Being born in Naples is useful for a single thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare full of savagery and death.
Electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing. My favourite key is the one that deletes.
Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause . . . everything at the end consoles you.
As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. And he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love.
Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.
Do you still believe in public opinion? Well let me tell you public opinion is a gimmick thought up by the English and Americans, it's them who are shitting us up with this public opinion rot, of you'll excuse my language, we've never had their political system, we don't have their traditions, we don't even know what trade unions are, we're a southern people and we obey whoever shouts the loudest and gives the orders.
They were just like the relations from whom I had fled as a girl. I
couldn’t bear them and yet they held me tight, I had them all inside me. Life can have an ironic geometry. Starting from the age of thirteen or
fourteen I had aspired to a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life,
cultured and reflective. Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me. I didn’t
think the city could contain life forms different from those I had known as a
child, violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or obtusely
fortified in defense of their own wretched degradation.
I observed my daughters when they weren’t paying attention, I felt for
them a complicated alternation of sympathy and antipathy……Even when I
recognised in the two girls what I considered my own good qualities I felt that
something wasn’t right. I had the impression that they didn’t know how to make
good use of those qualities, that the best part of me ended up in their bodies
as a mistaken graft, a parody, and I was angry, ashamed.
“You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”
“Always destroy what is in you.”
“Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.”
“There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania for improvement. “
“Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.”
“Thought is made in the mouth.”
“Dada is not modern at all, it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada puts an artificial sweetness onto things, a snow of butterflies coming out of a conjurer's skull. Dada is stillness and does not understand the passions.”
And on the other side for lack of sun there is death perhaps
waiting for you in the uproar of a dazzling whirlwind with a thousand explosive arms
stretched toward you man flower passing from the seller's hands to
those of the lover and the loved
passing from the hand of one event to the other passive and sad parakeet
the teeth of doors are chattering and everything is done with
impatience to make you leave quickly
man amiable merchandise eyes open but tightly sealed
cough of waterfall rhythm projected in meridians and slices
globe spotted with mud with leprosy and blood
winter mounted on its pedestal of night poor night weak and sterile
draws the drapery of cloud over the cold menagerie
and holds in its hands as if to throw a ball
luminous number your head full of poetry
― Tristan Tzara, L'Homme approximatif
DADAIST DISGUST
Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: DADA; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: DADA; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: DADA: every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: DADA; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: DADA; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of eve ry useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least - with the same intensity in the thicket of core's soul pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: DADA DADA DADA, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies:
LIFE.
It was a prophetic corner. For just as there are plants that are said to confer the power to see into the future, so there are place that possess such a virtue. For the most part, they aredeserted places - treetops leaning against walls, blind alleys or front gardens where no one ever stops. In such places, it seems as if all that lies in store for us has become the past.
Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.
The empty grave and the heart weighed in the balance - two enigmas to which life still owes me the solution.
The dull, mechanical sound of the engine had now been replaced by athe irregular, echoing roar - to me a delicious sound - of waves piled upon each other and breaking in disorder.
An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquility.
Because the world to-day is so constructed that no one can do what he would like to do, and he is forced, instead, to do what others wish him to do. Because the question of money always intrudes—into what we do, into what we are, into what we wish to become, into our work, into our highest aspirations, even into our relations with the people we love!
Where and how Dada began is almost as difficult to determine as Homer’s birthplace.
Dada marches on, destroying more and more, not in extension but in itself.
Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing; it is the point at which Yes and No, and all opposites, meet; not solemnly, in the palaces of human philosophy, but quite simply, at streetcorners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
Dada is useless, like everything else in life.
