Drama,
Poems,
Essays

FUTURIST MANIFESTO

We are in at the birth of the centaurs, we shall see the first angels fly. We must rattle the doors of life, test the hinges and the bolts. Let us go. There on Earth is the first dawn of history and there is nothing to match the red sword of the sun, slashing for the first time through the shadows of a thousand years.

Filippo Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto (excerpt), 1909

In his lifetime the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) published numerous manifestos for an artistic movement he dubbed Futurism. He published the first Futurist Manifesto in French in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. This is the only artistic manifesto that has ever made me want to leap to my feet and join a social movement.

The growth of human civilization, alas, confronts many ambiguous menaces. One of the most deadly is clearly the ignorant energy of its naïve male youth. Marinetti's first Futurist Manifesto is a work in love with speed, modernity, and energy. In its time, it was a total revolution.

Unfortunately not far beneath its surface is barbarism, militarism and recklessness.

Historically, the results of recklessness and barbarism, combined with youthful male energy, have been devastating. Yet they have also been fruitful. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), for example, exploited this energy under a mantle of glory (la gloire) to preach and carry out a crusade to spread the French Revolution. This killed several million Europeans. But it also destroyed much of the remainder of European feudalism and brought constitutional law (or at least the hope of it) to several corners of Europe.

Reckless male energy may also have brought on the First World War that forever smashed 19th century Europe at the cost of 15 million lives.

But, though the charge that reckless male energy has been horribly destructive is fair, I prefer to point out that this youthful energy is inescapable. Civilization has no choice but to attempt to successfully channel energy into constructive paths. Energy itself is neither good nor evil: we must set up systems that channel available youthful energy to the doing of good.

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Incidentally (May 21, 2002), I have recently realized that the Futurist Manifesto was almost certainly written because Martinetti was under the influence of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

Last modified: 9:06 AM 9/7/2002