Here Russolo touches upon an important factor related to both his success and failure as a composer. While his status as a nonmusician often led him to be dismissed as little more than a joke, that same lack of professional training enabled him to extend his vision beyond the most distant regions of what had previously been musically imaginable. Like Duchamp, Russolo embodies that almost mythical modernist prototype, the artist as outsider--the painter who has no professional training, or who does not paint at all; the writer who produces in a foreign tongue; the composer who is not a musician.
Though Russolo remains a largely forgotten re in music history, his sudden appearance on the musical scene in 1913 can be viewed as marking a critical historical juncture, supplying the final link in a chain initiated in the early Romantic aesthetics of autonomous music. That he represented not merely a point of termination, but one of origin, has been made clear by subsequent Western music. Russolo's vision of a new kind of music, offering materiality as a replacement for its lost spirituality, has proved remarkably fertile, and has shown little sign of exhaustion.
Robert P. Morgan, Professor of Music at Yale University, is author of Twentieth Century Music and editor of a volume in the "Man and Music" series, Modern Times . He is currently working on a book on transformations in form in nineteenth-century music.
1. Originally published in the Süddeutsche Monatshefte and reprinted in Hans Pfitzner, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Augsburg: Benno Filler Verlag, 1926).
2. Ferruccio Busoni, Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1916). An English translation by Th. Baker, including most of the new material for the second edition, appeared in 1911 and is reprinted in Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music (New York: Dover, 1962), hereafter abbreviated TCAM
3. "Open Letter to Hans Pfitzner," in Ferruccio Busoni, The Essence of Music, trans. Rosamond Ley (London: Salisbury Square, 1957), 17. The letter was originally published in the June 1917 edition of Berlin Vossische Zeitung.  Auf keiner Seite meines Büchleins ist das Wort 'Futurismus' gefallen, niemals habe ich mich einer Sekte angeschlossen: der Futurismus, eine Bewegung der 'Gegenwart,' konnte zu meinen Argumenten keine Beziehung haben." "Offener Brief an Hans Pfitzner," in Ferruccio Busoni, Von der Macht der Töne. Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Siegfried Bimberg (Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., 1983), 83, hereafter abbreviated VMT.
The Busoni-Pfitzner controversy has been the subject of a number of studies, mostly in German, usually including discussion of Pfitzner's opera Palestrina, underway at the time of the exchange. and a subsequent, related debate between Pfitzner and the German music critic Paul Bekker. For a recent example see Reinhard Ermen, Musik als Einfall. Hans Pfitzners Position in aesthetischen Diskurs nach Wagner (Aachen: Rimbaud Presse, 1986), in particular the chapters "Fortschritt als Utopie--Pfitzner und Busoni," "Palestrina," and "Pfitzner contra Bekker." Two recent studies in English are Peter Franklin's "Palestrina and the Dangerous Futurists," The Musical Quarterly 70 (fall 1984): 499-514, which deals mainly with ideological aspects of the opera; and Marc A. Weiner's "Music in the Modern Imagination: The Polemics of Hans Pfitzner," the first chapter of his Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics, and the Social Sphere in the Modern (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 35-71, which focusses upon the political and nationalistic implications of the entire Busoni-Pfitzner-Bekker exchange.
4. The reply originally appeared in the September 1912 edition of the periodical Pan and is reprinted in Busoni, The Essence of Music, 28-9. The manifesto appeared in La Liberté in the spring of 1912.
5. Busoni's admiration for Boccioni is evident from a letter written to his wife in 1913, in which he remarks, apparently of the sculpture Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (Unique forms of continuity in space), which he found "ugly and unintelligible" but also arresting: "Compared to this art...Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire is a tepid lemonade!" Ferruccio Busoni, Letters to his wife, trans. Rosamond Ley (London: Edward Arnold, 1938), 223. In other letters Busoni refers to Boccioni as "something of a genius," and notes that he represents "at last, after a lengthy interval, an Italian painter of historical significance." Ferruccio Busoni, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Anthony Beaumont (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 236-248.
6. Published in the 31 August 1916 edition of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
7. In the teens some commentators even began referring to all advanced music as "futuristic," no doubt influenced by the considerable publicity surrounding the Italian Futurist movement. The November and December 1913 issues of the Monthly Musical Record of London, for example, contain "Futurist Examination Papers," complete with such questions as "Compare the older diatonic, 'sex-tonal' and the 'duodecuple' scale with the present 'tri-partitional' one," prepared by A. Eaglefield Hull as a "suggestion of what the examination papers at our leading institutions may be like in a few years hence, if the Modernists are really coming into complete possession of the field." Monthly Musical Record, 1 November 1913, 282.
8. TCAM, 80. The original reads: "unzuübertreffende Abgeschlossenheiten" (VMT, 12).
9.  Wie aber wenn es anders wäre? Wenn wir uns auf einem Höhepunkt befänden oder gar der Höhepunkt schon überschritten wäre?" Hans Pfitzner, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, 220-21.
10. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 69. More recently Marjorie Perloff has taken Poggioli's phrase for the title of her excellent book The Futurist Moment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
11. Quoted in Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 247.
12. Busoni, TCAM, 77. The original reads: "die Ungebundenheit ihrer Unmaterialität," and
So Jung es ist, dieses Kind, eine strahlende Eigenschaft ist an ihm erkennbar, die es vor allenseinen älteren Gefährten auszeichne.  Das Kind--es schwebt!  Es ist nicht der Schwere unterworfen. Es ist fast unkörperlich. Seine Materie ist durchsichtig. Es ist tönnende Luft. Es ist fast die Natur selbst. Es ist frei! (VMT, 8)
13. The original reads: "Demnach hat keine andere Kunst einen Grundstoff, der schon an sich mit so himmlichem Geiste geschwängert wäre, als die Musik." Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe, ed. Friedrich von der Leyen (Berlin: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1938), 186.
14. The original reads: "die Sprache der Engel." Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe, 168.
15. TCAM, 93, 91. The originals read: "Denn alles verkündet eine Umwälzung und einen nächsten Schritt zu jener 'ewigen'" (VMT, 42); and "Unser ganzes Ton-, Tonart- und Tonartsystem ist in seiner Gesamtheit selbst nur den Teil eines Bruchteils eines zerlegten Strahls jener Sonne 'Musik' am Himmel der 'ewigen Harmonie'" (VMT, 40).
16. TCAM, 95. The original reads:
Welch schöne Hoffnungen und traumhafte Vorstellungen erwachsden für sie! Wer hat nicht schon im Traume 'geschwebt?' Und fest geglaubt, dass er den Traum erlebe?  The phrase is from Marinetti's second manifesto "Let's Murder the Moonshine," included in F. T. Marinetti, Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Classics, 1991), 54. The original reads: "sbeffeggino tutto ciò che è consacrato dal tempo." F. T. Marinetti, "Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna!" in idem, Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano de Maria (1968: reprint, Milan: Mondadori, 1983), 15.
18. Umberto Boccioni et al., "Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto" , in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, trans. Robert Brain et al. (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 27-31, hereafter abbreviated "FPTM," and FM respectively. Idem, "The Exhibitors to the Public" , in FM, 45-50, hereafter abbreviated "EP." For the originals, see idem, "La pittura futurista--Manifesto tecnico" , in Futurismo, ed. Umbro Apollonio (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, 1970), 55-59, hereafter abbreviated "PFMT" and F respectively; and idem, "Prefazione al catalogo delle esposizioni di Parigi, Londra, Berlino, Bruxelles, Monaco, Amburgo, Vienna, ecc." , in F, 88-96, hereafter abbreviated "P."
19. For painting dealing with modern subjects in modern dress, see "FPTM," 29, "PFMT," 57; "the simultaneousness of states of mind" and ("EP," 47), the original reads: "la simultaneità degli stati d'animo" ("P," 91); for the spectator located at the center of the picture, see "FPTM," 29, "PFMT," 57; "carry within himself the landscapes" ("FPTM," 28), the original reads: "il pittore ha in sé i paesaggi che vuol produrre" ("PFMT," 55); for the rejection of imitation, see "FPTM," 30, "PFMT," 58; for the interpenetration of objects, see "FPTM," 28, "PFMT," 57; for the tendency toward the "infinite" be revealed through "force-lines," see "EP," 48, the originals read "infinito," and "linee-forze" ("P," 94).
20. Félix Fénéon, "The Impressionists in 1886," reprinted in Joshua C. Taylor, Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 480.
21. Author's translation. The original reads: "La modernité, c'est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l'art, dont l'autre moitié est l'éternel et immuable." Charles Baudelaire, "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," in L'Art romantique, vol. 3 of Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Louis Conard, 1925), 66.
22. Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 331-62. The original reads: "Alles Ständische und Stehende verdamft." Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften, ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1964), 529.
23. Walter Pater, "The School of Giorgione," in Selected Works, ed. Richard Aldington (London: William Heinemann, 1948), 271.
24. For a wide ranging discussion of this topic, see Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustif (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
25. The original reads: "Alors je conçus pleinement l'idée d'une âme se mouvant dans un milieu lumineux, d'une extase faite de volupté et de connaissance, et planant au-dessus et bien loin du monde naturel." Baudelaire, "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris," in L'Art romantique, 207.
26. Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. and trans. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), 475. His words, which appear in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonk, are "die Kunst des Übergangs."
27. TCAM, 79; the original reads: "Überhaupt kamen die Tondichter in den vorbereitenden und vermittelnden Sätzen (Vorspielen und Übergängen) der wahren Natur der Musik am nächsten...." (VMT, 11).
28. Robert P. Morgan, "Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism." Critical Inquiry 10 (March 1984): 442-61.
29. See F. T. Marinetti, "Destruction of Syntax--Wireless Imagination--Words-in-Freedom," in FM, 98, 106, 99, 100. The originals read: "stupide definizioni," "il canale logico della sintassi," "lirismo scatenato," "c'introdurranno nella essenza della materia," in F. T. Marinetti, "Distruzione della sintassi--Immaginazione senza fili--Parole in libertà--La sensibilità futurista," in F, 147, 153, 147, 148.
30. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities Press, 1953), 3. The original reads: "Unsere Untersuchungen gehen von der Voraussetzung aus, dass das Kunstwerk also selbstständiger Organismus gleichwertig neben der Natur und in seinem tiefsten innersten Wesen ohne Zusammenhang mit ihr steht, sofern man unter Natur die sichtbare Oberfläche der Dinge versteht." Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Munich: R. Piper Verlag, 1959), 35.
31. Quoted in Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 147.
32. Wassily Kandinsky, quoted in Arnold Schoenberg Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures, and Documents, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch, trans. John C. Crawford (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 21, 27. The originals read: "Ich finde eben, dass unsere heutige Harmonie nicht auf dem 'geometrischen' Wege zu finden ist, sondern auf dem direkt antigeometrischen, antilogischen. Und dieser Weg ist der der 'Dissonanzen in der Kunst', also auch in der Malerei ebenso, wie in der Musik," and "Ich beneide Sie sehr! Sie haben ihre Harmonielehre schon im Druck.    Arnold Schönberg Wassily Kandinsky. Briefe, Bilder und Dokumente, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1980), 19, 25. Kandinsky even envisioned that painting might eventually develop a malerische Generalbass and Harmonielehre der Malerei, a "red bass for painting" and "theory of harmony" for painting. Wassily Kandinsky, "On the Spiritual in Art," Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: 1982), 1:196, 209.
33. Robert Delaunay, quoted in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 318.
34. Quoted in Serge Fauchereau, Kupka, trans. Richard Lewis Rees, (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 19.
35. "EP," 49; the originals read: "pittura degli stati d'animo," "tratto dall'evoluzione della musica," and
tagliamo bruscamente e a piacer nostro, ogni motivo con uno o più altri motivi, di cui non offriamo mai gli sviluppi, ma semplicemente la note iniziali, centrali o finali. Come vedete; c'è in noi, non solo varietà, ma caos ed urto di ritmi assolutamente opposti che riconduciamo non meno ad un'armonia nuova. ("P," 94-95)
36. "EP," 49-50; the original reads: "delle macchie, delle linee, delle zone di colore, che non corrispondono a nessuna realtà ma, secondo una legge della nostra matematica interna, preparano musicalmente ed aumentano l'emozione dello spettatore" ("P," 95).
37. The principal exception was the German expressionist group associated with Kandinsky, whose publication Der Blaue Reiter contained articles on music as well as reproductions of scores by Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg.
38. Balilla Pratella, "Manifesto of Futurist Musicians," in FM, 31-38, hereafter abbreviated "MFM"; for the original see Balilla Pratella, "Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi" , in F, 61-68, hereafter abbreviated "MMF."
39. For "shame and filth," see "MFM," 34; "the intellectual mediocrity, commercial baseness and misoneism" ("MFM," 31-32); "to proclaim the unique concept of Futurist music, as absolutely different from music to date, and so to shape in Italy a Futurist musical taste, destroying doctrinaire, academic and soporific values" ("MFM," 37). The originals read: "l'onta e il fango" ("MMF," 65); "il mediocrismo intellettuale, la bassezza mercantile e il misoneismo" ("MMF," 61); and "proclamare un concetto unico di musica futurista, cioè assolutamente diversa da quella fatta finora, formare così in Italia un gusto musicale futurista e distruggere i valori dottrinari, accademici e soporiferi" ("MMF," 67).
40. Ballila Pratella's "Technical Manifesto" is reprinted in Nicholas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1971), 1296-98. The original reads: "considerare l'instrumentazione sotto l'aspetto di universo sonoro incessantemente mobile," in Balilla Pratella. "La musica futurista--manifesto tecnico" , in F, 77-78.
41. Slonimsky, Music since 1900, 1298. The original reads:
Portare nella musica tutti i nuovi atteggiamenti della natura, sempre diversamente domata dall'uomo per virtù delle incessanti scoperte scientifiche. Dare l'anima musicale delle folle, dei grandi cantieri industriali, dei treni, dei transatlantici, delle corazzate, degli automobili e degli aeroplani. Aggiungere ai grandi motivi centrali del poema musicale il dominio della Macchina ed il regno vittorioso della Elettricità. (F, 78)
For the Marinetti attribution, see Barclay Brown's introduction to Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 2, hereafter abbreviated AN. This volume includes both the manifesto and the much longer publication that Russolo issued under the same title in 1916.
42. Quoted in Karen von Maur, Vom Klang de Bilder. Die Musik in der Kunst de 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1985), 121. Russolo also remarks that the "different masks represent, through particular human expressions, the indefinite feelings that belong to this music." Both the von Maur book and the extensive bibliography in G. F. Maffina, Luigi Russolo e L'Arte dei rumori: con tutti gli scritti musicali (Torino: Martano, 1978) cite Russolo's brief description as originally appearing in the Italian Futurist periodical Poesia in 1920, though that journal ceased publication in 1913.
43. By Marianne W. Martin in her important study Futurist Art and Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1978), 150. Martin's book is a useful source for additional information about Russolo, and includes black-and-white reproductions of all five of the paintings mentioned here, as well as several others by the artist. A number of color reproductions, including all these five except Profumo, are found in Futurisme et Futurismes, ed. Pontus Hulten (Paris: Editions le Chemin vert, 1986), 204-11.
44. See Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noises," in FM, 74, hereafter abbreviated "AN"; the original reads: "logica conseguenza," in Russolo, "L'arte dei rumori," in F, 127, hereafter abbreviated "AR."
45. "AN," 76; the original reads:
Bisogna rompere questo cerchio ristretto di suoni puri e conquistare la varietà infinita dei "suoni-rumori." Ogniuno riconoscerà d'altronde che ogni suono porta con sé uno sviluppo di sensazioni già note e sciupate, che predispongono l'ascoltatore alla noia, malgrado gli sforzi di tutti i musicisti novatori. Noi futuristi abbiamo profondamente amato e gustato le armonie dei grandi maestri. Beethoven e Wagner ci hanno squassato i nervi e il cuore per molti anni. Ora ne siamo sazi e godiamo molto di più nel combinare idealmente dei rumori di tram, di motori a scoppio, di carrozze e di folle vocianti, che nel riudire, per esempio, l'"Eroica" o la "Pastorale." ("AR," 128-29)
Marinetti's famous verbal depiction of modern warfare, Zang-Tumb-Tuuum (introduced with: "Recently the poet Marinetti, in a letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis, described to me in admirable unfettered language the orchestra of a great battle"), is cut from Russolo's manifesto in the Apollonio collection. Complete versions are found in AN, 23-28 and Slonimsky, Music Since 1900, 1298-1302.
46. "AN," 85; the originals read: "con le orecchie più attente che gli occhi," and "intonare e regolare" ("AR," 130).
47. AN, 27. The original reads:
Intonare i rumori non vuol dire togliere ad essi tutti i movimenti e le vibrazioni di tempo e d'intensità, ma bensì dare un grado e un tono alla più forte predominante di queste vibrazioni. Il rumore infatti si differenzia solo in quanto le vibrazioni che lo producono sono confuse e irregolari, sia nel tempo che nell'intensità. Ogni rumore ha un tono, talora anche un accordo che predomina nell'insieme delle sue vibrazioni irregolari. Ora, da questo caratteristico tono predominante deriva la possibilità pratica di intonarlo, di dare cioè ad un dato rumore non un solo tono ma una certa varietà di toni, senza perdere la sua caratteristica, voglio dire il timbro che lo distingue. Così alcuni rumori ottenuti con un movimento rotativo possoano offrire un'intera scala cromatica ascendente o discendente, se si aumenta o diminuisce la velocità del movimento. ("AR," 131)
Russolo's interest in controlling noise through scalar increments analogous to those in pitch scales led him to introduce a system of notation incorporating microtonal divisions. It must be understood, however, that what is transformed through Russolo's scalar adjustments is not a fixed pitch, but a noise made up of irregular frequencies. Russolo's proposal thus goes well beyond what Busoni and Pratella had suggested regarding microtonal scale divisions. For a recent discussion of Russolo's notational innovations, see Mark A. Radice, "Futurismo: Its Origins, Context, Repertory, and Influence" Musical Quarterly 73, no. 1 : 7-13.
48. "AN," 86. The originals read: "rombi," "bisbigli," "stridori," and "gridi" ("AR," 131).
49. The London Times reported of the opening concert: "It is impossible to say that the first of the 'noise-spirals' [a term Russolo applied to his compositions] performed, 'The Awaking of a Great City,' was as exhilarating as Futurist art usually is; on the contrary, it rather resembled the sounds heard in the rigging of a Channel-steamer during a bad crossing, and it was, perhaps, unwise of the players--or should we call them 'noisicians?'--to proceed with their second piece, 'A Meeting of Motor-cars and Aeroplanes,' after the pathetic cries of 'No more!' which greeted them from all excited quarters of the auditorium." London Times, 16 June 1914, 5. A description of a rehearsal preceding the first concert in the Pall Mall Gazette of 12 June, 1914 (page 1, column 4) is only somewhat less dismissive: "Thunder rolling, bulls roaring, hurricanes blowing, factories buzzing, dogs barking, pigs grunting, and occasionally some gentle and necessary murmurs like the approach of a calm dawn, were amongst the noises that were heard at a rehearsal of the Futurist band on the stage of the Coliseum this morning." Pall Mall Gazette, 12 June 1914, 1. According to the account given by R. W. Nevinson in his Paint and Prejudice (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), the first concert caused such a furor that Marinetti was thereafter obliged to add a gramophone recording of music by Elgar to the performances in order "to bring a little melody into the act" . See also Felix Barker, The House that Stoll Built: The Story of the Coliseum Theatre (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1957), 183-86. I am indebted to Lawrence Rainey for bringing these reports to my attention and making copies available to me.
50. For a more detailed account, in Russolo's own words, see "Polemics, Battles, and the First Performances of the Noise Instruments" in AN, 31-36.
51. Comtemporary descriptions, such as those quoted in note 49, are not very helpful.
52. The two compositions, Corale and Serenata, were released on a 78 recording, His Master's Voice R6919/20.
53. See the opening section of this article.
54. A clear reproduction of the two pages appears in AN, 72-3.
55. "AN," 85-86. The original reads:
Ogni manifestazione della nostra vita è accompagnata dal rumore. Il rumore è quindi familiare al nostro orecchio, e ha il potere di richimare immediatamente alla vita stessa. Mentre il suono, estraneo alla vita, sempre musicale, cosa a sé, elemento occasionale non necessario, è divenuto ormai per il nostro orecchio quello che all'occhio è un viso troppo noto, il rumore invece giungendoci confuso e irregolare dalla confusione irregolare della vita, non si rivela mai interamente a noi e ci serba innumerevoli sorprese. Siamo certi dunque che scegliendo, coordinando e dominando tutti i rumori, noi arricchiremo gli uomini di una nuova voluttà inaspettata. ("AR," 131)
56. A similar point has been made by Peter Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), though principally in connection with the somewhat later dada and surrealist movements, which Bürger views as rejecting art as an "autonomous institution" in order to reintegrate it into the "praxis of life." See especially the section "The Negation of the Autonomy of Art by the Avant-Garde," 47-54.
57. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 152-15.
58. Ibid., 98.
59. Cf. Gavin Bryars, "Notes on Marcel Duchamp's Music," Studio International 192 (November-December 1976): 274-79: and Craig Adcock, "Marcel Duchamp's Gap Music Operations in the Space between Art and Noise," in Wireless Imagination. Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 105-38. Realizations by Duchamp of a version of each piece, notated on music paper, are included in the former.
60. "AN," 88. The original reads:
Non sono musicista: non ho dunque predilezioni acustiche, né opere da difendere. Sono un pittore futurista che proietta fuori di sé con un'arte molto amata la sua volontà di rinnovare tutto. Perciò più temerario di quanto potrebbe esserlo un musicista di professione, non preoccupandomi della mia apparente incompetnza e convinto che l'audacia abbia tutti i diritti e tutte le possibilità, ho potuto intuire il grande rinnovamento della musica mediante L'Arte dei Rumori. ("AR," 133)
"Throughout the course of his life," we learn from the "Reminiscences" of his daughter, Luce, F. T. Marinetti persisted in "jotting down his thoughts in the tiny notebooks that followed him" almost everywhere, "from trains to battlefields." 1 Begun perhaps as early as 1900, the notebooks originally spanned the entire period from the formation of Futurism in 1909 to several days before Marinetti's death in 1944, and in their complete form they must have offered one of the most remarkable perspectives on the cultural and political history of the twentieth century's first half. When his daughters returned to the family house in Tuscany after the war, however, they discovered that most of the diaries had been lost or destroyed by looters. 2 What remained were some fifty notebooks covering the period 1915 to 1921, together with a few others from 1926. 3 In 1979 the diaries, which had been put in their present order by Luce Marinetti, were acquired by the Beinecke Library of Yale University, together with the bulk of Marinetti's papers, but placed under restriction until January of 1992. In the interim an edition of them was published by Alberto Bertoni (with guidance from Ezio Raimondi) in 1987, based on microfilms made prior to the diaries' having been consigned to Yale.
Bertoni's edition printed about 80 percent of the originals. It excluded "sketches, plans for novels, and notes for literary or fictional projects that decisively depart from the registration of actual events," all of which were to be "the object of a later publication" ("NSC," lix-lx). In addition, when questions of "discretion and the preservation of privacy" were deemed at stake ("NSC," lx), real names were systematically replaced with ciphers, while "occasional passages" were omitted altogether on the same grounds. 4 Other decisions were equally debatable. Bertoni was plainly trying to address a number of conflicting imperatives, and it would be unfair and inappropriate to criticize his decisions now. Yet one may question the wisdom of adhering to the basic distinction that Bertoni wished to draw between "actual events" and "literary or fictional projects." For what characterizes the diaries, perhaps above all else, is how easily, how seamlessly they shift back and forth between the two, between experience and culture, life and art.
The notebooks as we have them are still a compelling document. They cover perhaps the most crucial and certainly one of the most dramatic moments of the twentieth century, a period that comprises the experience of the Great War in Italy, from the cataclysmic defeat of Caporetto in October 1917 to the euphoric victory of Vittorio Veneto a year later, and the birth of fascism four months later, formally marked by the organization of the Fasci italiani di combattimento or Italian Battle Fasces in March 1919 (an event in which Marinetti participated). as well as the official formation of the National Fascist Party or PNF in November 1921. The final passage in the selection that we present here shows Marinetti, in Rome on the day after the Party's convention, watching Benito Mussolini as he leads a procession of forty thousand fascists to the Monument to Vittorio Emmanuele, the so-called Altar of the Patria, to salute the tomb of the unknown soldier, a show of force that preceded his arrival in power at the head of the government by less than a year. 5
The period covered by the diaries was no less eventful for Marinetti himself. By June of 1918 he had met Benedetta Cappa, the writer and painter who would eventually become his companion and later his wife. His literary career, in the same period, was marked by an almost feverish production. War, conflict, and struggle were central to Marinetti's outlook on life, and the effort to convey the impact of war had already sparked much of his pre-war experimental writing, including the "words-in-freedom" works. 6 The experimental variety of his production in the years 1915-21, however, reflects a more sustained and more complex exploration of the aesthetic and philosophical implications of war. The year 1915 might be said to mark a watershed in his development. On the one hand he writes War: The Only Hygiene of the World , a short book that looks forward to the political program outlined in Futurist Democracy: Political Dynamism and most coherently elaborated in the brief work, Beyond Communism . 7 On the other hand he issues the manifesto of "Futurist Synthetic Theater," with its call for a "dynamic leap in the void, beyond the range of territory previously explored," a call swiftly answered by a series of brief experimental plays that were meant to embody its theories. 8 Yet a third direction is announced with the essay, "The New Religion-Morality of Speed" (11 May 1916), in which Marinetti moves into the realm of an anthropology and ethics of modernity, seeking to "defend man from the decay caused by slowness, by memory, by analysis, by repose and habit," and lead him to a "spiral ascent of the I towards the Void-God." 9 Yet a fourth direction is elaborated in dialogue with the feminist controversy, in How to Seduce Women , which is amended and expanded to How to Seduce Women and Betray Men , and is rapidly followed by A Woman's Belly: A Surgical Novel written in collaboration with Enif Robert, which recounts the dialogue between the Futurist Marinetti and a first-person narrator who gives a shockingly graphic account of her operation. 10 Likewise, the brief "theatrical syntheses" are elaborated into longer satirical works such as The Island of Kisses: A Social-Erotic Novel , as well as the more ambitious Futurist Loves: Programs for Life with Variant Endings at your Choice , where he returns to the main ideas of "The New Religion-Morality of Speed" in his exploration of the rejuvenating and spiritually beneficial effects of speed, novelty, and violence. 11 Most important are the three major novels that derive from Martinetti's own experiences in the war: Eight Souls Within a Bomb: An Explosive Novel , which elaborates many of his experiences from 1917 in a prose still strongly inflected by the "words-in-freedom" experiments; 12 The Steel Alcove , which draws on later events that he witnessed as commander of an armored car, this time in prose that alternates between deliberate coarseness and almost mystical lyricism; 13 and The Untamable , perhaps his finest work of extended fiction, written in a style that returns to yet advances beyond the symbolist tendencies of his earlier writing, elaborating a sensual, descriptive prose that lingers over the surface of each object in accordance with Marinetti's theory of "tactilism," with its emphasis on the immediacy of touch over the distantiation of sight and its anticipation of the same motif in Surrealism. 14
What follows below is a selection of twenty-three passages from the unpublished portions of Marinetti's diaries. (Luce Marinetti requested that three passages from the original selection of twenty-six not be published.) Like the published works from this same period, they range across a variety of genres and discursive types: from wistful self-reflection to spare narrative, from lyrical evocations of landscape to experiments in a theater of oneiro-erotics, from notes for a manifesto to pungent, even acerbic observations on people such as D'Annunzio and Mussolini. For Anglo-American readers especially, for whom Marinetti is known almost wholly from the declamatory style of the manifestos, the passages will offer a surprising range of tones: coarse anecdotes jostling against moments of genuine lyricism, philosophical reflections against unabashed eroticism, and everywhere an authorial voice that is alternately wry, witty, crude, tender and severe, bitter and shrewd, and consistently endowed with an immediate responsiveness to the variety of the world. It is this re, far richer and more complex than one might gather from just the manifestos, who is increasingly being viewed as a writer of major importance not just within the history of modern Italian literature, but within the broader evolution of cultural modernism.
The translations have not attempted to replicate particularities of spelling or punctuation of the originals, except in cases when it appeared that Marinetti was drawing upon the techniques derived from the "words-in-freedom" experiments. On the whole they have aimed at suggesting the range of tones and linguistic registers in the original. Marinetti sometimes revelled in vulgarity, and the English faithfully reflects that. Readers can also make their own assessments, as a transcription of the original Italian is given immediately after the translation. It adopts the same conventions fro rendering the original as were used in the published edition of Bertoni. 15
Prior to several entries we have included brief headnotes, given in italics, which furnish a minimum of contextual information and identify people or events mentioned in the text that follows. Readers are free to skip them and can read a text otherwise uncluttered with notes.
We are deeply grateful to Paola Gambarota for her careful transcriptions from the original diaries and to Paolo Valesio for ongoing support and advice. 16 Above all we wish to thank Luce Marinetti, whose candor and frankness were evidenced in her kind permission to publish these passages.
Passages 1-4. Marinetti spent most of 1916 on leave from active duty, though inevitable he continued to feel the effects of the war: on 17 August 1916 the painter Umberto Boccioni died during military exercises, and two months later on 10 October the architect Antionio Sant'Elia was killed in battle. In late December Marinetti was recalled to duty and in February 1917 he was stationed at a small town about ten kilometers southwest of Gorizia (at the extreme northeast of modern Italy). He soon came down with bronchitis, and after enduring a month of illness he was sent on 3 April to a hospital at Cormons to recuperate (some one hundred kilometers west of the front), where he stayed until 18 April. The four passages given here were written during this period. Passage 2 consists of a sketch for a brief play that derives from the "synthetic theater" which Marinetti had been developing in 1915 and 1916, first announced in the manifesto "The Futurist Synthetic Theater" (January-February 1915). 17 It survives in two versions: the longer one is given here, but the shorter one bears the title "The Game of the Lampshade" (Il gioco dell'abatjour). Passage 3 is Marinetti's first draft for the "Manifesto of the Italian Futurist Party," first published in the newspaper L'Italia Futurista in February 1918. 18
[1.] 31 March 1917
Always always, in my life these two tormenting states of mind have alternated with one another. In the happiest and most voluptuous bed I have suddenly torn myself away from the arms of a seductive and delightful lover, and trembling seated at the edge of the bed I have strained my ear to catch a distant, imaginary shelling. Nostalgia, desire for heroism and violence. In the muddy broth of the trench which the shellings have made, a monstrous ivy of women's naked bodies climbing from my temples up to the moon. Torrid nostalgia of lust. Why? Why?
[2.] 31 March 1917
La Reine Bordel [the brothel queen]
This small wooded room totally shaken by the cannonades + noise that my soldier cook is making as he grates cheese like the sound that my old servant Angiolina used to make at Godiasco (15 years ago) + a line of fifteen-year-old girls led by the dark-haired daughter of Stanny from Amsterdam, all restraining their knowing bursts of laughter, they pass and give a light caress, a tender fillip to my erect member. I am lying down and pretend to sleep in my bedroom opening onto the lunar garden. First time around: little fillip. I sleep naked on my back.  They pass by and one after the other each hoists her leg, taking my face between her thighs. I am licking furiously. Each one vibrates with pleasure, declaring in a serious tone: "Oh! He won't wake up."   So ends the game. (The Brothel Queen)
[3.] 15 April 1917
Political social program
1. Divorce conceded on the basis of a simple request by one
of the spouses.
The gradual abolition of marriage.
Free Love. Child of the State.
Abolition of marital authorization.
Absolute freedom of the young woman.
Devaluation of virginity.
2. Expulsion of the Papacy.
A center of passeist infection.
Medieval State included within the modern state.
Center of foreign espionage.
enemy of Italy protected by Italy.
Festering Cancer of the capital.
A small weekly newspaper: Out with the P...
3. Abolition of Parliament.
The head of state counseled by a ministry of pure technicians
elected directly by the people.
4. Abolition of higher education.
Universities, academies, etc.
Abolition of illiteracy.
--obligatory elementary schools
--schools of gymnastics
--schools of arts and trades
--schools for factories
--schools for courage
swift courageous reading and writing
To eliminate illiteracy one must eliminate professors.
5. Abolition of the police.
Every citizen armed, defends himself on his own.
Popular upheavals, being fires, should be stopped and suffocated by the firemen. If a fire takes on enormous proportions it means that there's a lot of dry wood to burn. The firemen will go back with their pumps and let it burn.
Futurism has been and will always be a school of mental and physical courage. A formula of hygiene for the mind, the spirit. Man must be intellectually and muscularly courageous and swift.
The boor will be punished, as will the dullard and the greedy fool who lets himself be taken in by the usual American-style swindle; much more than the American-style thief.
The lout from the library and the lout from the countryside will have to disappear, equally awkward slow stupid obstructionist dangerous for the highly rapid gearings of modern society.
[4.] 16 April 1917
It's not so bad being in the hospital if one isn't very ill. At last a chance for the reorganization of the body. Rest. A reordering of the cells. Freedom of the brain (I haven't smoked for more than a month). From my bed in my very white recovery room I see the fields that at last are green beneath the sun now, and the road that goes to the railway. Endless trucks, trucks, batteries in front of the squalid houses.
I had an excellent orderly from Benevento, intelligent. He knows everything understands everything war politics nations the conflagration. But now he has to prepare boric packings for a soldier whose eyes have been burned.
A serious danger: carnal obsession and consequent masturbation.
Passage 5. After leaving the hospital in Cormons in April 1917, Marinetti was stationed with forces situated in the village of Plava (one hundred kilometers north of Gorizia) He participated in the series of heavy bombardments that began on 12 May in anticipation of an assault on Austrian positions on Mount Kuk (or Monte Cucco; on this event see also passage 22), and on 14 May he was severely wounded by a grenade explosion (see passage 14). He spent the summer in convalescence in Udine, where he was twice visited by D'Annunzio. Then, in early September, he was stationed near the village of Doberdò, thirty-five kilometers northwest of Monfalcone, a city on the Adriatic coast. His diary for 27 September records his taking an evening walk with several colleagues by the shores of Lake Doberdò: "A large lake. With islands that are almost round. A kingdom of the moon. Acute sense of solitude and sadness.... So the place is deserted, a peaceful and very quiet Kingdom of the moon...." 19 Immediately after this comes the passage given below, which is omitted from the published diaries.
The moon is a pervasive image in Marinetti's work, beginning as early as 1904 when he evokes "the corrosive light of the moon," "the air heavy...with lunar milk," the "strange sap" of this "terrible Magician" who "imitates and liquefies the hardness of marble;" 20 it reemerges in the manifesto "Let's kill the moonlight!" , where the moon symbolizes sentimentality and decadence attacked by a band of madmen led by the Futurists. 21 In The Steel Alcove , Marinetti dedicates a whole chapter to the temptations of the moon, entitled "The moon's troops disembark at Rapallo," where the moon boasts that she has been able to "stop the war" by "fill[ing] the trenches with the beneficial milk of [her] light, and the lookouts' heads drooped, filled with sleep and tender pessimism...." 22 Finally in The Untamable , the moon's melting sweetness is associated with the freedom and agapic love of the night, and opposed to the sadistic violence of the midday sun.
[5.] 27 September 1917
I imagine rifle fire from the trenches being exchanged from one side of the lake to the other, shooting among the shoreline plants (which emerge and then sometimes are submerged again when the lake has risen a great deal), beneath the discourse of the moon.
Discourse of the Moon to the Soldiers (for the novel).
 Let yourselves become tender, you hard stiff rough surly trenches. Why are you ting one another? Why are you struggling for this pool of useless absurd water that you can't even use to ease your thirst? The water has been poisoned by the moon. I alone reign here. This lake is neither Austrian nor Italian. It's mine. It belongs to the Moon! Give it up. Lay down your rifle and sleep for a while.
"Be quiet," shouted an Italian sentinel. "You're an Austrian moon. Be quiet or I'll take aim at you with my rifle!"
"No, no," another sentinel murmured to him. "The moon is Italian. Can't you hear? She's singing just the way they sing in my home town! This moon is Italian."
"That's why I'm going to smash it down with a rifle shot. Let me take care of it. I'm a first-class Futurist marksman."
And thus it was that the Moon sank over the lake of Doberdò at the crack of rifle fire.
Passage 6. Stationed near the front lines as he was, Marinetti experienced first hand the disaster that occurred with the Austro-German breakthrough at Caporetto and the massive rout that ensued in late October 1917. Subsequently stationed at several different places, Marinetti was ordered to serve at the new front near the river Piave in February 1918, a site where Austrian and Italian sentries would fire at one another across the river. He noted in his diary for 21 February: "When I step out of my hut at night I am trapped by the continuous firing of machine guns behind and in front of me. The bullets ring as they strike the roof and against the wooden walls of the hut." 23
[6. February 1918]
[Previous page torn.] even though wanting to avoid it.
It fell into the frozen water. I unbuckled the knapsack and loaded it onto my shoulders. I detached the corpse of the shock trooper from the rocks and pushed it into the current that will take it out to the sea.
Then, onward. As I was walking among the raging fitful gleams of the floodlights on the Austrian shore I heard weeping alongside me, just above me, within me. The beautiful body was weeping, and the tears were dripping onto my back, burning slowly slowly.
Passages 7-8. On 22 March 1918 Marinetti was assigned just north of Thiene (a small city about one hundred and sixty kilometers north of Vicenza). Passage 7 shows him, a day after his arrival, testing and refining sentences around one of his favorite themes, the sun as a symbol of the power of destruction and renewal of the Futurist hero, as seen in the third chapter of Mafarka le futuriste, "The dogs of the sun," where the sun both decomposes the cadavers of the dead and ploughs the fields to nourish the warriors. 24 as Marinetti writes in The Steel Alcove, "The sun of lava communicates with my heart through invisible tubes, communicating vessels." 25
Passage 8 comprises two parts. The first consists of two sentences written toward the work that would eventually become 8 Souls Within a Bomb , a sequence of eight stories that "explodes" at the end. More interesting is the abrupt shift to the second part, Marinetti's recollection of an event that had taken place almost exactly three years earlier, on 11 April 1915, when Marinetti and Mussolini were both arrested in Rome. The occasion was a demonstration on behalf of interventionism, one of a series staged in the principal cities of central and northern Italy on the same day. They were organized by the "Fasces of Revolutionary Action," a leftist group that strongly favored intervention and many of whose documents and theoretical writings were printed by Mussolini in Il Popolo d'Italia.Mussolini was speaking as a representative of this group when he was arrested in the early afternoon and was released in the evening on the condition that he leave Rome immediately. 26
[7.] 23 March 1918
Boastful sun.
The sun's boasting at twilight.
The last boasting of the sun, says the disdainful moonlight.
An assault of pressing smells.
The pressing light.
The sun is palming off its false coins.
The thick river sated with corpses is undulating toward the sun like a
serpent that has just eaten.
Demagogue sun.
Tribunal sun.
The sun has taken off its shirt and is yelling over the elegant hilltops.
Aristocratic sun.
Dictator sun.
The deserter sun is crawling into the underbrush.
The motion picture sun projected its film of gold, vibrant and dusty.
The thick intrigues of the black waters; the sea overcome by shadows.
[8.] 5 April 1918
For Five Souls Within a Bomb.
One sleeps really deeply after having punched some low and traitorous scum in the snout.
Fifth Soul:
Everyone makes fun of me because my name is goooood-willl!
Mussolini in the middle of about a hundred republicans and revolutionaries. I in the middle of about fifty Futurists. An exchange of glances, fraternal and full of solidarity.
Be begins to speak. The sound of water crashing in the Fountain of Trevi. Two wagons ready.
Settimelli and Bruno Corra are near me. I Scream: "Down with Austria!"
Suddenly twenty hands of policemen. Bruno and Settimelli are defending me with blows and trying to prevent the arrest. But my whole body is lifted up and placed inside a wagon and away we go amid a cyclone of blows and punches. On the way an officer tells me that Mussolini is in the other wagon behind mine, also having been arrested.
Passages 9-12. In early July 1918 Marinetti was assigned to the Corps of Armored Cars. After receiving his initial training in Genoa he was ordered to join the Eighth Armored Squadron stationed between Venice and Padua, where he remained for three months (25 July to 24 October). We give four passages from this extraordinarily productive period just prior to the end of the war.
Passages 9 and 10 are a sketch for an episode in the work that came to be called Futurist Loves , though ultimately it was not included in the finished volume. Marinetti first mentions the larger project in a diary entry for 18 March 1918: "I am thinking about the Futurist Loves. Programs for life, with ramifications. Which is to say, with variant endings. Two or three or four possible endings, each different from one another, which a reader can then choose." 27 The
passages' central image, connecting melancholy, pessimism and "D'Annunzian poisons" to an infection of the sexual organs, is recurrent in Marinetti, and appears, for example, in A Woman's Belly: A Surgical Novel (1919; see note to passages 21-23 for more details). Ettore Petrolini and Leopoldo Fregoli, both mentioned in the sketch, were variety performers who were able to respond to the rapid improvisational rhythms of Futurist theater and early comic film. 28
Passage 11 presents an extensive narration of the battle of Caporetto, which had taken place a year earlier, as experienced by one Captain Raby, who served with Marinetti in the Corps of Armored Cars and who res prominently as a fictional character in Marinetti's work The Steel Alcove , a novel closely based on Marinetti's experiences in the war's final year. To what extent Marinetti altered Raby's account cannot be determined, but it differs greatly from his own experiences as recorded in the diaries. More important, Raby's account sounds many of the notes that were heard in public debate about the disaster, the scope of which had left Italy profoundly shocked. After the breakthrough on 24
October 1917, the Italians were forced to retreat more than two hundred kilometers in eighteen days, battered by incessant rains and constant shelling. When
it was over they had suffered 40,000 casualties (dead and wounded) and lost 280,000 prisoners and 350,000 more who were separated from their units or had deserted. Less than half of the army was left at full strength. Explaining "the disaster" became a national obsession and the account of Captain Raby is partly a contribution to that debate, as well as a distillation of Marinetti's own wartime experiences. Only a portion of the narration is presented here, enough to indicate Marinetti's understanding of the disaster's "real cause" and his flair for condensed narrative.
Passage 12, in contract, looks forward to the end of the war, already immanent, and attempts to assess its "lessons" for the postwar period to follow, touching a subject also addressed in the satire The Island of Kisses in which two of daring Futurists unmask a band of homosexual museum lovers who want to prevent technological progress and war.
[9.] 1 August 1918
Joy or Sorrow at Will.
(One of the Futurist Loves.)
A Program of Life (or of pleasure) with variants to one's own liking.
First you have to become an assistant to Bossi. Then go into the provinces: Pisa, Pistoia, Gubbio, Perugia, cities either dead or half-dead, and flush out a young lady who is very pale, nostalgic, sick with sentimental indecision, and fond of passeist literature. Respectfully ask for her hand. Then make her fall in love with you by using all the old and decadent epistolary poisons of the D'Annunzian sort. When she's yours, blurt out monstrous revelations about your infidelity as a man of orgiastic temperament. Her spirit is shattered. Her fragile body grows ill. Neurasthenia. Longing for suicide. Persuade her parents, then personally take your betrothed into the clinic of Professor Bossi in Genoa right on the sea, so clear and rich in cubic afternoons of flowing gold and torrid sunlight.

You must speak to her of the necessity of forgetting you and of falling in love with a weak young pallid sick neutralist who has been discharged after a case of enterocolitis and a liver illness, yet is respectful, Platonic, and full of elegant sorrows.
 (Outside, a cloudy night as dark as pitch, sultry warmth as heavy as pitch.) The ray strikes the jalousie of the window. A hole is opened by the oxhydrogen blowpipe. Outside the ray is now thrusting forward and inundating the night and the sea with a marvelous and mournful moonlight.
A dialogue, under the lunar trees, between your beloved and the ideal.
"To be yours. Yesss. But that can never happen! Never! Our lips will never meet!"
"I understand your soul! I cannot reach the terrible limit of truth. You will never know the secret of my renunciation."
Doctor Bossi enters.
"Damn that phosphorescent light. A basket of putrefied fish must have been left here!"
[10.] 7 August 1918
Continuation of Joy or Sorrow at Will (futurist loves)
They look beneath the bed.
"There's no basket of fish down here!"
"Well then, it's quite simple! It's a case of shrivelled uterus with pockets of menstrual puss! You know what the operation consists of."
Then, Bossi having departed, you will speak to your beloved of the necessity of becoming a singer of light music, meanwhile pressing the wound in the uterus with a light massage. You will repair the ege of the uterus. You will wash it and take away all the pus.
Then you will go out into the garden and lie down on the grass about 100 meters from the window of the operating room. After 10 minutes an extraordinarily white ray will leap out from the pierced jalousie and fill the nocturnal garden which, bathed in bright light, will reveal red armchairs that teem with naked shoulders and pearls, that bristle with astoundingly luminous osprey feathers and dark glances, black diamonds, a frenzied river of jewels.
Rising, you will turn around and see, within the radiant circle formed by the electric floodlights, a stage that is shining, with the actor Petrolini in the middle, agile, jumping about in a black tuxedo worn with a starched shirt-front as white as snow beneath the enemy floodlights....With his mouth, with his eyes, Petrolini is imitating grimaces, guffaws, hunger, thirst, ironies, thanks, and the prayers of the female vulva.
The actor Fregoli (standing near Petrolini), meanwhile, will imitate all the faces of the mothers, the fathers, the young couples who are there, faces marked by horror, desire, reproach, and exaltation at the sight of the immaculate daughter displaying herself in that way in public. At last, what she had kept hidden beneath her dress is revealed.
The stage has great buzzing wheels, 20 motors each of 200 horsepower. It runs, leaps over plains, climbs mountains, jumps into a river (it looks like a dalabieh or riverboat on the Nile being pulled by unnumerable vieux marcheurs viveurs in tuxedos who are bent beneath the tow-line...on both shores they are pulling the stage as it sputututters and bebebelches its speedy motors over the water like propellers) with ropes like electric rays.
Away! The stage contains your beloved who does a mean cakewalk and then begins a marvellous belly-dance just where the uterus is becoming a spiral a vortex of light warmth perfumes. The stage, like an assault car, launches an attack upon a convent full of elderly respectable English ladies, located on a mountain in Scotland. They are reading the Bible. You take the Bible, mount the stage, and explain how Noah, at the age of eighty, screwed his virgin daughters.
[11. August 1918]
The Retreat of Lieutenant Raby's Five Armored Cars
I was at Maiano with five armored cars. The others were at Turin, in the security service, at Turin with the Captain.
The Night of 25-26 October 1917
They are taking away the telephone from the office (three soldiers from the Engineering Corps placed at my orders) that linked me to the 16th Division. I can hear shelling in the direction of Gorizia. At two o'clock I go to the 16th Division Command at Purgessimo. I pass by Premariacco, transport cars blocking the road. In the place where the cars are parked I learn the tragic news of our collapse and retreat at Caporetto. Two grenades explode nearby. Smoke is billowing over Cividale, fires. They tell me that the first Austrian patrols are already in Cividale. I search for the 16th Division at Remanzacco. They don't know anything there.  The clearing out of our troops has begun in a tumult of bad news.
I go on to Trigesimo.
"Where is the 16th Division?"
"What army are you with?"
"The Third."
"This is the Second. We don't know a damned thing."
27 October 1917
At Trigesimo I finally find the 16th Division. The second in command says to me: "What are you doing here?"
"I'm looking for a place to hide the general's car!! I don't have time to waste with you!"
At last I find General Ponzio, who says to me: "Bravo! If only all the officers were like you! Very well. I've lost all my machine guns. I'm going to need you."
Ponzio describes the conration of our troops in retreat. Gorizia (the Army's "Zone of Gorizia"). Lucinico, Rubrio, Trigesimo, Artegna, Gemona--all of Carnia has already been lost. "We're meeting tomorrow at Casacco. But remember to pass below Udine, because the road from Trigesimo to Udine is being shelled." The defense was to be on the river Torre.
The night of the 28th I pass by Udine. It is pouring rain. Disorder, panic. The wounded and the ill cleared out in haste. Stretchers everywhere, wounded. Screams of terror. Cars, ambulances, the drone of airplanes as they surge upwards in the dark. Fields with oxen. Cattle, cows, carts. Cannons overturned. Fires, fires. The vast blushes of red in the night against the maniacal tenacious filaments of rain turning into tears over the countryside stricken with terror. Casacco. Artegna.
I am fired on by rifles that are shooting from Monte Stella. Then I run into twelve Alpines. "We're all that's left of a battalion! The Austrians are up on Monte Stella!" And then I run into a major coming with two guns from the mountains. "I'm retreating. Ammunition is finished. I've been shooting until now."
I go on, passing by the fiery blast, the enormous hot burning breath of the old spinning mill at Artegna, in flames.
At Buia. Avella. Maiano. Deveacco. Farla.
The Morning of the 29th
The 16th Division has been merged with the 34th Division to form a unit named the "Di Giorgio Special Corps," which has been assigned the task of holding the bridgehead at Pinzano, with regrouping on the river Ledra.
I originally had five armored cars, but from Udine to Buia I've lost three. With two cars and some outposts of the Cavalry (Umberto Regiment) I am to cross back and forth from Buia to Avella and Avella to Buia. Exchanges of fire with Austrian patrols. Pouring rain.
The Night of the 29th
San Tommaso, Command of the 16th Division. They receive a communication from the Command of the Syracuse Brigade reporting that Maiano has already been occupied. Maiano is two kilometers away from San Tommaso. Panic in the Command. A retreat is discussed.
"If you want," Raby says to the general, "I'll go and see."
Rain. Darkness. Carts abandoned on the roads. I go around via the country roads. Empty houses. I think that I'm in a village near Maiano. I run into a peasant.
"What village is this?"
"Maiano."
I examine some houses. I go to the intersection of the roads going to Peri and Tonzolano. Nobody. Rifle fire in the distance. I return to San Tommaso to make my report.
Dawn of 30 October
The 16th Division is folding back to the river Ledra. I am to stay behind with two armored cars and a battalion of Alpines.
At Buia we see six Austrian cavalrymen outlined against the sky in the hills. I fire with my machine gun. They disappear. They were three hundred meters away.
The bridges over the river Ledra are being mined.
At midday I return to our lines. I am in the divisional reserves.
At twilight, an attack by the Austrians, who are coming from Udine. There is a persistent rumor (started by the Austrians): the Third Army has already reached Trieste and has taken 60,000 prisoners!!! Soldiers keep on passing by and shouting: "This is the road to Trieste!" Then they throw down their weapons!
11:00 on 30 October
I take an armored car and go to Maiano. I'm accompanied by a battalion of the 246th Infantry. Their captain is energetic, powerful, bold. Maiano has been occupied by the Austrians. They have six machine guns. Three are standing pointed in a row in the middle of the road, left visible, stupidly. I'm told that during the night one of our battalions had occupied Maiano, but that it was chased out in the morning by the Austrians. Now they are holding the city with six machine guns transported with bicycles.
With my machine gun, at a distance of 50 meters, I take aim at the three machine guns in the open road. I am standing at a corner. One blast and the Austrian machine gun in the middle is overturned. I see the gunner, who had been lying behind it, with his stomach to the ground, rising and attempting to get up. His chest and stomach have an enormous hole torn out, 30 centimeters in diameter, from which blood is flowing in streams in rivers to left to right inundating the street which is already filled with water and turning it all red. The three machine guns have been smashed and overturned. The other gunners are fleeing into the nearby houses, among the bicycles that they had placed under the porticos. The dead gunner, who had gotten bloodily entangled in the tripod of his gun, is crushed by the armored car as I pass over his body. I take away the other two guns in the armored car; they're about a yard high. My tires are shredded. There is the smell of gunfire. Pursuit into the houses. My sergeant, the driver, chases one Austrian gunner and stabs him against the shut door of a house.
The other three machine guns that were targeting us, hidden in a stack of corn on the right, have grown silent. The captain of the infantry battalion has been struck in the chest and falls dead. The battalion is falling apart as it retreats. I fall back. My two Maxims have been disabled. The radiator of the armored car is leaking, riddled by bullets. I return to San Tommaso.
The 16th Division has already left. They are firing at me from the church, situated in a high part of the town. I send the other armored car to sector 193 just outside the town in order to fire from the same height as the church. Grenades, the 75ers, are falling around us rrrrrrrr but land without exploding. I reach the other car commanded by Lieutenant Failli. My two cars fall back from Farla to San Daniele. Patrols. Rifle fire.
I know that San Tommaso has been occupied by the Austrians. I run into a captain from the 1st battalion of the Eighth Fortress, who has lost all his weapons and is leading his men disarmed. At Villa Farlate there are some blasts from machine guns which disabled the last two of Failli's guns that were still firing.
At San Daniele del Friuli, a town that sits upon a hillside, I find myself at the bottom of the city in a road that twists upward with s-curves. At the top of the town are our two machine gun companies. I clear the street of overturned carts, then go up on foot. I receive orders from the Rovigo Brigade to disable the motors of my armored cars and to take the remaining machine guns that work and resist as long as possible. At whatever cost. The command of the brigade sends me two boxes of cartridges.
In the passageway of a country house I find a cart, on which I screw down the machine that loads the cartridge belts. Helped by an old refugee woman, I load the belts with my men. Meanwhile, my drivers are weeping as they break up their motors. I prepare some cartridges with gunpowder for mines in order to blow up the gasoline tanks.
[12. 18 October 1918]
Theories of Spring
The spring with its tearing and overflowing rivers of war-revolution for the new ideal flowers that are seeking the sky.
Codification of Spring. The Laws of Spring.
Revision of all laws. Why have they been condemned? One has to weigh modify or destroy the checks prohibitions imposed by society (living together order security = cowardice) on the free rapacious incestuous assassin spring.
1. Should humanity once again become incestuous? No! not even for the sake of experience.
2.  Yes! for the sake of experience. The recent conflagration has proved it.
3. Should humanity have a vast experience of promiscuity and sexual intercourse? Yes! The recent conflagration has quite abundantly shown that.
4. Should humanity be bloodthirsty? Yes! The conflagration has demonstrated that.
5. Should humanity be homosexual? No! The conflagration having demonstrated the necessity of an abundant destruction of life, everything that is contrary to the reproduction of the species must be combatted. But homosexuality can be a useful experience in order to devaluate woman (lasciviousness, sentimentalism, fidelity).
Passage 13. Marinetti's meeting with Benedetta Cappa, an aspiring writer and gifted painter, was undoubtedly the most important event of his personal life during the period 1917-21. His earliest dated letter to her is from 15 June [1918], but it was plainly preceded by several others. 29 Nine years later they married and eventually they had three daughters. The passages given below are found among loose leaves that follow a diary entry dated 3 November 1918, but their date is hardly secure. "Marinetto" is a pet name that was used by "Beny," as Benedetta came to be called.
[13. Late 1918]
Dreams of Beny
First, music of Edgar Poe, all in violent snatches, executed by three trams on the taut musical strings of the tracks of the piano-city. And from the tumultuous tangle of the feverish and tragic notes it forms and releases an ideal re.
[Late 1918]
1. It is Marinetto's duty to think about Beny every morning and every evening.
2. It must be his pleasure to serve her every day.
3. He must desire to see her as soon as possible.
4. He must dream of kissing her.
5. He must be joyful only in love, in loving Beny ever increasingly.
Beny adores Marinetto with all her soul. So it is.
Passage 14. The Dolina of the Carso or The Nightingale of the Plava was a work that Marinetti planned, but never completed. It was to thematize the lessons of the war in the re of a nightingale whose song was transformed to harmonize with the sound of factories and cannons. Toward this work, then, Marinetti plans to draw on his own experience when he was wounded on 14 May 1917 at Plava (see the note to passage 5). The Café Savini, in Milan, was frequented by writers in Milan in the years before the war.
The haunting image of Marinetti "accartocciato nel camminamento" (crumpled like paper in the communication trench) recalls the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti's description of himself in "Dolina notturna" (nocturnal doline), a poem dated "Naples, 26 December 1916," which first appeared in 1918: 30 "Questo nomade / adunco / si lascia / come una foglia / accartocciata // L'interminabile / tempo / mi adopera / come un fruscio" (this nomad is left like a crumpled leaf, time consumes me like a rustle; lines 6-16).
The "dolina" was, in Marinetti's own words, "a depression in the terrain of the Carso. It looks like the crater of a dead volcano. Sometimes a real circus dug out by the waters. A little dried-out lake." 31 It was typically used as a shelter by the soldiers--including Marinetti and Ungaretti--in Worlld War One.
[14. Late 1918]
For the Dolina of the Carso or in the Nightingale of the Plava, render the hunger that I felt at Plava when wounded on the stretcher next to the dissevered leg of an Alpine, while a former waiter of the Savini Café in Milan (where I had lived through so much) offers me his sympathy and some exquisite broth, etc. I eat it, thinking about the mysterious roads of the Forces and coincidences. Also render my worry at the Parello dolina upon hearing it declared that the three infantrymen who had died in the communication trench had been crumpled like paper by death. I thought that if I had died as they did, they would have written fairly if they had defined me as one who was: crumpled like paper in the communication trench.
Passages 15-17. The year 1919 signalled the moment of Marinetti's most intense political engagement. On 11 January he joined Mussolini in leading a group that disrupted a speech at La Scala by Leonida Bissolati, the head of the reformist Socialists and an advocate of moderation on the question of how much territory Italy was to receive after the war. On 23 March Marinetti joined Mussolini in forming the Fasci italiani di combattimento (Italian Battle Fasces), the organization that became the Fascist National Party. By the end of the year he was under arrest and imprisoned for twenty-one days on charges of keeping weapons and engaging in subversive activities. The three passages given here range widely in nature and tone. Passage 15 is a sketch for brief play of the "synthetic theater" sort. Passage 16 probably dates from late September or early October 1919, and apparently recalls a moment during Marinetti's visit to Fiume (15 September to 2 October), where he had gone only three days after D'Annunzio's take over of the city. It is both harsher and more honestly admiring of D'Annunzio than any of his published remarks, which are instead marvels of satirical ambiguity, beginning with his short "biography" The Gods Depart, D'Annunzio remains . 32
Passages 17, in contrast, suggests Marinetti's deepening interest in questions of practical morality, questions that he explores by assimilating Nietzschean thematics of the strong or forceful individual to a vein of scientific mysticism turning around the concept of "forces" at work in the universe. In his notes for the novel based on his later war experiences, The Steel Alcove , he repeatedly pondered giving it the subtitle: The Book of Forces; and in chapter three of the novel, "The chemical battle and the azure halos," he describes the "halos of lived life," in which are gathered "all the affective forces of couples, friends, parents, children, mothers, lovers and little children that, united with the forces of past pain and pleasure, shield the soldiers." 33
[15. Between 25 March and 5 April 1919]
Percussion Suicide.
A young woman abandoned by her lover opens the window and desperately calls to him. The lover, already in the street, looks up and sees the girl sobbing and screaming. She leaps over the windowsill. He opens his arms and receives her falling body on his chest. He falls beneath her weight and breaks a leg! They are married, naturally, cemented together by that dynamic suicide.
[16. Late 1919]
[Previous page missing] the worst [impression] that D'Annunzio left on me, smiling with the grimace of a cretinous whore at the salutations of the soldiers: "All of them were recognizing me and saluting me!" A strange mixture of heroism and genius and petty pederastic vanities in this superior man, strong tenacious patriot, mystically disinterested and also so vain that he would perhaps ruin Italy for the pride of being or seeming to be the head of the revolution. Yesterday he was, at bottom, a sort of traditional reactionary; today he is undisciplined and ready for any form of violence. He wants to lead everybody and everything. He is greatly deluding himself.
I think that I am better than him: disinterested, more secure, and indifferent about possible successes and ambi[tion...next page missing].
[17. December 1919]
The Knowledge of Forces
1.) Mix great boldness with detailed prudence. Alternate a grandiose blind thrust with a religious concern for being prudent about particulars.
2.) The use of amulets should sometimes be a form of homage or a genuflection to Forces that have been angered or gone mad.
3.) There are shifty or halfway sorts of beings who are of no interest to the Forces. They live in the shadow of what surrounds them; they are never caught in the cyclonic movement of the Forces. Others, instead, are always at the center of the breach or in the middle of the road. These must always choose the type of movement in which it is possible for them to turn the current that is taking them along in order to redirect it then with the impetus added by the enthusiasm of the Forces themselves. Otherwise they must give themselves over to the current, changing themselves from opaque rafts to giant floating luminous things, so that the Forces themselves go more quickly toward a new harmony.
4.) Magicians say: You want to have something? Say in a loud voice: I possess it. A loud voice, naturally. This is true for halfway people who neither have nor can have much influence.
5.) A magician said that I was a crowd. I tell Beny that she's a crowd of beauties.
6.) To say some things out loud is very dangerous. For the Forces can overhear a voice and sometimes reject it absolutely. To repeat out loud certain ideas reinforces them, makes them real.
7.) Humans are open like porticos or rooftops or blocks of flats without windows and doors. They can be invaded by another soul or by many other souls. Others are closed and can't be invaded. Still others are extremely open, but their inner personality is so compact active and powerful that souls that penetrate it cannot resist that internal dynamism and end up leaving immediately.
Passages 18-20. Unlike the violent waves that attack the stars in The Conquest of the Stars, the crepuscular and languid waves described in passage 19 recall the seductions of Coloubbi at the end of Mafarka the Futurist, and the hypnotic music of the "Lake of Poetry and Sentiment" where the Untamed are purified of their violence. 34
[18. Circa 31 March 1920]
The will anatomically transforms the body. It increases the capacity of the stomach, which can contain such a quantity of liquids. The will can forbid the body from transmitting inebriation from alcohol to the brain. I have never been drunk except when I softened my will. I have maintained my will like a guardian of order until I wanted it otherwise. Then I softened it. And in turn this softened the body. Sudden dizziness and absolute vomiting.
[19. August-September 1920]
The Seductiveness of Evening by the Sea (A free-word assessment.)
The optical nerves are relaxing. Coolness spreading over the cheeks. A summation of all the olfactory acoustical caresses soothings mildnesses silkinesses shadings. The slowness of the tepid breeze that is becoming cooler. Soft mother-of-pearl shades, lilac pink green turquoise, torpid rhythms of the sea's movements, delicate childish swinging of diminutive waves; the gentle wry face of the shimmers all the shimmers pink lilac purple blues greens of the sea; they are straining to melt into the half-effaced shades of sky (to form an immense shell of bluelilac coolness). The lighter boats are straining to keep their balance, as if not to burden the waves. The oars dip delicately, not wanting to tear the sea-silk. They rise gracefully, not wanting to ruffle the edges of the wave's little scars. Undulating agile metallicity of the waters that will resolutely resonate and sing of sweetness. The soft velvety look of the navy slacks and crimson cap in the white boat. Each boat is a set of scales that is weighing the woman at the prow against the man at the stern.
Boats: fruitdishes that offer women cadenced by the blue music of the cool waves pallid with pleasure. In the bluecool high sea, look, the dark oars of the boat which rhythmically dip and rise with delicacy and precision, as if not to wrinkle the rare silk of the sea.
Ssssssssss gggggg The wave is sweetening its murmurs, its languors, perfecting itself before becoming a sound that is drunk by the ear ecstatic like an aroused eye, mouth, heart.
The beach is falling asleep, extinguishing the flashing footlights of its theatrical stage, closing its sandy eyelids beneath the fringes of white slow spume faint ever fainter more sluggish.
The Splendor and Folly of Midday by the Sea. (A free-word assessment.)
The massive scenic stage of the high sea at calm, a dance of wave-ballerinas, silvery frenetic butterflies. Typographic boat of gaudy placards, with the little rotary press of the rower moving like a piston and printing printing endlessly printing flowers of vermilion and gold on the rolls of blue paper furnished by the sea.
[20. August-September 1920]
Against memory. Nostalgia as negation of new and joyous effort. Nostalgia.
Against the historical document. Patience, a restraint that exasperates good fortune and makes it flee.
Futurism is the formula for optimistic mental hygiene; a projection, passionate and fraught with faith, of the I in action; a conquest and shaping of tomorrow.
Passages 21-23. The first two passages are difficult to date because they are fictional, and on loose sheets of paper inserted into the diaries pertaining to 1921. Passage 22 outlines a method for overcoming the oscillations of fortune through an "artificial optimism opposed to all chronic pessimism, a continuous dynamism, a continuous becoming and an indefatigable will." 35 It is later developed into the "futurist cure," entitled "courage + truth," that Marinetti develops in his fictional letters to Enif Robert 36 (mentioned in passage 22) who must undergo an operation and recover from severe depression in the novel they co-wrote in 1919, A Woman's Belly: A Surgical novel . 37
[21. Date Unclear]
Futurism is the religion of the new. To render certain inevitable the creation of the New by force of Faith in the New. The love of the new, so intense as to quicken miraculously the new itself.
Bruitism of Kisses
--mmzzz
--mbdc
--mpsc
--mpds
--mmps
A normal almost realistic Drama with character-Forces that
speak with abstract verbalizations. These three or four
character-Forces dressed in a solid color.
--red --black --green --yellow.
[22. Date unclear]
[Page missing.]
2. An attempt at a Futurist cure.
My letter to Signora Enif Robert and her reply.
3. Never speak of Impossibility.
Declare that everything that is desired and everything that is wanted is possible. Never say, "I am unlucky. I'll never be able to do it"
4. Keep silence in matters that are relatively easy and prepare them carefully. You should want them fiercely, but not say to others that you'll succeed. Never say it's a sure thing, even when a favorable outcome seems certain. To say it's certain is the same as considering oneself the master of auspicious forces. But the forces like to consider themselves free not to favor someone even when they have already made their decision. They are kind, but surly and easily irritated with people who are strong. It is necessary to say we hope or perhaps! For if they hear you say, it's a sure thing or I'm certain, they can abandon you brutally without reason.
5. Creative force of the word.
A terrible passion a terrible and pernicious love can be created in us just by the force of saying, "I'm in love" or "I'm smitten with that woman. I can't live witout her." Example: Carmissati.  But he felt himself to be Tristan and saw in her his Isotta, and by means of the music of Wagner at La Scala he artificially created his drama of love. The piercing separation. Her brother understood the situation and took her away from him, encouraging the musical tragedy with its crescendi of violins--anxiety--blood sperm that rises falls rises rises toward the spasm of the full orchestral conclusion. There's no one but her. To marry her! Mine! Mine!
But she was already his! Marriage was necessary only to render more Wagnerianly romantic a love that was already naturally romantic because free. Literary superimposition. To perfect a love with weak artifice by means of the instinctive physiological element of music.
You can create a political state of mind in favor of war or revolution with a simple cry: Down with Austria or Death to Giolitti. We have to take Mount Cucco. "I've got Mount Cucco in my pocket," as Cappello said at the dawn of the action of May 1917. The more difficult a collective revolution is to achieve, the more one must repeat, insistently and with iron crystalline adamantine faith, the will to realize it. It is necessary not to say, the war with Austria is a sure thing. One must say down with Austria! with faith and adamantine optimism. One must say I want I have to have that woman. Don't say: I'll have her for sure. The cry down with Austria, shouted with force and with faith precisely when out intervention was and seemed to be the least likely event, was an adamantine drill in the glass bell of the Germanophile clerical moderate conservative quietist neutralism. It was a force of a quality absolutely opposed to the other one, and therefore it pierced it.
6. The electric light has killed the sunset (indecision nostalgia shadings of pessimism); agony of the solar force that man tends to imitate; the pain of the sun that must yield to the shadows. We no longer see the fields that grow pale and die under the rattlings of churchbells. Electric light extends the full natural day with a full artificial day.
7. Speed has killed eliminated the visual analysis of the countryside and the psychological analysis of the antimuscular internal life. Speed has created the synthesis of a life deliberately thrown up in great blocks and withdrawn from minute pessimism. Pessimism is minutiae, detail, analysis. Optimism is synthesis. For that reason speed is optimism because velocity gathers together and synthesizes life. Velocity kills memory, folding back upon oneself, remorse. Velocity attacks, it does not suffer; it is almost always the master of life and its forces. Slowness is subject to others and is always a slave of life and its forces.
8. Destroy the frills of one's own life. Simplify each thing in order to be able to dominate a greater number of affairs. One must have a hundred things simplified and coarsened in one's own life. One must never have anything tied up or made ornate with a thousand useless frills.
Destroy all tricks masks cosmetics ribbons of important things. Reduce every important matter to its state of raw nudity. That way you can dominate many important matters and make a complex synthesis of them directed toward its perfection and splendor. Frills prevent us from seeing the direction of their strength. Important things, once stripped liberated from their frills, can reveal their power and their direction to us. Thus one can identify the one two or three directions of the twenty or thirty things-forces that are really important, and so life converges towards its true ends.
9. Establish a bridge with artificial optimism (constructed of whatever elements are at hand, even fragile and worn out ones) between one good occurrence and another, striding over the valley of the bad event. This is based on the already universally acknowledged law of the oscillation of fortune and misfortune. After the good the bad, after the favorable the unfavorable. Rollercoaster of events. Create a bridge from the good to the good and over the bad.
10. Artificially keep up the situation at all costs when there is support on the right and the left and when the circumstances dictate that the perilous situation, viewed within the context of all the other situations, may turn out favorable. The Countess D'Orsay leaves tips of 500 liras "in order to preserve her station," as the Countess Robilant of Florence says. She's right. The act of the Countess partakes of artificial optimism and is quite right and useful for the entire environment that wants the Countess D'Orsay to rise and not sink. The tips prevent her from having to fall to the point of accepting some miserable little job, which would not be honorable because it would mark a fall and would depress a person ill-suited to such work.
11. We must cultivate, educate in ourselves, our vanity, rendering it, however, charming and not aggressive. Thus one should give oneself numerous tasks and numerous peaks to conquer. For the zig-zags of fortune and misfortune will so turn out that a piece of good luck in politics will be matched by bad luck in love or vice versa. And therefore one is never overcome by any single misfortune. We should never renounce our possibilities. We should remove all the frills from our objectives, but have many of them.
12. Once you have decided on a given offensive in life, employ your own forces to the utmost and use a violent attack without indecision, not worrying about possible losses or the labor involved. After you have taken all the necessary precautions, attack resolutely and desperately.
13. When life seems to offer truces; when one is at the crossroads, in a swamp, in the bogs, at a stopping point where the dimness of indecision slowly falls like night; when the situation becomes serious, ambiguous, full of checks and prohibitions masks and half-way measures; when everything around us seems to say, if only this or that were not in my way, or if only I weren't afraid of revealing everything to the husband by some action taken against my flirtatious or unfaithful lover, I would slap her, I would punch her other lover; when every kind of logic seems to dictate immobility--then, instead, one must smash every obstacle with sudden violence and decisive attack. (Rimini, Gabriella, etc. The public gardens of Milan.) For the forces of the universe are like men: they fall asleep when they think they are secure. Thus the unfavorable forces fall asleep when it seems absurd that you should attack them. Precisely for this reason you must choose the moment of maximum confusion tumult indecisive swamp in order to attack them and sink them.
At Plava every logic counseled us not to take the Cucco head on. Indecision, mistrust, too much time passed beneath the Austrians, pressing upon their heels. Not only the Austrians but the superphysical forces of the Cucco were shattered and in disorder when Cappello decided, precisely then, to launch the great frontal assault against the mountain that had always been deemed impregnable and especially so after sitting there for some two years.
When you find yourself in this state with a woman whom you want to seduce; when you find yourself in a long pause after fruitless attacks of no importance; when you feel skepticism, or think that it's useless to attack and certainly right now it's absurd to do so--this, instead, is precisely the moment. But with violence and fierce decisiveness. Right to the very end.
14. Always be close to strong men. They give you voluntarily, or they always let you take, a part of their useful forces. They enrich all who approach them. If those who are strong should take some of your strength (which rarely happens), it's not bad, for they won't lose that force, but use it, and your force, having been utilized by them, will create others that will be at your service. There is, therefore, always profit for you in living close to strong people.
 This gives the contagion of destruction to your other forces.  Betrayal discourages and devalues your good forces. What they take away from you is irremediably lost and harmful. Weak and depressing people (such as Ada Negri) say: Don't make me laugh, because I don't want to have to cry someday when remembering these happy hours!!!
15. Always use the antidote of happiness against all sufferings and against all misfortunes. When you lose someone dear to you and are assailed with terrible suffering, use the surefire antidote of revivifying obscenity.
The mother of my friend Enif, a strong and energetic woman, tall, powerful, sixty years old, of distinguished personality and will, loves the lottery games to the point that she will almost ruin herself with a big weekly game. Yet she never opens the envelopes that the office of the lottery system sends her. Even though she's a subscriber! I think that she does it to maintain, within herself, that hope-almost-certainty of winning from one moment to the next. In effect she is a subscriber to the pleasure of being able to get the winning combination of numbers. This is artificial optimism. She doesn't open the envelopes because what matters to her most is this continual probability of winning, which gives her a continuous optimism, and because when she actually opens the envelopes she experiences a series of sorrows in finding out that she hasn't won. This woman of superior instinct lives quite intelligently in her isolated villa at Spazzavento, content and calm, without melancholy, with her nerves in good health. She is also given over to social pleasures, which is to say to the better life that she leads by means of her telephone, which gives her the certainty of communicating with everybody. So she lives in almost absolute solitude, but with a sense of society and a wider life concentrated in the telephone that communicates with Florence, Milan, etc. The enormous importance that the telephone has in her dining room in the solitary villa. She once told me that in her worst moments of sorrow she was fond of composing obscene popular songs. This is strange, given that she never speaks obscenities herself and is not given over to salacious tales. It is the antidote of sorrow. The best antidote, because obscenity is happy and funny, energetically chasing and burning away sorrow and disgrace, which are always full of chastity and the austerity of physical renunciation.
16. Always take the initiative in everything. In America there are schools of initiative. Every day and several times a day a prize is given with little sums of money to the student who knows his lesson. There are no punishments, but one is rewarded with money. The hours outside of class and the vacations are used by the students in earning as much money as they can, in all honest ways and with every possible effort. Thus, in the twelve-year-old student, for example, are awakened the desire and the skill for living on one's own according to one's own instinct, intuition, judgment. An admirable way to develop the spirit of business and commercial initiative in a young boy.
17. Take into account the forces of Fortune and the forces of Misfortune, which is to say all the favorable and all the unfavorable forces that are not yet well known, but exist. Napoleon believed that his generals would prove able in times of war to the degree that they proved intelligent in times of peace, and more or less unfortunate or fortunate. Their good luck or bad luck was the more important point of view for judging them.
18. The art of scenting, deciphering, and utilizing forces.
19. Learn everything in life by living it, not watching it.
[23. 10 November 1921]
Facist Procession after the Convention
Three-thirty in the afternoon. A leaden sky. Frozen wind. Solemn march of 40,000 fascists from the Piazza del Popolo to the Altar of the Patria, the Monument to Vittorio Emmanuele. Hundreds of black red pennants. The black in the pennants and in the silk shirts of the fascists predominates.  In the wind the billows of the crowded black red flags are seething. Dynamic seething of Balla. At the head of the procession, after a small band, Mussolini in a large and wide rust-colored coat, carrying a walking stick and balancing it. His step is measured. This huge crude proletarian with his Caesarean head, his heart swollen with the savor of revenge on his former socialist companions. After crossing in front of the monument, he extends his arm in salute to the Unknown Soldier. The band:
tiraram tirarim
tiraram ram
tiraram tirarim
tiraram ram
[1.] 31 Marzo 1917
Sempre sempre, nella mia vita si alternarono questi due stati d'animo
tortus torturanti: Nel letto più voluttuoso e felice
mi sono ad un tratto strappato alle braccia d'una amante deliziosa e
buona, e seduto fremente ho teso l'orecchio ad un lontano immaginario
bombardamento. Nostalgia desiderio d'eroismo e di violenza. Nella
trincea fango broda delle bombarde mostruosa edera rampicante di corpi
nudi di donne dalle mie tempie fino alla luna. Nostalgia torrida di
lussuria. Perché? Perché?
38
[2.] 31 Marzo 1917
La Reine Bordel
Questa cameretta di legno tutta scossa dalle cannonate + rumore che fa il
mio soldato cuoco nel grattare il formaggio simile a quello che faceva
la mia vecchia Angiolina a Godiasco (15 anni fà) + una fila di
bambine quindicenni guidate dalla bruna ia di Stanny a Amsterdam,
tutte trattenendo le risatine furbissime passano e danno una carezzetta un
lieve buffetto al membro ritto mio. Io sono coricato e fingo di dormire
nella mia camera aperta sul giardino lun lunare. Primo giro:
buffetto. Dormo sulla schiena nudo. 2 giro più audace: Nous
allons lui mettre un abatjour sur le visage pour qu'il ne se reveille pas!
Passano e una dopo l'altra alzano una gamba prendendomi la faccia tra
le cosce. Io lecco furiosamente. Ognuna vibra dal piacere dieen
dichiarando con tono serio: Oh! il ne se reveillera pas. Tandis
que l'une se f Mentre l'una si fa leccare l'altra mette un identico
abatjour sulla candela del mio membro e se lo se lo stro frega
contro la fica. La bruna ia di Stanny mi sussurra passando che vuole
farselo entrare nel culo e che io goda così. Il gioco finisce
così. (La Reine Bordel)
[3.] 15 Aprile 1917
{Programma politico sociale
1) Divorzio concesso sulla semplice domanda di uno dei coniugi.
Abolizione graduale del matrimonio.
Libero amore. io di Stato.
Abolizione dell'autorizzazione maritale.
Libertà assoluta della signorina ragazza.
Svalutazione della verginità/
2) Espulsione del Papato
Centro d'infezione passatista.
Stato medioevale incluso nello stato moderno.
Rifugio Centro di spionaggio estero nemico d'Italia
protetto dall'Italia.
Cancro purulento della capitale.
Un giornale piccolo settimanale. Fuori il P...
3) Abolizione del Parlamento
Il capo dello stato consigliato da un ministero di puri tecnici eletti
direttamente dal popolo.
4) Abolizione dell'insegnamento superiore
Università Accademie ecc.
Abolizione dell'analfabetismo
--scuole elementari obbligatorie
--di ginnastica
--arti e mestieri
--scuole d'officina
--scuole di coraggio.
veloce coraggioso leggere e scrivere.
Per abolire l'analfabeta bisogna abolire il professore.
5) Abolizione della questura
Ogni cittadino armato si difende da sé.
Le sommosse essendo degl'incendi devono essere frenate o soffocate coll'acqua dai pompieri. Se l'incendio prende proporzioni enormi vuol dire che vi è molta legna secca da ardere. I pompieri rientreranno colle pompe e lasceranno bruciare.
Il futurismo è stato e fu sarà sempre scuola
di coraggio spirituale e fisico. Una formula d'igiene per
lo spirito. L'uomo deve essere coraggioso spiritualmente
e muscolarmente e veloce.
Sarà punito lo zotico il lento il cretino rapace che si lascia prendere dalla solita truffa all'americana molto di più del ladro all'americana.
Il scimmione di biblioteca e il scimmione della campagna devono sparire egualmente goffi lenti stupidi ingombranti pericolosi per gl'ingranaggi velocissimi della civiltà.}
[4.] 16 Aprile 1917
Non si sta male all'ospedale quando non si è molto male. Possibilità finalmente di riorganizzazione del corpo. Riposo. Riordinamento delle cellule. Libertà del cervello (non fumo più da 1 mese). Vedo dal mio letto nella mia bianchissima camera degl'operati, vedo dei prati ora finalmente verdi al sole e la strada che va alla ferrovia. Camions camions batterie infinite davanti alle casaccie.
Avevo un piantone eccellente di Benevento intelligente. Sa tutto capisce tutto guerra politica nazioni conflagrazione ma ora deve preparare impacchi borici per un soldato che ha gli occhi ustionati. Mi hanno dato un altro piantone: un scimmione cretino lento impaurito rozzo e credo-temo sporco.
Grave pericolo: ossessione carnale e relativa masturbazione.
[5.] 27 Settembre 1917
Immagino una fucileria di trincee da una parte all'altra del lago nelle piante lacustri (che emergono e sono talvolta tutte sommerse quando il lago cresce molto) sotto il discorso della luna.
Discorso della luna ai Combattenti (per il romanzo)
Mi sdraio tra di voi, dure trincee e vi spalmo lentamente
colla mia dolce bava saliva di lumaca e l'olio della mia
saliva argentea. Lasciatevi intenerire dure irte scabre sornione
trincee! Perché vi battete? Perché vi contendete questo
stagno inutile assurdo al quale non potrete nemmeno dissetarvi. L'acqua
è troppe avvelenata di luna. Io sola regno qui. Questo
lago non è né Austriaco né italiano. È
mio. È un lago della Luna! Via addormentatevi e deponete
il fucile e dormite.
--Taci, gridò una sentinella italiana, o luna tu sei Austriaca. Taci o ti centro col mio fucile!
--No no gli mormorò un altra sentinella italiana. La luna è
italiana. Non la senti eantare una eanzone di Napoli canta
come si canta al mio paese! La luna è italiana Questa luna
è italiana.
È per questo che io la butterò giù con un colpo
di fucile. Lascia fare a me. Sono tiratore scelto futurista! E fu
così che La luna tramontò sul lago di Doberdò al
crepitare d'una fucileria della fucileria.
[6. Febbraio 1918]
<> {pur volendolo scansare.
Cadde nell'acqua gelata. Io staccai lo zaino e me lo caricai sulle spalle. Svincolai il cadavere dell'ardito dalle pietre e lo spinsi nella corrente che lo porterà al mare.
Poi avanti. Mentre camminavo fra i splendori furenti inquieti dei reflettori sulla riva austriaca sentii piangere vicino a me su di me in me. Piangeva il corpo delizioso e il pianto colava sulla mia schiena bruciante lento. lento.
[7.] 23 Marzo 1918
Sole smargiasso.
Smargiassate del sole al tramonto.
Le ultime smargiassate del sole--dice la luna sprezzante.
Un assalto di odori incalzanti.
La Luce incalzante.
Il sole spaccia le sue monete false.
Il fiume pigro e satollo di cadaveri mareggia al sole come un serpente
pasciuto.
Sole demagogo. Sole tribuno. Il sole scamiciato sbraitava sulle colline
eleganti. Sole aristocratico. Sole dittatore.
Sole disertore si dava alla macchia.
Il sole cinematografo progettò la sua film d'oro vibrante e
pulverulento.
I torbidi intrighi delle acque nere. Il mare sopraffatto dalle tenebre.
[8.] 5 Aprile 1918
per "5 Anime in una bomba"
Si dorme ben profondamente dopo avere cazzottato dei musi di canaglie basse e perfide.
5a Anima: Tutti mi deridono perchè mi chiamo boooontaa! Amo i cani e le creature dolci le donne piccoline.
Mussalini in mezzo a un centinaio di repubblicani e rivoluzionari. Io in mezzo a una cinquantina di futuristi. Scambio di occhiate fraterne solidali.
Incomincia a parlare. Scrosciare della fontana di Trevi. 2 vetture pronte.
Settimelli e Bruno Corra sono vicino a me. Grido: abbasso l'Austria!
Subito 20 mani di poliziotti. Bruno e Settimelli a bastonate mi difendono tentano di impedire l'arresto. Ma sono sollevato di peso messo in carrozza e via fra un ciclone di bastoni e di pugni. vengo a sapere dal delegato che Mussolini è in un'altra carrozza pure arrestato dietro la mia.
[9.] 1 Agosto 1918
Gioia o dolore a volontà
Manipoliamo il chiaro di luna
uno degli Amori Futuristi
programmi di vita (o di divertimento) con varianti a scelta
Diventa assistente di Bossi. Poi va in provincia Pisa Pistoia Gubbio Perugia città morte o semimorte e snida una signorina pallidissima nostalgica malata d'indecisione sentimentale e di letteratura passatista. Domanda rispettosamente la Sua mano. Poi innamorala con tutti i vecchi veleni epistolari decadenti D'Annunziani. Quando è presa precipita su lei delle rivelazioni mostruose su la tua infedeltà di uomo orgiastico. La sua anima si sfascia. Il corpo fragile si ammala. Nevrastenia Suicidomania. Persuadi i parenti e conduci tu stesso la tua fidanzata nella clinica del prof. Bossi a Genova in riva al mare chiaro ricco di meriggi cubici d'oro rovente e di sole torrido.
Nella sala delle operazioni bianchissima (odore di cloroformio) è coricata bianca nel letto bianco.
Tu parla della necessità per lei di dimenticarti e di amare un
giovane pallido neutralista malato senza forza eso riformato
per enterocolite e malattia di fegato, ma rispettoso platonico pieno di
tristezze eleganti.
Dal basso ventre della tua fidanzata vedrai sorger una fosforescenza verdastra che poco a poco diventerà un raggio lunare. (Fuori notte nuvolosa pesante di pece, caldaia marina di pece.) Il raggio colpisce la gelosia della finestra. Buco aperto da quello [?] cannello ossidrico. Fuori si slancia il raggio e allaga la notte e il mare d'un meraviglioso chiaro di luna tristissimo.
Dialogo sotto gl'alberi lunari della tua fidanzata e dell'ideale:
-- Essere tua Siii Ma questo non può avvenire! Mai! Mai le nostre labbra si uniranno!
-- Comprendo la tua anima! Pero Non posso giungere all'orlo
terribile della verità. Non saprai mai il segreto della mia
rinuncia.
Entra il Dottor Bossi.  Qui deve essere rimasto un canestro di pesci putrefatti!
[10.] 7 Agosto 1918
Continuazione di
Gioia o dolore a volantà
(amori futuristi)
Si cerca sotto i letti.
-- Non ci sono canestri di fe pesce qui dentro!
-- Allora è semplicissimo. Si tratta di utero accartocciato con saccoccia carica di pus mestruale! Sapete quale è l'operazione.
Allora (uscito Bossi) tu parlerai alla tua fidanzata della necessità di fare la canzonettista e premerai intanto nella piega del'utero con lieve massaggio. Rimetterai a posto l'orlo. Laverai l'utero e toglierai tutto il pus.
Poi andrai fuori in giardino e ti coricherai nell'erba a 100 metri dalla finestra della sala di operazioni. Dopo 10 minuti ecco un raggio bianchissimo elettrico sfreccerà dalla gelosia forata e riempirà il giardino notturno che illuminatissimo rivelerà tutte le sue poltrone rosse piene di spalle nude con perle e irte di asprì vertiginosamente luminosi e di occhiate nere diamanti neri frenesia di fiumi di gioielli.
Ti volterai alzandoti e vedrai nel cerchio radioso dell del
riflettore elettrico il palcoscenico splendere con in mezzo Petrolini
agile saltellante in frack nero sparato bianchissimo (di neve alpina
sotto i riflettori nemici...). Colla bocca cogli occhi Petrolini imita
le smorfie le risate la fame la sete le ironie le grazie e le preghiere
della vulva femminile.
Fregoli intanto (vicino a Petrolini) imiterà tutte le facce
delle mamme dei padri dei fidanzati intorno, di orrore di desiderio di
rimprovero di esaltazione al vedere la ia immacolata così
manifestarsi pubblicamente colla faccia illeg alfin rivelata che
teneva celata sotto le gonne.
Il palcoscenico ha le ruote dietro romban[ti] 20 motori di 200 cavalli l'uno. Corre si slancia traversa le pianure sale le montagne beccheggia in un fiume (sembra una dalabieh sul Nilo trascinata da innumerevoli vieux marcheurs viveurs frack (curvi sotto la gomena, [?] sulle due rive tirano il palcoscenico che fa sbrrruffare rrruttare i suoi motori veloci sull'acqua come eliche) con corde di raggi elettrici.
Via via via. Il palcoscenico colla tua fidanzata che danza il cake wake benissimo poi comincia una meravigliosa danza del ventre dove l'utero diventa spirale vortice di luce calore profumi. Il palcoscenico (come un carro d'assalto) dà l'assalto a un convento pieno di vecchie dame inglesi su una montagna della Scozia. Leggono la Bibbia tu prendi la bibbia monti sul palcoscenico e spieghi come Noè [?] infilzò 80enne le sue vergini ie.
[11. ottobre 1918]
La Ritirata delle 5 blindate del tenente Raby
Ero a Maiano con 5 blindate. Le altre erano a Torino servizio di
publica sicurezza a Torino col Capitano.
(25-26 notte Ottobre 1917)
mi portano via il Telefono dall'ufficio (3 soldati del genio a mia disposizione) che mi collegava alla 16 divisione.
Sento che bombardano verso Gorizia. Ore 2 vado Comando 16 Divisione Purgessimo. Passo da Premariacco. Ingombro carreggi. Al parco automobilistico conosco la notizia tragica della ritirata e sfondamento a Caporetto. Cadono 2 granatoni. Fumate su Cividale incendi. Mi dicono che a Cividale ci sono le prime pattuglie austriache. Cerco la 16 Divisione a Remanzacco. Non sanno nulla. Mangio e vado a Udine. Comincia lo sgombero in una ridda di notizie gravissime.
Vado a Trigesimo:
-- Dove è la 16a Divisione?
-- Lei di che armata è
-- della 3a
-- Questa è la 2a non sappiamo nulla!
(27 Ottobre 1917)
Trovo a Trigesimo la 16a. Il sotto capo stato maggiore mi dice:
-- cosa viene a fare qui?
-- Sto cercando il posto per la vettura del generale! Non ho tempo
da perdere!
Trovo il generale Ponzio mi dice:
-- Bravo! Se tutti gli ufficiali fossero come lei! Bene! Ho perso tutte
le mie mitragliatrici. ho bisogno di lei!
Ponzio mi descrive lo schieramento delle nostre truppe in ritirata Gorizia (armata Zona di Gorizia). Lucinico. Rubrio. Trigesimo. Artegno. Gemona. La Carnia è tutta già perduta!
-- Si trovi domani a Casacco. Si ricordi però di passare sotto Udine poichè la strada Trigesimo-Udine è cannoneggiata. La difesa era sul Torre.
Passo per Udine la notte del 28. Piove dirottamente. Disordine panico. Feriti e malati sgombrati in furia. Barelle. Feriti. Grida di terrore. Carri. Ambulanze. Ronzare di aeroplani che spiccano il volo nel buio. Parchi di buoi. Buoi vacche carri. Cannoni rovesciati. Incendi. Incendii. Rossori vasti nella notte su le reti impazzite accanite della pioggia che si rovescia in lagrime sulla campagna col terrore. {xxx} Casacco. Artegna.
Sono accolto da fucilate che vengono dal monte Stella. Incontro 12 alpini:
-- Siamo--dicono--i superstiti d'un battaglione! Gli austriaci sono sul
monte Stella!
Incontro un maggiore con 2 pezzi da montagna:
-- mi ritiro. Finite le munizioni Ho sparato fino ad ora.
Passo nella vampa e nell'alito infuocato enorme bruciante della
Filanda di Artegna in fiamme (notte del 29)(all'alba del 29) a
Buia. Avilla. Maiano. Deveacco. Farla.
(nella mattina del 29)
La 16 Divisione colla 34 Divisione forma il corpo speciale Di Giorgio
che deve form tenere la testa di ponte di Pinzano con schieramento
nel fiume Ledra.
Avevo 5 macchine ma da Udine a Buia per ho perduto 3 macchine. Sono
con 2 macchine e avanposti di Cavalleria (Regg. Umberto) a fare una
crociera da Buia a Avilla e da Avilla a Buia. Fucilate colle pattuglie
austriache. Piove dirottamente.
(Notte del 29 Ottobre)
San Tommaso. Comando 16 Divisione. Ricevono un ordine dal Comando di Brigata Siracusa che dice Maiano già occupato dagl'Austriaci. Maiano è a 2 chilometri da S. Tommaso Panico al Comando. Si pensa a ritirarsi.
-- Se vuole--dice Raby al generale--vado a vedere.
Piove. Buio. Carri abbandonati sulla strada. Faccio un giro per strade
di campagna. Case vuote. Credo essere in un paese vicino a Maiano. Trovo
un contadino:
-- Che paese è questo?
-- Maiano.
Visito le case. Vado agli sbocchi delle strade di Peri e di Tonzolano. nessuno. Fucilate lontane. Torno a S. Tommaso per riferire.
(Alba del 30 Ottobre)
La 16a Divisione si ripiega sul Ledra. Rimango indietro con 2 macchine e 1 battaglione alpini.
A Buia sulle colline 6 cavalieri austriaci contro il cielo sagome nere. Una mia raffica di mitragliatrice. Scompaiono. Erano a 300 metri.
Si Sta minando i ponti sul Ledra.
A mezzagiorno rientro nelle nostre linee.
Sono di riserva di divisione.
Al Crepuscolo un attacco di austriaci che vengono da Udine.
Una voce insistente (d'origine austriaca): La 3a Armata è
già a Trieste e ha fatto 60.000 prigionieri!!! Passano soldati
che dicono:
-- Questa è la via di Trieste!
e buttano via il fucile!
(Ore 11 del 30 Ottobre)
con macchina vado a Maiano. Sono accompagnato da un battaglione del 246 fanteria. Capitano energico potente audace. Maiano occupato da Austriaci. 6 mitragliatrici 3 sulla strada in riga puntate stupidamente scoperte. Vengo a sapere che nella notte un nostro battaglione occupò Maiano ma fu cacciato all'alba dagl'austriaci. Ora tengono Maiano con 6 mitragliatrici su biciclette.
Colla mia mitragliatrice di culo a 50 metri di distanza io punto le 3 mitragliatrici allo scoperto sulla strada. Sono a uno svolto. Un raffica è la mitragliatric e austriaca al centro è rovesciata. Vedo sollevarsi il mitragliere che era coricato dietro pancia a terra e tentare di alzarsi. Ha nel petto e nel ventre un buco enorme squarciato di 30 centimetri di diametro che schizza sangue a fiotti a rivoli a destra a sinistra inondando la strada piena d'acqua che si arrossa tutta. Le tre mitragliatrici sono spaccate rovesciate gli altri mitraglieri fuggono nelle case vicino fra le biciclette che avevano messe sotto i portici. Il mitragliere morto impigliato sanguinosamente nel suo trepiede è schiacciato dalla mia blindata che passa sopra. Porto via nella mia blindata 2 trepiedi. Sono alti un palmo fissi. Il mitragliere tira pancia a terra. Ho le gomme sfasciate. Fragore di fucileria. Inseguimento nelle case. Il mio sergente automobilista insegue un mitragliere austriaco e lo pugnala contro la porta chiusa d'una casa.
Le altre 3 mitragliere che ci bersagliavano nascoste nel granoturco sulla destra tacciono. Il capitano del battaglione di fanteria è colpito al petto e cade morto. Il battaglione si sgretola ritirandosi. Ripiego. Ho 2 delle mie Maxim fuori uso. Il manicotto bucato dalle pallottole fa acqua. Torno a S. Tommaso.
La 16 Divisione è già parita. Mi tirano addosso dalla chiesa che si trova in posizione alta. Mando l'altra mia macchina sulla quota 193 fuori del paese per tirare all'altezza della chiesa. Cadono intorno delle granate da 75 srrrrrrrrr e s'interrano senza esplodere.
Raggiungo l'altra macchina comandata dal Tenente Failli.
Le due mie macchine ripiegano da Farla a
S. Daniele. Pattuglie. Fucilate. So che S. Tommaso è occupato
dagli austriaci. Incontro un capitano della 1a batt. del 8
Fortezza che ha perduto i pezzi e riconduce uomini disarmati. a Villa
Farlate. delle scariche di mitragliatrici mi mettono fuori uso
le mie 2 ancora {xxx} sparanti di Failli.
A S. Daniele del Friuli che è scaglionata su uno collina. Io mi trovo al basso nella strada che sale serpeggiando. In alto del paese nelle case vi sono le nostre compagnie mitragliatrici. Sgombro la strada dai carri rovesciati poi vado su a piedi. Ricevo ordini dalla Brigata Rovigo di inutilizzare i motori e di resistere colle mitragliatrici ancora in buono stato. Ad ogni costo. Il comando di brigata mi manda 2 casse di cartucce.
Nell'androne d'una casa di campagna io trovo un carro. Avvito sul carro la macchinetta per caricare i nastri e aiutato da una vecchia profuga carico i nastri coi miei uomini. Intanto a mazzati i miei automobilisti piangenti spaccano i motori. Prepara le cartucce di polvere da mina per potere incendiare i serbatoi di benzina.
[...]
[12. 18 Ottobre 1918]
Le Teorie della Primavera
La Primavera coi suoi fiumi squarcianti e travolgenti
di guerra-rivoluzione per i nuovi fiori ideali che cercano il cielo.
-- La codificazione della Primavera
-- Le Leggi della Primavera
Rivisione di tutte le leggi. Perché sono state condannate?  Si! La conflagrazione l'ha dimostrato abondantemente.
4 L'umanità deve essere sanguinaria? Si! La conflagrazione lo ha dimostrato.
5) L'umanità deve essere omosessuale? No! La conflagrazione avendo dimostrato la necessità di distruzione abbondante di vite umane, tutto ciò che contraria la riproduzione della specie deve essere combattuto. Per svalutare la donna (lussuria sentimentalismo fedeltà) può essere una utile esperienza l'omosessualità.
[13. fine 1918]
[...]
Sogni di Beny
1°) Musica di Edgar Poe tutta a strappi violenti eseguita da tre tram sulle corde musicali tese (di pianoforte-città) dei binari. E dal groviglio tumultuoso delle note convulse e tragiche si liberava disegnandosi una ra ideale.
[...]
[fine 1918]
1 È dovere di Marinetto pensare ogni mattina e ogni sera a Beny.
2° Deve essere suo piacere servirla ogni giorno.
3° Deve desiderare di vederla al più presto.
4° Deve sognare di abbracciarla.
5° Deve avere solo gioia nell'amore amare Beny sempre di più.
Beny adora Marinetto con tutta la sua anima. così sia.
[14. fine 1918]
Nel Dolina del Carso o nel Usignolo di Plava dare la mia
fame a Plava (in barella ferito) accanto alla gamba d'un Alpino, mentre
un ex cameriere del Savini (dove avevo vissuto tanto) mi offre la sua
simpatia brodo squisit ecc. Mangio pensando alle strade misteriose delle
Forze e delle coincidenze. Dare inoltre la mia preoccupazione alla
dolina Parello una mattina nel dichiararmi che i tre fanti morti nel
camminamento erano stati accartocciati dalla morte. Io pensavo che
morto se fossi morto come loro avrebbero scritto bene se mi
avessero definito accartocciato nel camminamento.
[15. fra il 25 Marzo e il 5 Aprile 1919]
Suicidio a percussione
Una ragazza abbandonata dal suo amante apre la finestra e lo chiama disperatamente. L'amante già in strada alza la testa e vede che la ragazza singhiozzando e gridando scavalca il davanzale, apre le braccia e riceve il corpo piombante della suicida sul petto. Cade sotto di lei e si rompe una gamba! Si sposarono naturalmente cementati da quel suicidio dinamico.
[16. fine 1919]
< >pessima che mi ha fatto D'Annunzio che sorrideva con smorfie da puttana cretina dei saluti dei soldati: "Tutti mi riconoscevano e mi salutavano!" Strana miscela di eroismo e di genialità e di meschine vanità pederastiche in questo uomo superiore forte tenace patriota misticamente disinteressato e anche vanitoso fino a rovinare forse l'Italia per l'orgoglio di essere o parere il capo della rivoluzione. Era ieri in fondo una specie di reazionario tradizionale, oggi è indisciplinato e pronto a tutte le violenze. Vuole capeggiare tutto e tutti. S'illude molto.
Mi sento migliore di lui, disinteressato più sicuro e disinvolto tra i successi possibili e le ambi < >
[17. Dicembre 1919]
Conoscenza delle Forze
1°) Dosare delle grandi audacie con delle minuziose prudenze. Alternare lo slancio grandioso cieco colla cura religiosa delle prudenze particolari.
2°) L'uso degli amuleti deve essere talvolta un omaggio o una genuflessione alle Forze irritate o impazzite.
3°) Vi sono esseri mezzo calibro mezza tinta che non interessano le forze. Vivono nell'ombra dei contorni non sono mai presi nel movimento ciclonico delle Forze. Altri invece sono sempre nel centro del varco o della strada. Questi devono sapere scegliere o il movimento tipico in cui è loro possibile di deviare la corrente che li porta per poi dirigerla col peso accresciuto dall'entusiasmo delle Forze stesse. Altrimenti devono abbandonarsi alla corrente, trasformandosi da zattere opache in galleggianti luminosi perché le Froze stesse vadano più rapidamente verso una nuova armonia.
4°) I maghi dicono: Volete avere una cosa? Dite ad alta voce: la posseggo. A voce alta, naturalmente. Questo è vero per gli esseri mezza tinta che non hanno ne possono avere grande influenza.
5°) Un mago disse che io sono a crowd una folla. Dico a Beny che è una crowd of beauties.
6°) Dire ad alta voce certe cose è molto grave. Poichè
le Forze ascoltano la voce e la rigettano talvolta assolutamente. Ripetere
ad alta voce certe cose idee le rinforza e le concretizza.
7°) Gli esseri sono {xxx} aperti come portici o tettoie o casamenti senza finestre e senza porte. Questi sono invadibili da una altra anima o da molte altre anime. Altri sono chiusi e non sono da invadere. Altri sono apertissimi ma la personalità interna è talmente massiccia attiva e potente, che le anime che la penetrano non possono resistere al dinamissimo interno e finiscono per uscirne subito < >
[18. circa 31 Marzo 1920]
La volontà trasforma anatomicamente il corpo aumenta la capacità dello stomaco che può contenere tanto liquido. La volontà vieta al corpo di trasmettere al cervello l'ebrietà dell'alcool. Non mi ubbriaccai che quando mollai la volontà. Io tenni la volontà come un custode dell'ordine finchè volli. Poi mollai la volontà. Questa mollò il corpo. Subito capogiro e vomito assoluto.
[19. Agosto-Settembre 1920]
Il fascino del Crepuscolo sul mare
Il fascino della sera sul mare
(valutazione parolibera)
Si stendono i nervi visivi. Frescura spalmata sulle gote.
Somma di tutte le carezze olfatiche acustiche tattili attenuazioni
morbidezze sericità sfumature. Lentezza della brezza tiepida
che va rinfrescandosi. Tinte soavi madreperlacee lilla rosa verde
turchese ritmo illanguidito delle molle del mare altalene infantili
delicatissime delle piccole onde smorfie gentili dei riflessi sforzo
espre tutti i riflessi rosa lilla viola azzurri verdi del mare
si sforzano di fondersi colle tinte semispente del cielo (per formare
una immensa conchiglia di frescura azzurrolilla. Le barche più
leggere si sforzano di sollevarsi in equilibrio, per non pesare sulle
onde. I remi si tuffano delicatamente per non stracciare la re seta del
mare. Si staccano con grazia per non arruffare gli orli delle ferite delle
onde. Metallicità ondulata agilissima delle acque che risuoneranno
e canteranno certamente di dolcezza. Vellutamento e tarnitura soave d'un
pigiama blu e d'una cuffia cremisi in quella barca bianca. Ogni barca
è una bilancia che pesa la donna a prua colla misura d'un uomo
a poppa.
barche: fruttiere di donne cadenzate dalla musica azzurra delle onde
fresche pallide di piacere nel alto mare frescazzurro ecco i remi neri
di quella barca si tuffano poi si rialzano di scatto con delicatezza e
precisione per non sciupare le belle set sete preziose del mare.
sssssssssss gggggg l'onda addolcisce i suoi rumori languori perfezionandosi prima di diventare un suono bevuto dall'orecchio estatico come un occhio bocca cuore intenerito.
La spiaggia si addormenta, spegne i suoi scintillii lampeggii di ribalta teatrale, chiude le sue palpebre di sabbia sotto le frange di schiuma bianca morbida lenta sempre più morbida lenta.
Lo splendore e la follia del meriggio sul mare
(valutazione parolibera)
Al sommo palcoscenico dell'alto mare calmo una danza di onde ballerine farfalle argentee frenetiche. Barca tipografica
per cartelloni reclame sgargianti, con sopra una piccola rotativa di rematore a stantuffi che stampa stampa stampa senza fine fiori d'oro vermigli e d'oro sui rulli di carta azzurra del mare.
[20. Agosto-Settembre 1920]
Contro il ricordo nostalgia negazione del nuovo sforzo gioioso nostalgia.
Contro il documento storico freno pazienza che esaspera la fortuna e la mette in fuga
il Futurismo è la formula d'igiene mentale ottimistica. Proiezione fiduciosa appassionata dell'io in azione conquista plasmazione del domani.
[21. senza data]
Il Futurismo è la religione del nuovo.
Rendere sicura inevitabile la creazione del Nuovo a forza di Fede nel Nuovo. L'amore del nuovo, tanto intenso da suscitare prodigio samente il nuovo.
Rumorismo di Baci:
-- mmzzz
-- mbdc
-- mpsc
-- mpds
-- mmps
Un Dramma normale quasi realistico con personaggi-Forze che parlano con verbalizzazioni astratte. Questi 3 o
4 personaggi-Forze vestiti di colore unico:
-- Il rosso--Il nero--Il verde--Il giallo.
[22. senza data]
< >
2°) Un tentativo di guarigione futurista
Lettera mia alla S.ra Enif Robert e Sua Risposta.
3°) Non parlare mai d'Impossibilità. Dichiarare che tutto il desiderato e tutto il voluto è possibile. Non dire mai "io sono sfortunato. Io non potrò mai."
4°) Conservare il silenzio nelle cose relativamente facili e che si prepara con cura. Volerle ferocemente senza dire che riusciranno. Non dire mai è sicuro! anche quando l'esito favorevole sembra sicuro. Dire è sicuro, equivale a considerarsi padrone delle forze favorevoli. Queste desiderano sentirsi libere di non favorire anche quando hanno deciso di favorire.
Sono gentili ma burbere e irritabilissime con i forti. Bisogna dire speriamo. Forse! Se sentono dire È sicuro. Sono sicuro. possono brutalmente abbandonarvi senza ragione.
5°) Forza creatrice della parola Si può creare in noi una passione un amore terribile e pernicioso a forza di dire stupidamente "sono innamorato sono preso di quella donna. Non posso vivere senza di lei." Esempio: Carmissati [?] la sua modella chiavata già da altri e da lui che poteva restare la sua modella amante. Egli si sentì Tristano e vide in lei Isotta e attraverso la musica di Wagner alla Scala creò artificialmente il dramma suo d'amore la separazione lacerante. Intervennero i fratelli di lei compresero e ritirarono la ragazza al pittore favorirono la tragedia musicale coi suoi crescendi di violini--angoscia--sangue sperma che sale scende sale sale verso lo spasimo d'una piena orchestrale. Non c'è che lei. Sposarla! Mia! Mia! Ma era già sua! Fu necessario il matrimonio per rendere più Wagnerianamente romantico un amore che era romantico naturalmente perché libero. Sovvrapposizione letteraria. Perfezionamento artificioso d'un amore mediante l'elemento istintivo fisiologico della musica.
Si crea uno stato d'animo politico di guerra o di rivoluzione coll'insistenza d'un grido d'un Abbasso l'Austria o Morte a Giolitti. Bisogna prendere il Cucco. Ho il monte Cucco in tasca (parola di Cappello alla vigilia dell'azione di maggio 1917) Più una {xxx} rivoluzione collettiva è difficile più bisogna ripetere con insistenza e con fede ferrea cristallina adamantina la volontà di realizzarla. Non bisogna dire La guerra contro l'Austria è sicura. Bisogna dire Abbasso l'Austria con fede forza e ottimismo adamantino. Bisogna dire voglio devo prendere quella donna. Non dite: l'avrò sicuramente.
Il grido di Abbasso l'Austria pronunciato con forza e fede proprio quando era e sembrava meno probabile il nostro intervento era un trapano di diamante nella campana di cristallo del neutralismo tedescofilo clerico moderato conservatore quietista. Era una forza di qualità assolutamente opposta all'altra e perciò perforante.
6°) La luce elettrica ha ucciso il crepuscolo (indecisione
nostalgia sfumature del pessimismo, agonia della forza solare che
l'uomo tende ad imitare--dolore del sole che cede alle tenebre. Noi
non vediamo più i prati che trascolorano e muoiono coi rantoli
delle campane. La luce elettrica continua il pieno giorno artif
naturale con un pieno giorno artificiale.
7°) La velocità ha ucciso eliminato l'analisi visiva delle campagne l'analisi psicologica della vita interna antimuscolare. La velocità he creato la sintesi [?] d'una vita a blocchi scagliati volitivamente e sottratta allo scetticismo minuzioso. Il pessimismo è minuzie dettaglio analisi. L'ottimismo è sintesi. Perciò la velocità è ottimismo perché la velocità riassume e sintetizza la vita. La velocità uccide il ricordo il ripiegamento il rimorso. La velocità aggredisce non subisce, è quasi sempre padrona della vita e delle forze. La lentezza subisce ed è sempre schiava della vita e delle forze.
8°) Distruggere i fronzoli della propria vita. Semplificare
ogni cosa per poter dominare un maggior numero di cose. Bisogna
avere un centinaio di cose semplificate e rudizzate nella propria
vita. Non Bisogna mai avere una cosa legata ornata da mille fronzoli
inutili. Distruggere tutti i trucchi le maschere i belletti i nastri delle
cose importanti. Ridurre ogni cosa importante alla sua nudità
forte. Così si può avere molte cose importanti dominarle
e farne una sintesi complessa diretta tutta al suo perfezionamento e
splendore. I fronzoli ci vietano di vedere la direzione fi della
sua forza. Le cose importanti una volta denudate liberate dai fronzoli
ci rivelano la loro forza e la loro direzione. Cosi si determina le due
o tre direzioni delle 20 o trent 30 forze-cose-importanti e la
vita converge al suo vero scopo.
9°) Stabilire un ponte coll'ottimismo artificiale (costruito di elementi qualsiasi anche fragili o logorati) tra un avvenimento buono e un altro avvenimento buono, scavalcando il vallone dell'avvenimento cattivo. Questo è basato sulla legge ormai indiscussa della fortuna e sfortuna in altalena. Dopo il bene il male dopo il favorevole lo sfavorevole. Montagna russa di avvenimenti. Creare un ponte dal buono al buono sopra il cattivo.
10°) Tenere su ad ogni costo artificialmente le situazioni quando si possono avere dei contratt sostegni a destra e a
sinistra e quando l'ambiente esige che la situazione pericolante, inclusa
in tutta la rete delle altre situazioni, stia su. La Contessa D'Orsay fa
le marchette di 500 lire per conservare il suo rango--dice la Contessa
Robilant di Firenze. Ha ragione. È dell'ottimismo artificiale
quello della D'Orsay molto giusto e utile a tutto l'ambiente che esige e
vuole la Contessa d'Orsay su e non giù. Le marchette le servono
a non decadere in un piccolo impieguccio miserabile che non può
essere onorevole poichè segna una caduta e perchè deprime
la persona non adatta.
11°) Coltivare educare in noi tutti la vanità rendendola però gradevole e non aggressiva. Darsi così
dei numerosi compiti e numerose cime da conquistare. Così
avviene che le mond montagne russe della fortuna e sfortuna
fanno corrispondere una fortuna in politica a una sfortuna in amore o
viceversa. Così avviene che non si è sopraffatti dalla
sfortuna. Non rinunciare a nessuna nostra possibilità. Togliere
i fronzoli agl'obbiettivi da raggiungere. Ma averne molti.
12°) Una volta decisa una data offensiva nella vita impiegarci il massimo delle proprie forze e usare un attacco violento senza indecisioni non preoccupandosi delle perdite e della fatica. Dopo avere preso tutte le precauzioni attaccare risolutamente e disperatamente.
13°) Durante le tregue della vita. Nei bivi. Nei pantani nei
laghi nelle soste quando scende à poco a poco la caligine delle
indecisioni. Quando la situazione si aggrava diventa ambigua piena di
freni di divieti di maschere di mezzi termini. Quando tutto dice se
non ci fosse il tale di mezzo. Se non temessi di svelare tutto al
marito con un mio atto voluto contro l'amante civetta e perfida, io la
schiaffeggerei e cazzotterei il suo flirt. Quando si è tutte
le logiche consigliano l'immobilità bisogna invece spaccare
tutto il viluppo colla violenza irruente e l'attacco deciso. (Rimini Gabriella ecc. Giardini pubblici di Milano.) Le
forze sono come gli uomini si addormentano quando si credono al
sicuro. Le forze sfavorevoli si addormentano quando sembra assurdo
che voi le attacchiate. Precisamente per questo Bisogna scegliere i
momenti di massimo imbroglio groviglio pantano indeciso per attaccarle
e sfondarle. A Plava tutte le logiche consigliavano di non attaccare
frontalmente il Cucco. Indecisione sfiducia troppo tempo passato sotto
gli Austriaci aggrappati alle loro scarpe. Non soltanto gli Austriaci
ma le forze soprafisiche del Cucco erano re in disordine e
sfasciate quando Cappello decise precisamente di dare il gran colpo
frontale sul Cucco giudicato imprendibile da tutti sempre e specialmente
dopo 2 anni di sosta sotto. Quando ci si trova in questo stato con una
donna che si vuole sedurre. Lunga sosta dopo attacchi infruttuosi poco
importanti. Marasma. Scetticismo. Inutile attaccarla e certamente
ora assurdo attaccarla. Ecco invece il momento. Ma bisogna violenza
decisione feroce. A fondo.
14°) Stare vicino sempre agl'uomini forti. Essi vi danno
volontariam[ente] o vi e lasciano prendere sempre una parte
delle del loro forze utili. Essi arricchiscono tutti coloro che
li avvicinano. Se i forti vi prendono un po' di forza (cio che è
raro) non è male. poichè essi non perdono quella forza la
utilizzano e la vostra forza utilizzata da loro ne crea delle altre che
sono à vostra disposizione. Vi è dunque sempre guadagno per
voi nel vivere vicino ai forti. I deboli i deprimenti oltre che
deprimere sconfortare anemizzare le vostre forze e scoraggiarle pompano le
vostre forze talvolta colla volontà di utilizzarle. ma non riescono
a utilizzarle e le disperdono le lasciano agonizzare. Ciò dà
il contagio della diserzione alle vostre altre forze. Talvolta pompano le
vostre forze coll'intenzione subdola di non utilizzarle e di perderle. Il
tradimento scoraggia e svaluta le vostre buone Forze. Ciò che
vi portano via è irrimediabilmente perduto e dannoso. Le persone
deprimenti deboli (come Ada Negri) dicono: Non fatemi ridere perché
non voglio poi un giorno piangere nel ripensare queste ore allegre!!!
15°) Usare sempre il controveleno dell' allegria contro
tutti i dolori e contro tutte le disgrazie. Quando si perde
una persona cara e siete si è assaliti da un dolore
massacrante bisogna usare il controveleno sicuro dell' oscenità
rallegratrice. La madre della mia amica Enif, donna forte energica alta
potente 60 anni di volontà e di personalità spiccata. Adora
il gioco del lotto al punto di rovinarsi con un giuoco settimanale
fortissimo...Ma non apre le buste che gli le manda il botteghino
del lotto. È abbonata al gioco. Credo lo faccia per mantenere
in sé la speranza-quasi-sicurezza di vincere. da un momento