For Madmen Only

[darmstadt]

+++

Philippe Soupalt tries to free himself from the three
unities of number, space and time, but feels himself a
prisoner within the four cardinal points.

He calls his book "Rose des Vents" (Compass Card). He is
aiming at the lyrical ubiquity towards which Apollinaire's
orphism was tending.

Philippe Souplalt turns the compass dial on its axis. He
scorns the conception of the universe inflicted on him by
the grey matter of his brain. To resolve all opposition he
turns to Dada.

My ideas like germs
dance along my meninges
to the rythm of the exasperating pendulum
a revolver shot would be a sweet melody.

He wants to go outside himself. Free himself from
determinism. He scales horizons. "I have broken my static
ideas," he says. Modern discoveries show him glimpses of
metaphysical probabilities. The Eiffel Tower shoots its
beams to the four corners of the world. The idea of space is
an illusion imposed on our senses by matter. Everything
moves on the same level. He persuades himself that the
Gaurisanker is next door to Notre Dame. He is simultaneously
open to all sensations.

The thousand interpretation that words admit of meet in his
mind when he sees a common notice:

REMOVALS TO ALL COUNTRIES

This, I think, is how the Dada joke must be understood.

[darmstadt]

+++

Louis Aragon has not foresworn every scruple of art.
Sometimes he even seems to remain attached to the old
prosodic forms. Yet Loius Aragon has found his salvation in
Dada. He calls his book "Bonfire". It is a bonfire on which
he sacrifices all the vain acquisitions of his mind for a
new order of things that will arise from the absurd
suggestions of consciousness. A neutral colour - bitumen or
reseda - is not Aragon's favourite. We even find bright
colours the Dadas were generally not fond of.

In a piece called "Jolt", Aragon shows us how a sudden
change comes about in the orientation of his thought:

BROUF
Flight for ever from the bitterness
The wonderful flying meadows newly-painted turn
Stumbling fields
Standstill
My head rings and so many rattles
My heart is in pieces the scenery shattered

The poet remembers his adolescence, the years vexed with
latin and algebra and he sums up his youth in a poem, "life
of Jean Baptiste A."

Rosa the rose and that drop of ink oh my youth
Calculate Cos. &
in function of
tg. a/2
My Apero childhood hardly glimpsed
By the fly-blown windows fo a cafe
Youth and I didn't kiss every mouth
The first one to get to the end of the corridor
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 DEAD
A shade sleeps in the middle of the sun, it's your eye

But now that the poet has rid himself of the narrow human
conventions, a hope is aflame in his breast. By the light of
this bonfire he glimpses new constructions, salutary
transformations.

Then will rise the ponies
Youths
In bands by the hand by the town

Louis Aragon is the only Dada who seems to be preparing a
territory of conciliation between the suggestions of
consciousness and the demands of reason.

[darmstadt]

+++

Paul Eluard is aiming at a complete transformation of
language. "Let's try," he says, "it is difficult to remain
absolutely pure." Language as it reaches us by way of usage
no longer has any meaning. It is chatter which, according to
Paul Eluard, no longer has any raison d'etre, and he wants
to institute, in poetry, the most elementary simplicity.

In "Animals and their Men" he endeavours to refresh his
vision of the world by simplified images and initial
analogies: The fish in the air and the man in the water. The
grass in front of the cow, the child in front of the milk.

Paul Eluard wants to retain nothing of things but the
essential relation-ships in order to obtain a complete
purity of feeling. Here is an example of this elementary
poetry:

WET
The stone skims over the water
The smoke does not enter.
The water like a skin
That cannot be wounded
Is caressed
By man and by the fish
Snapping like a bow-string,
The fish, when the man catches it,
Dies, as it cannot swallow
This planet of air and light
And the man sinks to the bottom of the water
For the fish
Or for the bitter solitude
Of the supple ever-closed water.

What extremely shocks Paul Eluard's set purpose of
simplicity is the "distinguished allure". According to him,
poetry must be something "naive like a mirror". He conceives
of a poetry where "time does not pass". It is difficult, as
man moves in a thick atmosphere. In his Examples, he says:
"man, the air-diver". Yet he has a confused glimpse of a
universal unity that makes him say: "I have crossed through
life in one go".

+++

Francis Picabia is not concerned with practical
applications. He uses a systematic curtness to destroy
everything. It would be difficult to find a more complete
absence of morality elsewhere.

It is in the agitated state that follows on love that
Francis Picabia tries to formulate for himself a conception
of man stripped of all illusion.

Read my little book
after making love
in front of the rubber fireplace

He calls this little book "Thoughts without language". As he
does not want to be taken in by words.

He no longer distinguishes values. Love, art, religion:
chemical reactions. It is a quasi-psychological Dada. The
heart is like the prostate gland, the belly like the brain.
And Francis Picabia says:

The events of my life
Take place in the sauce
Of my heartbeats.

In "The Girl born without a Mother", poems accompanied by
drawings, he applies himself to seeing the erotic mechanism
work. He takes desire for the only reality, and there is
hardly anything he believes in other than seminal fluid.

Life, according to Picabia, is not a "cream cake"; it is an
"old music-box" that churns out the same tune over and over.
As for the price he puts on human knowledge? "Men thinh", he
says, "Like a free Chinaman."

Francis Picabia experiences an innocent pleasure in throwing
stink bombs in schools and academies. The smell of sodium
cacodylate does not put him off.

In "Jesus Christ Rastaquouere" Picabia's disillusioned
philosophy seems for an instant as if it is trying to escape
from its incoherence. But if Picabia expresses himself a
little more clearly than usual, it is to turn common sense
inside out like a glove. His deliberately disorientated mind
enjoys standing the scale of values upside down. "it's words
that don't exist", he says. "What doesn't have a name
doesn't exist." And by some kind of metaphysical spite he
uses a conjuror's skill to juggle with traditional
locutions.

I can only give my word of honour if I am lying. Cheat, but
don't hide
it. Cheat in order to lose, never to win, for a winner loses
himself,
etc.

And he sums up his opinion of life in a short story: The
story of a man who chewed a revolver!

"This man was already old, and all his life he had indulged
in this strange chewing; in fact his extraordinary weapon
would kill him if he stopped an instant; yet he had been
warned that, in any case, one day inevitably the revolver
would go off and kill him; however, with no sign of
wearying, he went on chewing..."

Francis Picabia, strange he may seem, is a tragic poet.

[darmstadt]

+++

Clement Pansears is the only representative of Dada in
Belguim and it is extremely unlikely that anyone here will
thank him for it. Yet nobody can let his mind roam on the
periphery of the world of reason, in the barely accessible
regions of the absurd, as easily as Pansears.

The "Pan-pan au cul du nu negre" is Clement Pansears' first
attempt. This title may mean the "nu negre" followed by the
"pan-pan", but I think that by pan-pan Clement Pansears
means a revolver. So it would be different then. Clement
Pansears listens to all the discordant noises that surround
us today. He seems to have surveyed all the ideas, as we can
see from certain things he says ("Une museliere au rheteur
de la surbrute", etc.) and in the end he gives the
impression of a disorganised gramophone that begins to sound
the all-clear when it comes to the end of the record.
Clement Pansears misuses scientific terminology. Now and
again, one thinks of Rabelais' Limousin scholar, but he
justifies himself by saying, "A useless chemist is as good
as a philosopher - who discovers principles by evaporating
vocables."

In "Bar Nicanor" Clement Pansears follows the same tendency,
but to a much greater degree. Clement Pansears launches into
heady delights. In the piece called "Aero" he upsets the
cardinal points. He drives in the void, executes "trapeze
turns". His ears tingle by dint of "browsing raw noises in
interplanetary scales". He exhausts his engine to get as
much as possible out of it.

Getting drunk procures the same incongruous feelings for
him. He puts his lips to every electuary and examines his
half-drunkenness to unveil the speck of immateriality that
throbs inside him. He praises the eminently cosmopolitan
nature of drunken orgies. Solving existence, according to
him, is to take a good one over the eight until the walls
knock into each other, while the principle of being pursues
the "motley race towards pure quality the infinite
denominator leading to zero pan-O."

Perverted feelings run through the erogeneous zones. He
destroys woman as a child would a toy, annoyed at not
getting something more wonderful. Clement Pansears makes one
think of a Des Esseintes corresponding to the wildest
audacity of the new man. In "The defence of laziness" a
morbid perturbation seems to result from the constant effort
of mental inversion. Sudden shocks like electric bells
crackle in his head. Clement Pansears has been, one after
the other, "a tamer of tribades", "a paria esdemolitions",
"a violator of human identity".

Men seem sexless to him. With an Erasmic indifference he
creates a defence of laziness. What is cynicism, if it is
not laziness? Laziness in the sovereign condition of human
reason.

It's annoying
My encephalus is out of tune.
Impossible to re-tune my understanding
to the tuning fork of the fashionable cosmic variations.

He resigns himself to sacrificing to laziness:

Do I revolt you?
All revolt aborts.

What is the point of rebelling? Let us do like the others
do. Instead of creating the revolutions, let us go on
general strike. Everything is there. In any case laziness
extends to the first terrestrial elements.

Spasmodic morbidness
Sea and land
Penetrate each other
and the commotion is comatose.

"Be lazy," Clement Pansears says to himself, possessed with
an orgiastic weariness. Clement Pansears is a modern man in
the most excessive meaning of this expression.

+++

These are the people who form the Dada Pleiad. But it is
difficult to be conclusive as regards Dada, as Dada is a
return to unorganised life, by a means of expression
stripped of any verbal habits. Dada makes fun of
onomatopoeia.

In ancient times they used to say that those who had lifted
the veil of physical phenomena had seen the great god Pan.
The upheavals of our time that have revealed a solution of
continuity in the evolution of mankind have given rise to a
panic literature. Dada is without doubt a pessimistic
movement. But its pessimism is based on the danger of human
ambitions. It is in de la Rochefoucald and Schopenhauer that
we must search for the preliminaries to an international
agreement. Dada is the only possible link between men since
its fundamental principle consists in being right about
nothing. Not to know Dada is not to know our time. In a
century when Lenin falls after Wilson, Dada has nothing that
can surprise us. Dadas are deliberately out of their depth.
But if they are fools they are not stupid. They say nothing
for a laugh and take nothing seriously.

Dada is a philosophy. Dada is a moral. Dada is an art, the
art of being likeable in a time when all superiority has
become unbearable and when all human grandeur seems a joke.
Dada is the flower of ruins, not the little blue flower of
optimism that poets want to pick amid the debris of a
civilisation, but an azalea, an arid azalea, which is not
begging for a downpour of blood, but is rather seeking to
slake its thirst in drought.

[AlfredJPruffock]

The study of luminous radiations suggested to him unhoped
for results. The idea of infinity, which has tormented
human reason throughout all eternity, for the first time
perhaps seems to subside in the Einsteinian axiom: "Nothing
is faster than light". The existence of an absolute speed is
not beyond our understanding.

Ah not so fast , what if the Universe aint quite what Albert imagined it to be, ie that its is holographic in its nature, perhaps the Hindus were closest to describing the Universe as illusory, now you see it ... now you dont !

From the Orignal Post

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light.

Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations

[sasguru]

Dada Dum, da dum da dum. Dum de do dum. Da da dum, dada ....

[AlfredJPruffock]

Dada Dum, da dum da dum. Dum de do dum. Da da dum, dada ....

Exactly SG.

Im terribly sorry to have taken your time but the thought just occured ...


Hare Hare... London Bus
Hare Hare ... Ladies Lavatory
Hare Hare ... Computer Contractor

Nothing remains to be said.

[sasguru]

Exactly SG.

Im terribly sorry to have taken your time but the thought just occured ...


Hare Hare... London Bus
Hare Hare ... Ladies Lavatory
Hare Hare ... Computer Contractor

Nothing remains to be said.

My last post was aimed at Darmstadt the Dadaist

[Fungus]

There are too many wacky theories from theoretical physicists: that there is an infinite number of universes and hence anything and everything can and will happen; that the universe is a hologram; that the universe started from a big bang with nothing before (whatever before means in that context); that the universe is constantly expanding, contracting, exploding, expanding and so on.

At the end of the day I find these theories as unsatisfying as the myths that lie at the heart of each religion. Once we know what happened 1 nanosecond after the universe began, then what? 1 hundredth of a nanosecond?

I wonder what dark matter and dark energy will turn out to be. I think they are remains of Threaded's half eaten meals. The mass would be about right. Maybe they should build a giant nose to sniff the far reaches of the universe to detect left over pie and curry sauce.