusk in order to overturn
democratic civilization between their steel claws, and plunge it into
the void of an ancient time that was.
When the bourgeoisie had kneeled to the right of socialism in the sacred
temple of democracy, they serenely stretched out in the bed of
expectation to sleep their absurd sleep of peace. But the proletarians,
who had lost their happy innocence by drinking the socialist poison,
shouted from the left side, upsetting the tranquil sleep of the idiotic,
criminal bourgeoisie.
In the meantime, on the higher mountains of thought, the vagabonds of
the idea overcame nausea, announcing that something like the roaring
laughter of Zarathustra had echoed sinisterly.
The wind of the spirit, similar to a hurricane, would have had to
penetrate the human mind and raise it impetuously in the whirlwind of
ideas in order to overwhelm all the old values from the darkness of
time, raising the life of the sublimated instinct again in the sun with
the new thought.
But, awakening, the bourgeois toads understood that some
incomprehensible thing cried out in the heights, threatening their base
existence. Yes: they understood that a thing arrive from the heights
like a rock, a roar, a menace.
They understood that the satanic voices of frenzied forerunners of time
announced a furious tempest that, arising from the renewed will of a few
solitaries, exploded in the entrails of society to raze it to the
ground.
But they have not understood (and will never understand this until they
have been crushed) that what passed over the world was the powerful wing
of a free life in the beating of which was the death of the “bourgeois
man” and of the “proletarian man”, because all people could have been
“unique” and “universal” at the same time.
And this was the reason why all the bourgeoisie of the world rang their
bells, made from false idealistic metal, in mass, calling themselves to
a great assembly.
The assembly was general...
All the bourgeoisie gathered.
They gathered among the slimy rushes growing from the quagmire of their
common lies and there, in the silence of the mud, they decided the
extermination of the proletarian frogs, their servants and their
friends.
In the ferocious plot all sides were devotees of Christ and of
democracy.
All the former apostles of the frogs attended as well. The war was
decided and the prince of the black vipers blessed the fratricidal
armies in the name of the god who said, “Do not kill”, while the
symbolic vicar of death implored his goddess who came to dance on the
earth.
Then socialism — as skillful acrobat and practical juggler — took a leap
ahead. He jumped on the tight wire of sentimental political speculation,
his brow encircled in black, and, aching and weeping more or less this
way, said, “I am the true enemy of violence. I am the enemy of war, and
also the enemy of revolution. I am the enemy of blood.”
And after having spoken again of “peace” and of “equality”, of “faith”
and of “martyrdom”, of “humanity” and of “the future”, he intoned a song
on the motifs of the “yes” and of the “no”, bowed his head and wept.
He wept the tears of Judas, which are not even the “I wash my hands of
it” of Pilate.
And the frogs departed...
They departed toward the realm of supreme human baseness.
They departed toward the mud of all the trenches.
They departed... And death came! It came drunk on blood and danced
horribly in the world. For five long years...
It was then that the great vagabonds of the spirit, taken with a new
disgust, rode their free eagles once more to soar dizzily in the
solitude of their distant glaciers to laugh and curse.
Even the spirit of Zarathustra — the truest lover of war and the most
sincere friend of warriors — must have remained sufficiently disgusted
and scornful since somebody heard him exclaim: “For me, you must be
those who stretch your eyes in search of the enemy of your enemy. And in
some of you hatred blazes at first glance. You must look for your enemy,
fight your war. And this for your ideas!
And if your idea succumbs, your rectitude cries of triumph!”
But alas! The heroic sermon of the liberating barbarian availed nothing.
The human frogs knew neither how to distinguish their own enemy nor how
to fight for their own ideas. (The frogs have no ideas!)
And neither recognizing their enemies nor having their own ideas, they
fought for the bellies of their brothers in Christ, for their equals in
democracy.
They fought against each other for their enemy.
Abel, revived, died for Cain a second time. But this time, at his own
hand!
Voluntarily...
Voluntarily, because he could have rebelled, and he did not do so...
Because he could have said: no!
Or yes!
Because saying: “no” he could have been strong!
Because saying: “yes”, he could have shown that he “believed” in the
“cause for which he fought.
But he said neither “yes” nor “no”.
He departed!
From cowardice!
Like always!
He departed...
He went toward death!...
Without knowing why.
Like always.
And death came...
It came to dance in the world for five long years!
And it danced hideously in the muddy trenches of all parts of the world.
It danced with feet of lightning...
It danced and laughed...
It laughed and danced...
For five long years!
Ah! How vulgar is death that dances without having the wings of an idea
on its back.
What an idiotic thing to die without knowing why...
We saw it when it danced — Death.
It was a black Death, without transparency of light.
It was a Death without wings!
How ugly and vulgar it was...
How clumsy was its dance.
But still it danced!
And how it mowed — dancing — all the superfluous and all of those of the
majority. All those for whom — says the great liberator — the state was
invented.
But alas! It did not mow these alone...
Death — in order to avenge the state — has even mowed down those who are
not worthless, even those who are essential!...
But those who were not worthless, those who were not of the majority,
those who have fallen saying “no!”
They will be avenged.
We will avenge them.
We will avenge them because they are our brothers!
We will avenge them because they have fallen with stars in their eyes.
Because dying, they have drunk the sun.
The sun of life, the sun of struggle, the sun of an Idea.
What has the war renewed?
Where is the heroic transfiguration of the spirit?
Where have they hung the phosphorescent tables of the new values?
In which temple have the holy amphoras of gold enclosing the luminous
and blazing hearts of the supreme and creative heroes been laid?
Where is the splendor of the great and new noon?
Frightful rivers of blood washed all the turf and covered all the
pathways of the world.
Fearful torrents of tears made their heartbreaking lament echo across
the eddies of all the earth: mountains of bone and human flesh
everywhere blanched and everywhere rotted in the sun.
But nothing was transformed, nothing evolved.
The bourgeois belly merely belched from satiety and that of the
proletarian cried out from too much hunger.
And enough!
With Karl Marx the human mind descended into the intestines.
The roar that passes through the world today is a belly roar.
Our will can transform it into a shout of the mind.
Into a spiritual storm.
Into a cry of free life.
Into a hurricane of lightning.
Our thunderbolt could unhinge the present reality, rip open the door to
the unknown mystery of our longed-for dream and show the supreme beauty
of the liberated man.
Because we are mad forerunners of the time.
The pyres.
The beacons.
The signals.
The first announcements.
The war!
Do you remember it?
What has the war created?
Here it is:
The woman sold her body and called the prostitution “free love”.
The man, who “dodged” to manufacture bullets and to preach the sublime
beauty of the war, called his cowardice: “delicate artfulness and heroic
cunning”.
This one who always lived in unconscious infamy, in cowardice, in
humility, in indifference and in weak renunciations, cursed against
small audacities — which he had always detested — because by themselves
they did not have the strength to prevent his belly from being torn
apart by those weapons that he himself had constructed for a vile morsel
of bread.
Because even the beggars of the spirit — those who always remain outside
to warm up while the more noble part of humanity enters into the hell of
life — these humble and devoted servants of their tyrant, these
unconscious slanderers of superior minds, even these, we say, did not
want to depart.
They did not want to die.
They writhed, they wept, they implored, they prayed!
But all this from a low instinct of impotent and bestial
self-preservation, deprived of every heroic roar of revolt, and not
instead from questions of a superior humanity, of refined depth of
feeling, of spiritual beauty.
No, no, no!
Nothing of all that!
The belly!
Only the bestial belly.
Bourgeois ideal — proletarian ideal — the belly!
But in the meantime death came...
It came to dance in the world without having the wings of an idea on its
back!
And it danced...
It danced and laughed.
For five long years...
And while on the borders wingless death danced drunk on blood, at home
in the sacred apse of the internal front — in the vulgar “gazettes” of
lies — the miraculous moral and material evolution of our women was
recited and sung along with the spiritual peak that our heroic and
glorious foot soldier ascended. The one who died weeping without knowing
“why”.
How many ferocious lies, how much vulgar cynicism the grim minds of
democratic society and of the state vomited in the “gazettes”.
Who remembers the war?
How the crows croaked...
The crows and the owls!
And meanwhile death danced!
It danced without having the wings of an idea on its back!
Of a dangerous idea that bears fruit and that creates.
It danced...
It danced and laughed!
And how it mowed — dancing — the superfluous. All those who were of the
majority. Those for whom the state was invented.
But alas! It did not only mow these.
It also mowed those who had the rays of the sun in their eyes, those who
had the stars in their pupils!
Where is the epic art, the heroic art, the supreme art that the war
promised us?
Where is the free life, the triumph of the new dawn, the splendor of
noon, the festive glory of the sun?
Where is the redemption from material slavery?
Where is the one who has created the fine and profound poetry that had
to germinate painfully in this tragic and fearful abyss of blood and
death, in order to tell us the silent and cruel torture felt by the
human mind?
Who has said the sweet and good word to us that calls a clear morning
after a terrible night of hurricane?
Who has said the superior word that makes us great as our sorrow, pure
in beauty and deep in humanity?
Who is, who ever is the genius who has known how to bend himself with
love and faithfulness over the open wounds in the living flesh of our
life, to receive all the noble tears from them so that the supreme
laughter of the redeemer spirit could rend the claws from the starving
monsters of our past errors in order to make us ascend to the concept of
a superior ethic, where, through the luminous principle of human beauty
purified in blood and sorrow, we could lift ourselves, strong and
majestic — like an arrow taut on the bow of the will — to sing the
deepest and gentlest melody of the highest of all our hopes to earthly
life!
Where? Where?
I don’t see it!
I don’t feel it!
I look around me, but I see only vulgar pornography and false
cynicism...
At least we could have been given a Homer of art, and a Napoleon of the
acts of war.
A man who could have had the strength to destroy an epoch, to create a
new history...
But nothing!
The war has given us neither great singers nor great rulers.
Only lying ghosts and grim parodies.
The war has passed washing history and humanity in tears and blood, but
the epoch has remained unchanged.
An epoch of disintegration.
Collectivism is dying and individualism has not yet taken hold.
Nobody knows how to obey, nobody knows how to command.
But given all this, knowing how to live free, this is still at present
an abyss.
An abyss that can only be filled up with the corpse of slavery and that
of authority.
The war could not fill up this abyss. It could only dig it deeper. But
what the war could not do, revolution must do.
The war has rendered humans more beastly and plebeian.
Coarser and uglier.
Revolution must render them better.
It must ennoble them.
Already — socially speaking — we have slipped down the fatal slope, and
there is no more possibility of turning back.
To attempt it alone would be a crime.
Not a great and noble crime however.
But a vulgar crime. A crime more than useless and vain. A crime against
the flesh of our ideas.
Because we are not the enemies of blood...
We are the enemies of vulgarity!
Now that the age of obligation and slavery is agonizing, we want to
close the cycle of theoretical and contemplative thought in order to
open the breach to violent action, which is still the will of life and
the exultation of expansion.
On the ruins of piety and religion we want to erect the creative
hardness of our proud hearts.
We are not the admirers of the “ideal man” of “social rights, but the
proclaimers of the “actual individual”, enemy of social abstractions.
We fight for the liberation of the individual.
For the conquest of life.
For the triumph of our idea.
For the realization of our dreams.
And if our ideas are dangerous, it is because we are those who love to
live dangerously.
And if our dreams are mad, it is because we are mad. But our madness is
supreme wisdom.
But our ideas are the heart of life; but our thoughts are the beacons of
humanity.
And what the war has not done, revolution must do.
Because revolution is the fire of our will and a need of our solitary
minds; it is an obligation of the libertarian aristocracy.
To create new ethical values.
To create new aesthetic values.
To communalize material wealth.
To individualize spiritual wealth.
Because we — violent cerebralists and passional sentimentalists at the
same time — understand and know that revolution is a necessity of the
silent sorrow that suffers at the bottom and a need of the free spirits
who suffer in the heights.
Because if the sorrow that suffers at the bottom wants rise with the
happy smile of the sun, the free spirits who suffer in the heights no
longer want to feel the petty offenses of the shame of vulgar slavery
that surrounds them.
The human spirit is divided into three streams:
The stream of slavery, the stream of tyranny, the stream of freedom!
With revolution, the last of these streams needs to burst upon the other
two and overwhelm them.
It needs to create spiritual beauty, teach the poor the shame of their
poverty, and the rich the shame of their wealth.
All that is called “material property”, “private property”, “exterior
property” needs to become what the sun, the light, the sky, the sea, the
stars are for individuals.
And this will happen!
It will happen because we — the iconoclasts — will violate it!
Only ethical and spiritual wealth is invulnerable.
This is the true property of individuals. The rest no!
The rest is vulnerable! And all that is vulnerable will be violated!
It will be done by the unbiased might of the “I”.
By the heroic strength of the freed man.
And beyond every law, every tyrannical morality, every society, every
conception of false humanity...
We must set our endeavor to transform the revolution that advances into
“anarchist crime”, in order to push humanity beyond the state, beyond
socialism.
Toward Anarchy!
If, with the war, people were not able to sublimate themselves in death,
death has purified the blood of the fallen.
And the blood that death purified — and that the soil drank greedily —
now cries from underground!
And we solitaries, we are not the singers of the belly, but the
listeners to the dead; to the voice of the dead who cry from
underground!
To the voice of the “impure” blood that is purified in death.
And the blood of the fallen cries!
Cries from under the ground!
And the cry of this blood calls us also toward the abyss...
It needs to be freed from its prison!
Oh, young miners, be ready!
We prepare the torches and paravanes.
It is necessary to till the earth.
It is time! It is time! It is time!
The blood of the dead must be freed from its prison.
It wants to rise from the shadowy depths to hurl itself toward the sky
and conquer the stars.
Because the stars are the friends of the dead.
They are the good sisters who have seen them die.
They are the ones who go to their graves every night with feet of light
and tell them:
Tomorrow!...
And we — the children of tomorrow — have come today to tell you:
It is time! It is time! It is time!
And we have come at the hour before dawn...
In the company of the dawn and of the last stars!
And to the dead we have added more dead...
But all those who fall have a star of gold that shines in their pupil!
A star of gold that says:
“The cowardice of the remaining brothers is transformed into a creative
dream, into avenging heroism.
Because if it were not so, one would not deserve to die!”
How sad it must be to die.
Without a hope in one’s heart... without a pyre in one’s brain; without
a dream in one’s mind; without a star of gold shining in our pupil!
The blood of the dead — our dead — cries from underground.
Clearly and distinctly, we hear that cry. That cry which intoxicates us
with anguish and with sorrow.
And we cannot be deaf to that voice, nor do we want to... We.
We do not want to be deaf to it, because life has told us:
“Whoever is deaf to the voice of blood is not worthy of me. Because
blood is my wine; and the dead my secret.
Only to the one who will listen to the voice of the dead will I unveil
the enigma of my great mystery!”
And we will respond to this voice:
Because only those who know how to respond to the voice from the abyss
can conquer the stars.
I address myself to you, oh my brother!
I address myself to you and tell you:
If you are among those who are kneeling in the half circle, close your
eyes in the darkness and leap into the abyss.
Only in this way will you be able to bounce back to the highest peaks
and open your great pupils wide in the sun.”
Because one cannot be of the eagles if one is not of the divers.
One cannot soar to the peaks when one is incapable of the depths.
In the bottom, sorrow dwells, in the heights anguish.
Over the sunset of all the ages, a unique dawn rises between two
different dusks.
In the midst of the virgin light of this unique dawn, the sorrow of the
diver that is in us must be united to the anguish of the eagle that also
lives in us, to celebrate the tragic and fruitful marriage of perpetual
renewal.
The renewal of the personal “I” among the collective tempests and social
hurricanes.
Because perennial solitude is only for saints who recognize in god their
witness. But we are the atheist offspring of solitude.
We are the solitary demons without witness.
In the bottom, we want to live the reality of sorrow; in the heights,
the sorrow of the dream...
In order to live all the battles, all the defeats, all the victories,
all the dreams, all the sorrows and all the hopes intensely and
dangerously.
And we want to sing in the sun; we want to howl in the winds!
Because our brain is a sparkling pyre where the great fire of thought
crackles and burns in mad and joyful torments.
Because the purity of all dawns, the flame of all noons, the melancholy
of all sunsets, the silence of all tombs, the hatred of all hearts, the
murmur of all forests and the smile of all stars are the mysterious
notes composing the secret music of our mind overflowing with vital
exuberance.
Because in the depth of our heart we hear a voice speaking of human
individuation, a voice so masterful and vigorous that, often times,
while listening to it, we feel fear and terror.
Because the voice that speaks is His voice: the winged Demon from our
depths.
By now, it is proven...
Life is sorrow!
But we have learned to love sorrow in order to love life!
Because in loving sorrow we have learned to struggle.
And in struggle — in struggle alone — is our joy of living.
To remain suspended halfway is not our task.
The half circle symbolizes the ancient “yes and no”.
The impotence of life and death.
It is the circle of socialism, of pity and of faith.
But we are not socialists...
We are anarchists. And individualists, and nihilists, and aristocrats.
Because we come from the mountains.
From close to the stars.
We come from the heights: to laugh and to curse!
We have come to light a forest of pyres upon the earth to illuminate it
during the night which precedes the great noon.
And our pyres will be extinguished when the fire of the sun bursts
majestically over the sea. And if this day should not come, our pyres
will continue to crackle tragically amidst the darkness of the eternal
night.
Because we love all that is great.
We are the lovers of every miracle, the promoters of every prodigy, the
creators of every wonder!
Yes: we know it!
For you, great things are in good as in evil.
But we live beyond good and evil, because all that is great belongs to
beauty.
Even “crime”.
Even “perversity”.
Even “sorrow”.
And we want to be great like our crime!
In order not to slander it.
We want to be great like our perversity!
In order to render it conscious.
We want to be great like our sorrow.
In order to be worthy of it.
Because we come from the heights. From the home of Beauty. We have come
to raise a forest of pyres upon the earth to illuminate it during the
night which precedes the great noon.
Until the hour in which the fire of the sun bursts majestically over the
sea.
Because we want to celebrate the feast of the great human prodigy.
We want our minds to vibrate in a new dream.
We want this tragic social dusk to give our “I” some calm and thrilling
tinder of universal light.
Because we are the nihilists of social phantoms.
Because we hear the voice of the blood that cries from underground.
We prepare the paravanes and the torches, oh young miners. The abyss
awaits us. We leap into it in the end: Toward the creative nothing.
Our nihilism is not christian nihilism.
We do not deny life.
No! We are the great iconoclasts of the lie.
And all that is declared “sacred” is a lie.
We are the enemies of the “sacred”.
And to you a law is “sacred”; a society “sacred”; a moral “sacred”; an
idea “sacred”!
But we — the masters and lovers of pitiless strength and strong-willed
beauty, of the ravishing idea — we, the iconoclasts of all that is
consecrated — we laugh satanically, with a fine broad and mocking
laughter.
We laugh!...
And laughing, we keep the bow of our pagan will to enjoy always strained
toward the full integrity of life.
And we write our truths with laughter.
And we write our passions with blood.
And we laugh! .. .
We laugh the fine healthy and red laughter of hatred.
We laugh the fine blue and fresh laughter of love.
We laugh!
But laughing, we remember, with supreme gravity, to be the legitimate
offspring and the worthy heirs of a great libertarian aristocracy that
transmitted to us satanic outbursts of mad heroism in the blood, and
waves of poetry, of solos, of songs in the flesh!
Our brain is a sparkling pyre, where the crackling fire of thought burns
in joyful torments.
Our mind is a solitary oasis, always flowering and cheerful, where a
secret music sings the complicated melody of our winged mystery.
And in our brain all the winds of the mountains cry to us; in our flesh
all the tempests of the sea shout to us; all the Nymphs of Evil; our
dreams are actual heavens inhabited by thrilling virgin muses.
We are the true demons of Life.
The forerunner of the time.
The first announcements!
Our vital exuberance intoxicates us with strength and with scorn.
It teaches us to despise Death.
Today we have reached the tragic celebration of a great social dusk.
The twilight is red.
The sunset is bloody.
Anxiety flaps its throbbing wings in the wind.
Wings red with blood; wings black with death!
In the shadow Sorrow organized the army of her unknown children.
Beauty is in the garden of Life, and is weaving garlands of flowers to
crown the brows of the heroes.
The free spirits have already hurled their thunderbolts across the
twilight.
As first announcements of fire: first signals of war!
Our epoch is under the wheels of history.
Democratic civilization turns toward the grave.
Bourgeois and plebeian society is shattered fatally, inexorably! The
fascist phenomenon is the most certain and irrefutable proof of it.
To demonstrate it, we would only need to go back in time and question
history.
But there is no need for this!
The present speaks with abundant eloquence!
Fascism is nothing but the convulsive and cruel pang of a plebeian
society, emasculated and vulgar, that agonizes tragically drowned in the
quagmire of its flaws and of its own lies.
It — fascism — celebrates these its bacchanals with pyres of flame and
wicked orgies of blood.
But from the gloomy crackle of its livid fires, it does not sparkle with
even a single spark of vigorous, innovative spirituality, whereas the
blood that it sheds transforms itself into wine that the forerunners of
the time silently gather in the red chalices of hatred, addressing it as
the heroic beverage in order to commune with all the offspring of social
sorrow called to the twilight celebration of the dusk.
Because the great forerunners of the time are the brothers and the
friends of the offspring of sorrow.
Of sorrow that struggles.
Of sorrow that rises.
Of sorrow that creates.
We will take these unknown brothers by the hand to advance together
against all the “no” of denial, and to climb together toward all the
“yes” of affirmation; toward a new spiritual dawn; toward new noons of
life.
Because we are lovers of danger; the reckless ones in all undertakings,
the conquerors of the impossible, the promoters and precursors of all
“endeavors”!
Because life is an endeavor!
After the negating celebration of the social dusk, we will celebrate the
rite of the “I”: the great noon of the complete and actual individual.
So that the night triumphs no more.
So that the darkness surrounds us no more.
So that the majestic fire of the sun perpetuates its feast of light in
the sky and in the sea.
Fascism is an obstacle much too ephemeral and impotent to hinder the
course of human thought that bursts beyond every dam and overflows
beyond every boundary, stirring action on its way.
Fascism is impotent because it is brute force.
It is matter without spirit; it is night without dawn.
Fascism is the other face of socialism.
Both of them are bodies without minds.
Socialism is the material force that, acting as the shadow of a dogma,
resolves and dissolves in a spiritual “no”.
Fascism is a consumptive of the spiritual “no” that aims — wretch — at a
material yes.
Both lack willful quality.
They are the bores of time; the temporizers of the deed!
They are reactionary and conservative.
They are crystallized fossils that the strong-willed dynamism of history
that passes will sweep away together.
Because, in the willful field of moral and spiritual values, the two
enemies are equal.
And it is well known that when fascism is born, socialism alone is its
direct accomplice and responsible father.
Because, if when the nation, if when the state, if when democratic
Italy, if when bourgeois society trembled in pain and agony in the
knotty and powerful hands of the “proletariat” in revolt, socialism had
not basely hindered the tragic deadly hold — losing the lamps of reason
in front of its wide-opened eyes — certainly fascism would never even
have been born, let alone lived.
But the awkward colossus without mind is then allowed to take hold — for
fear that the vagabonds of the idea would push the movement of revolt
beyond the appointed mark — in a most vulgar game of sullen conservative
pity and false human love.
Thus, bourgeois Italy, instead of dying, brought forth...
It brought forth fascism!
Because fascism is the stunted and deformed creature born of the
impotent love of socialism for the bourgeoisie.
One of them is the father, and the other the mother. But neither wants
the responsibility for it.
Perhaps they find it a child much too monstrous.
And this is the reason they call it a “bastard”!
And it gets revenge.
Already wretched enough for being born this way, it rebels against the
father and insults the mother...
And perhaps it has reason...
But we, we bring all this out for history.
For history and for truth, not for ourselves.
For us fascism is a poisonous mushroom planted quite well in the rotten
heart of society, that is enough for us.
Only the great vagabonds of the idea can — and must — be the luminous
spiritual fulcrum of the tempestuous revolution, which advances in gloom
upon the world.
Blood requires blood.
That is ancient history!
It can turn back no more.
To attempt to turn back — as socialism does — would be a useless and
vain crime.
We must leap into the abyss.
We must answer the voice of the dead.
Of those dead who have fallen with immense stars of gold in their
pupils.
It is necessary to cultivate the soil.
To free the blood from underground.
Because it wants to rise to the stars.
It wants to burn its good sisters, luminous and distant, who have seen
them die.
The dead, our dead, speak:
“We have died with stars in our eyes.
We have died with rays of the sun in our pupils.
We have died with hearts swollen with dreams.
We have died with the song of the most beautiful hope in our mind.
We have died with the fire of an idea in our brain.
We have died...”
How sad death must be as the others died — not our dead — without all
this in the brain, in the mind, in the heart, in the eyes, in the
pupils!
Oh dead, oh dead! Oh our dead! Oh luminous torches! Oh burning beacons!
Oh crackling pyres! Oh dead...
Here it is, we are at twilight.
The tragic celebration of the great social dusk draws near.
Our great mind already opens toward the great subterranean light, oh
dead!
Because we too have the stars in our eyes, the sun in our pupils, the
dream in our heart, the song of hope in our mind and, in our brain, an
idea.
Yes, we too, we too!
Oh dead, oh dead! Oh our dead! Oh torches! Oh beacons! Oh pyres!
We have heard you speak in the solemn silence of our deep nights.
You said:
“We wanted to ascend in the sky of the free sun...
We wanted to ascend in the sky of the free life...
We wanted to ascend up there where once the penetrating eyes of the
pagan poet gazed:
Where the great thoughts arise and stand as inviolable oaks among the
people; where beauty descends, invoked by the pure poets, and stands
serene among the people; where love creates life and breathes joy!
Up above where life exults and expands in full harmony of splendor...
And for this, for this dream we struggled, for this great dream we
died...
And our struggle was called crime.
But our ‘crime’ must only be considered as titanic valor, as promethean
effort for liberation.
Because we are the enemies of all material domination and all spiritual
leveling.
Because, beyond all slavery and every dogma, we saw life dance free and
naked.
And our death must teach you the beauty of the heroic life!”
Oh dead, oh dead! Oh our dead...
We have heard your voice...
We have heard it speak this way in the solemn silence of our deep
nights.
Deep, deep, deep!
Because we are sensitives.
Our heart is a torch, our mind is a beacon, our brain is a pyre!...
We are the soul of life!...
We are the predawn ones who drink the dew from the chalice of flowers.
But the flowers have glowing roots attached in the darkness of the
earth.
In that earth which has drunk your blood.
Oh dead! Oh our dead!
This, your blood that cries, that roars, that wants to be freed from its
prison to hurl itself toward the sky and conquer the stars!
Those, your remote and luminous sisters who have seen you die. And we —
the vagabonds of the spirit, the solitaries of the idea — want our mind,
free and great, to open its wings wide in the sun.
We want to celebrate the social dusk in this twilight of bourgeois
society so that the final black night is made vermillion with blood.
Because the children of the dawn must be born of blood... Because the
monsters of the darkness must be killed by dawn...
Because the new individual ideas must be born through social
tragedies...
Because the new people must be forged in the fire!
And only from tragedy, from fire and from blood will the true, profound
Antichrist of humanity and of thought be born.
The true child of the earth and the sun.
The Antichrist must be born of the smoking ruins of revolution to
enliven the children of the new dawn.
Because the Antichrist is the one who comes from the abyss to rise
beyond every boundary.
He is the strong-willed enemy of crystallization, of pre-establishment,
of conservation!...
He is the one who will drive the human race through the mysterious
cavern of the unknown to the perennial unveiling of new sources of life
and of thought.
And we — the free spirits, the atheists of solitude, the demons of the
desert without witness — have ourselves already pushed ourselves toward
the most extreme peaks.
Because — with us — everything must be pushed to its maximum
consequences.
Even Hatred.
Even violence.
Even crime!
Because Hatred gives strength.
Violence unhinges.
Crime renews.
Cruelty creates.
And we want to unhinge, to renew, to create!
Because everything that is dwarfed vulgarity must be overcome.
Because all that lives must be great.
Because all that is great belongs to beauty!
And life must be beautiful!
We have killed “duty” so that our ardent desire for free brotherhood
acquires heroic valor in life.
We have killed “pity” because we are barbarians capable of great love.
We have killed “altruism” because we are generous egoists.
We have killed “philanthropic solidarity” so that the social man
unearths his most secret “I” and finds the strength of the “Unique”.
Because we know it. Life is tired of having stunted lovers.
Because the earth is tired of feeling itself trampled by long phalanxes
of dwarfs chanting christian prayers.
And finally, because we are tired of our brothers, carcasses incapable
of peace and of war. Inferior to hatred and to love.
We are tired and disgusted.
Yes, quite tired: quite disgusted!
And then that voice of the dead...
Of our dead!
The voice of the blood that cries from underground!
Of the blood that wants to free itself from its prison to hurl itself
toward the sky and conquer the stars!
Those stars that — blessing them — sparkled in their pupils at in the
final moment of death, transforming their dreamy eyes into vast discs of
gold.
Because the eyes of the dead — of our dead — are discs of gold.
They are luminous meteors that wander the infinite to point out the way
to us.
The way without end that is the pathway to eternity.
The eyes of our dead tell us the “why” of life, showing us the secret
fire that burns in our mystery. In that our secret mystery that nobody
has sung up to now...
But today the twilight is red...
The sunset is covered with blood...
We are close to the tragic celebration of the great social dusk.
Already, on the bells of history, time has struck the first predawn
strokes of a new day.
Enough, enough, enough!
It is the hour of the social tragedy!
We will destroy laughing.
We will set fires laughing.
We will kill laughing.
We will expropriate laughing.
And society will fall.
The fatherland will fall.
The family will fall.
All will fall after the free man is born.
The one is born who has learned the Dionysian art of joy and laughter
through tears and sorrow.
The hour has come to drown the enemy in blood...
The hour has come to wash our minds in blood.
Enough, enough, enough!
As the poet transforms his lyre into a dagger!
As the philosopher transforms his probe into a bomb!
As the fisherman transforms his oar into a formidable ax.
As the miner comes up from the unbearable caves of the dark mines armed
with his shining iron.
As the farmer transforms his fruitful spade into a war lance.
As the laborer transforms his hammer into a scythe and cleaver.
And forward, forward, forward.
It is time, it is time — it is time!
And society will fall.
The fatherland will fall.
The family will fall.
All will fall after the Free Man is born.
Forward, forward, forward, oh joyful destroyers.
Beneath the black edge of death we will conquer Life!
Laughing!
And we will make it our slave!
Laughing!
And we will love it laughing!
Since the only serious people are those who know how to be actively
engaged laughing.
And our hatred laughs...
Red laughter. Forward!
Forward, for the destruction of the lie and of the phantoms! Forward,
for the complete conquest of individuality and of Life!
But if Socrates and Christ by their senseless deaths had to undergo
horrendous bloody suffering, then wouldn’t all revolutions fought in
their names be equally bloody and senseless? The victory of Christianity
over the enviable paganism, the establishment of republics, the
conquests of empires, the liberal, constitutional or absolute monarchies
and democracies — were they not all consequences of the bloody torrents
of war and revolution? The violent pulse of all revolutions fought in
the name of ancient phantoms in order to erect new phantoms...
What possible value could these phantoms have for me, the iconoclast,
the killer of phantoms, the shatterer of idols old and new? And what
possible benefit . could the triumph of Christianity have for me since I
am the anti-christian par excellence? And what about the republics,
monarchies and all forms of society that can only accept me as a
“Christian”, a “subject”, a “citizen”, a “member”, etc., etc.? All forms
of society have systems to do one thing: Equalize! And all forms of
society consider themselves the perfect one. And it is this dogma of
perfection that obstructs the restless rebel who refuses to bow to its
new god... And I’m so revolutionary that I barely recognize myself. And
do you know why I am a barely recognizably revolutionary? Because I am
guided only by the tremendous and unstoppable impulse of MY desire to
expand the force of my own will. I am not guided by phantoms, I do my
own walking: it is not the illusion of a perfect society or the
universal redemption of humanity, but the absolute need to affirm my
potential in spite of all other forces.
The creation of a sick fantasy. Inhabitant of senile and impotent
brains. Companion and comforter of rancid spirits born to slavery. A
pill for constipated minds. Marxism for the faint of heart.
An abstract word with a negative connotation, long on power, short on
truth. An obscene mask painted on the mean face of a shrewd vulgarian
for the purpose of dominating the multitude of sentimentalist idiots and
imbeciles.
Penal servitude for the semi-intelligent, a cowshed of imbecility. A
Circe who transforms her adoring fans into dogs and pigs. A prostitute
for the master, a pimp of the foreigner. Child-eater, parent-slanderer
and scoffer at heroes.
The denial of love, life and liberty.
Discipline, discipline; obedience, obedience; slavery and ignorance,
pregnant with authority. A bourgeois body grotesquely fattened by a
vulgar christian creature. A medley of fetishism, sectarianism and
cowardice.
Churches for the powerless. Pawnshops for the stingy and weak. Many join
to live parasitically off the backs of their card-carrying simpleton
colleagues. Some join to become spies. Others, the most sincere, join to
end up in jail from where they can observe the mean-spiritedness of all
the rest.
The macabre altar used by capable comedians of all sort to display their
priestly talent for reciting masses. The beneficiaries pay nothing less
than 100% humiliation.
Fortunate are those who have drunk from its chalice without having their
souls offended or poisoned. If one such person exists, I urge them to
send me their photograph. I’m sure to look upon the face of an idiot.
Deception of the flesh and damage to the spirit. Disease of the soul,
atrophy of the brain, weakening of the heart, corruption of the senses,
poetic lies from which one gets ferociously inebriated two or three
times a day in order to consume this precious but stupid life more
quickly. And yet I would prefer to die of love. It’s the only swindler,
after Judas, that can kill with a kiss.
A filthy paste of servitude, tyranny, fetishism, fear, vanity — and
ignorance. The greatest offence one can commit against an ass is to call
it a man.
The most brutal of enslaved beasts. The greatest victim shuffling on
earth. And, after man, the most responsible for her problems. I’d be
curious to know what goes through her mind when I kiss her.
“We absolutely feel we are beyond all isms and theories. We will
suppress the works of all nitwits and all scribblers who, by affiliating
with the schools of the avant-garde, try to impose themselves on more
original minds. We will absolutely refuse all works of purely technical
virtuosity unless they serve to express an aesthetic rebellion. Dark,
virgin. forces, laughing ravagers of the impossible, audacious explorers
of the highest peaks and of the abyss, let’s thunder our howl of beauty
to squash the verminous swarms of the stinking feeble-minded.”
I don’t announce or promise anything. There are too many lying prophets
who make pronouncements on the possibility of a new life; and there are
even more vulgarians who promise the world new christs with their
unredeemed blood... Who are they? I don’t know! I can’t explain!... I
know I am a mixture of modesty, pride, wisdom and ignorance, of virtue,
cowardice and heroism, light and gloom, logic and absurdity. I am
suspended above an abyss of unexplored depth with my eye fixed on a
distant peak that may be nothing more than an illusion. I know that
within me are sunlit and blossoming summits like fantastic summer
gardens. I also know that there are dark hidden caverns that will never
see the light of day.
I have found some friends who resemble me to some extent insofar as I
resemble them to some extent and we have come together to build a
crystalline house on the rocks of a vertex. But this is not why we
consider ourselves gods. And there are eagles and there are snakes who,
like the gods, love the virgin heights... and we are among them as well.
We are all creatures, but creatures of the peaks, crouched together
between the symbolic shrubs of a truly free art form. We will cultivate
poisonous flowers of pure beauty in spite of the impish apes who live in
the lowest marshlands of society and who will hurl their impotent curses
toward our nest of violent hermits.
I’ve concluded my statement, but I haven’t yet defined myself. I know
that anyone, even the most humble of mortals, has the right to make o
statement of this kind. But I also believe that aside from having the
right, the true genius should regard it as an absolute duty.
History, materialism, monism, positivism and all the isms of this world
are old and rusty tools which I don’t need or mind anymore. My principle
is life and my end is death. I wish to live my life intensely and
embrace my death tragically.
You are waiting for the revolution? Let it be! My own began a long time
ago! When you are ready (god, what an endless wait!) I won’t mind going
with you for a while. But when you stop, I shall continue on my way
toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing!
Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits
of any society, unruly and heroic tramps will wander with their wild and
virgin thought — those who cannot live without planning ever new and
dreadful outbursts of rebellion! I shall be among them!
And after me, as before me, there will be those saying to their fellows:
“So turn to yourselves rather than to your gods and idols. Find what
hides within you and bring it to the light; show yourselves!”
Because every person who, searching his own inwardness, extracts what
was mysteriously hidden therein is a shadow eclipsing any form of
society which can exist under the sun!
All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy of tramps,
inaccessibles, unique ones, rulers over the ideal and conquerors of the
nothing resolutely advances. So, come on, icononclasts, forward!
Already the foreboding sky grows dark and silent!