Such a man is apt not only to become stubborn and dogged, but superstitious, a believer in magic and a practiser of magic. Such a man is beyond religion – it is his religiousness he is suffering from. Such a man becomes a monomaniac, bent on doing one thing only and that is to break the evil spell which has been put upon him. Such a man is beyond throwing bombs, beyond revolt; he wants to stop reacting, whether inertly or ferociously. This man, of all men on earth, wants the act to be a manifestation of life. If, in the realization of his terrible need, he begins to act regressively, to become unsocial, to stammer and stutter, to prove so utterly unadapted as to be incapable of earning a living, know that this man has found his way back to the womb and source of life and that tomorrow, instead of the contemptible object of ridicule which you have made of him, he will stand forth as a mm in his own right and all the powers of the world will be of no avail against him.
Out of the crude cipher with which he communicates from his prehistoric desk with the archaic men of the world a new language builds up which cuts through the death language of the day like wireless through a storm. There is no magic in this wavelength any more than there is magic in the womb. Men are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their inventions speak only of death. Death is the automaton which rules the world of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has never expressed anything. Death is wonderful too – after life. Only one like myself who has opened his mouth and spoken, only one who has said Yes, Yes, Yes, and again Yes! can open wide his arms to death and know no fear. Death as a reward, yes! Death as a result of fulfillment, yes! Death as a crown and shield, yes! But not death from the roots, isolating men, making them bitter and fearful and lonely, giving them fruitless energy, filling them with a will which can only say No! The first word any man writes when he has found himself, his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm is Yes! Everything he writes thereafter is Yes, Yes, Yes – Yes in a thousand million ways. No dynamo, no matter how huge – not even a dynamo of a hundred million dead souls – can combat one man saying Yes!
The war was on and men were being slaughtered, one million, two million, five million, ten million, twenty million, finally a hundred million, then a billion, everybody, man, woman and child, down to the last one. “No!” they were shouting, “No! they shall not pass!” And yet everybody passed; everybody got a free pass, whether he shouted Yes or No. In the midst of this triumphant demonstration of spiritually destructive osmosis I sat with my feet planted on the big desk trying to communicate with Zeus the Father of Atlantis and with his lost progeny, ignorant of the fact that Apollinaire was to die the day before the Armistice in a military hospital, ignorant of the fact that in his “new writing” he had penned these indelible lines,
“Be forbearing when you compare us
With those who were the perfection of order.
We who everywhere seek adventure,
We are not your enemies.
We would give you vast and strange domains
Where flowering mystery waits for him would pluck it.”
Ignorant that in this same poem he had also written:
“Have compassion on us who are always fighting on the frontiers Of the boundless future,
Compassion for our errors, compassion for our sins.” I was ignorant of the fact that there were men then living who went by the outlandish names of Blaise Cendrars, Jacques Vache, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Rene Crevel, Henri de Montherlant, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, George Grosz; ignorant of the fact that on July, 14,1916, at the Saal Waag, in Zurich, the first Dada Manifesto had been proclaimed -“manifesto by monsieur antipyrine” – that in this strange document it was stated “Dada is life without slippers or parallel . . . severe necessity without discipline or morality and we spit on humanity.” Ignorant of the fact that the Dada Manifesto of 1918 contained these lines. “I am writing a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and I am against manifestoes as a matter of principle, as I am also against principles … I write this manifesto to show that one may perform opposed actions together, in a single fresh respiration, I am against action; for continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain for I hate good sense .. . There is a literature which does not reach the voracious mass. The work of creators, sprung from a real necessity on the part of the author, and for himself. Consciousness of a supreme egotism where the stars waste away . . . Each page must explode, either with the profoundly serious and heavy, the whirlwind, dizziness, the new, the eternal, with the overwhelming hoax, with an enthusiasm for principles or with the mode of typography. On the one hand a staggering fleeing world, affianced to the jingle-bells of the infernal gamut, on the other hand: new beings…”
Thirty-two years later and I am still saying Yes! Yes, Monsieur Antipyrine! Yes,Monsieur Tristan Bustanoby Tzara! Yes, Monsieur Max Ernst Geburt! Yes! Monsieur Rene Crevel, now that you are dead by suicide, yes, the world is crazy, you were right. Yes, Monsieur Blaise Cendrars, you were right to kill. Was it the day of the Armistice that you brought out your little book -J’ai tue? Yes, “keep on my lads, humanity…” Yes, Jacques Vache, quite right – “Art ought to be something funny and a trifle boring.” Yes, my dear dead Vache, how right you were and how funny and how boring the touching and tender and true: “It is of the essence of symbols to be symbolic.” Say it again, from the other world! Have you a megaphone up there? Have you found all the arms and legs that were blown off during the melee? Can you put them together again? Do you remember the meeting at Nantes in 1916 with Andre Breton? Did you celebrate the birth of hysteria together? Had he told you, Breton, that there was only the marvellous and nothing but the marvellous and that the marvellous is always marvellous – and isn’t it marvellous to hear it again, even though your ears are stopped? I want to include here, before passing on, a little portrait of you by Emile Bouvier for the benefit of my Brooklyn friends who may not have recognized me then but who will now, I am sure…
“. . . he was not all crazy, and could explain his conduct when occasion required. His actions, none the less, were as disconcerting as Jarry’s worst eccentricities. For example, he was barely out of hospital when he hired himself out as a stevedore, and he thereafter passed his afternoons in unloading coal on the quays along the Loire. In the evening, on the other hand he would make the rounds of the cafes and cinemas, dressed in the height of fashion and with many variations of costume. What was more, in time of war, he would strut forth sometimes in the uniform of a lieutenant of Hussars, sometimes in that of an English officer, of an aviator or of a surgeon. In civil life, he was quite as free and easy, thinking nothing of introducing Breton under the name of Andre Salmon, while he took unto himself, but quite without vanity, the most wonderful titles and adventures. He never said good morning nor good evening nor good-bye, and never took any notice of letters, except those from his mother, when he had to ask for money. He did not recognize his best friends from one day to another…”
Do you recognize me, lads? Just a Brooklyn boy communicating with the red-haired albinos of the Zuni region. Making ready, with feet on the desk, to write “strong works, works forever incomprehensible”, as my dead comrades were promising. These “strong works” – would you recognize them if you saw them? Do you know that of the millions who were killed not one death was necessary to produce “the strong work”? New beings, yes! We have need of new beings still. We can do without the telephone, without the automobile, without the high-class bombers – but we can’t do without new beings. If Atlantis was submerged beneath the sea, if the Sphinx and the Pyramids remain an eternal riddle, it is because there were no more new beings being born. Stop the machine a moment! Plash back! Flash back to 1914, to the Kaiser sitting on his horse.
Keep him sitting there a moment with his withered arm clutching the bridle rein. Look at his moustache! Look at his haughty air of pride and arrogance! Look at his cannon-fodder lined up in strictest discipline, all ready to obey the word, to get shot, to get disembowelled, to be burned in quicklime. Hold it a moment, now, and look at the other side: the defenders of our great and glorious civilization, the men who will war to end war. Change their clothes, change uniforms, change horses, change flags, change terrain. My, is that the Kaiser I see on a white horse?
