Places and Persons

...The ear-drum is a snobbish, aristocratic appendage, anyway...

...For here be lovers the very fibres of whose lust is coarsened...

...Even monads will shake to a sufficient earthquake...

...and if it hasn't, its whole body quivers and answers every purpose...

...Nor was this a joyful noise unto the Lord...

...Not everything has it...

...Collectors of jade love to handle their treasures for the voluptuous pleasure of their cultivated finger-tips...

...But why should the modernist wish to deify it, to halt short of the other and later four, to reduce us all to the Braille system, as if blindness were a consummation devoutly to be wished...

...But why, to take up the second why in its turn—why then this futuristic scorn for velvet and softness...

...Thinking would be stopped...

...It goes...

...And as love may lead us beside the still waters and make our cup run over with fulness of normal life, so something which is not love may lead us into the shadows of the valley of spiritual death...

...He that regardeth the clouds—or the clock—shall not prosper...

...The treasures deposited along its shores he saw only as filth...

...We were not to hide our drumsticks under a bushel...

...The sense of smell is frankly provocative...

...And what would be left...

...Long before Marinetti, it had been discovered that in the evolution of orchestral instruments the law at work was the survival of the loudest...

...Tactilism is nothing but the worship of the sense of touch, the most ancient, the most primitive, the most universal of all the body's five wits...

...Our philosophical Barnum perceived that by merely multiplying the rings all this seeing and hearing could be stopped...

...They do not seem to realize that this damage, as they call it, is exactly what is being sought...

...So he made a hit—or should I say a touch...

...But what did he offer in its place...

...It was not mortification but enjoyment of which Marinetti was in search...

...He was the advocate of sandpaper, of heat, cold, wetness, dryness...

...The poet of the Rendezvous with Death spoke of touching fur as one of the delights which it was difficult to forego, a prospective loss which helped to make death itself more bitter than it otherwise was...

...Nothing save the inarticulate...

...They do not have his inner honesty—what, as I have hinted, may have been but his waggishness which hid, mayhap, a perfectly good fellow beneath a playful mask of reductio ad absurdums...

...And touch—ah...

...Everybody knows how completely noise has become the hero of the day...

...Why, tactilism, of course...

...Places and Persons THE PRESENT OF FUTURISM By HARVEY WICKHAM I DO not know whether this is the anniversary, subcentenary, or anything of the sort, of the birth, death or triumph of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti...

...Why hate the concord of sweet sounds, and despise sweet bells unless they be carefully jangled out of tune...

...So Marinetti bade us make a noise, and he set the example— whether it was a noise like Dada, or a chromatic noise like the cubists, or the super-accoustical noises of surrealism, was not the point...

...Yes, he did laugh at humbug...

...Marinetti sought to stun, not in metaphor but with a black-jack...

...Speaking broadly, it is not proletarian nor according to Marx...

...The old music was never more than a single-ringed circus...

...It has even found its way into Sisley Huddleston's Europe in Zigzags, in the Italian Section under Futurism...

...Marinetti, of course, is no longer futurism...

...Of course this was not new...

...And why should he at the same time scoff at those softer touches in which poets long have reveled...

...One of the penalties of being always up to date is that one is then always behind the times...

...The first why is answered by saying that the other senses lead gradually to the appreciation of things so little sensual that the mind alone finds much use for them...

...But everything has nerves of a sort...

...Perhaps not...

...Yet sometimes—as a reaction from excessive charity, perhaps—I fear the worst...

...His parlor disciples do not follow him thus far...

...They may be stirred only by the harsh, the brutal, the monstrous...

...When the plot comes off, however, there is an explosion, a row, a deafening clamor...

...He sought to leave it in the stage of colliding trolley cars, filing saws, steam riveters, boiler factories, and a host of other instruments of music which quiet old King Nebuchadnezzar knew not of...

...We come at last to the secret of Marinetti's popularity...

...For before he was the apostle of futurism, before that tactilism which was his most ingenious contribution to the pre-Joyce world, Marinetti was the apostle of noise...

...If we live for time as well as in it, refusing to lay hold of that eternal verity over which it sweeps, we shall learn that time's revenges are not only malicious but whimsical...

...Or it may be that Marinetti was only the prince of wags...

...If only all kinds of noise could be brought together at once— and what is to hinder?—the danger of those rests, those chasms of eternity and silence which yawn even in the most vociferous scores of Wagner and Strauss, not only between beats and between parts, but in all those unawakened vibrations between the tones of even the chromatic scale, could be avoided...

...I said that he did not date...

...Even time, whose praises he so loudly extolled, he could not bear when past...

...Tasting, however, is hardly an intellectual pleasure, notwithstanding the vast amount of intelligence required of a good cook...

...There was certainly something waggish in the way he once dominated the cafes of Paris, overwhelming all other wisecrackers by the racket of his table-beating fists and incredible Italian lung-power...

...Is not music then the food of love ? Not of such love as this...

...What is...

...All this sounded very like nonsense—at the time of it...

...And who can get beyond the loud-speaker's fearful range ? Machinery makes a noise...

...There is a quiet which precedes the storm, and when children are quiet they are proverbially plotting mischief...

...It is the sense of passion...

...Bang, whang, whang, goes the drum," says Browning, "tootle te tootle the fife"—and were it not so shrill, it had long since been all over with the fife...

...And as, being weak, they sin mostly in imagination only, the stirring must be by art, which beats and drags them roughly about as it were by the hair...

...and its more modern and as yet secret descendants...

...A noise which shakes the earth has already become tactilistic...

...The shrieks of the victims, whether of Baal or of science, make a noise...

...Who can listen to a still small voice in the vicinity of a loud-speaker...

...A little more in hearing—in mere hearing, I mean, without regard to such meanings as may be attached to what we hear...

...Noise does it...

...But I seem of late to be coming upon his name and theories everywhere—theories more often than name, of course, yet name often enough, too...

...So a bas the ear-drum and eviva the super-bassdrum— thunder, lightning, T.N.T...

...But it went...

...Doctors keep talking about the damage which the noise of our streets does to our nerves...

...Marinetti proposed that the "auditors" at concerts should sit and let ribbons, or ropes, or something such, be drawn through their hands...

...When sound sinks to music it is transformed by the magic of an ear-drum into something which soothes the savage breast...

...It wants to be spurred to action...

...Is it not notorious that Professor Alfred North Whitehead, for example, is able to attach the sense of reality only to the sense of touch...

...It is recognized as almost a disease, a mild and harmless if expensive mania...

...Men not calling themselves futurists, or even modernists, have cultivated curious touch-fads ere now...

...You could both see and hear what was going on...

...He believed in touching hemp where others had believed only in touching wood...

...We are at last in the green pastures of sex...

...He moved even our most hornyhanded philosophers...

...He spoke of tactile divans, pillows, beds—aye, even of tactile shirts, though of hairshirts he seems never to have heard...

...I wonder if one of the reasons why so many prophets come to grief is not the fact that the war is over before they begin to draft their troops, that what they say is going to happen has already proved itself to be that which failed to happen...

...If Marinetti refuses to date, if Marinettism continues to prosper, it must be because he plunged so deeply into the stream of contemporary folly that he actually reached to something seriously bad, to that permanently evil, which in its steadfast opposition to the very essence of the good makes a paradoxical eternity out of the sheer exaggeration of its own ephemeral nature—like a wheel which moves so fast that it seems to be standing still...

...And surely touch is the greatest because most fundamental blessing to which the flesh is heir...

...There is no such pleasure in life...

...Marinetti found the orchestra in the merely accoustical bang-whang-whang stage...

...Marinetti, who was not weak, hurried to war in sheer delight at the opportunity of getting his music first hand from the artillery, his tactilic sensations there in the rending of the flesh of others, and even in the contemplation of the possible rending of his own...

...and we must needs make a yet louder noise not to hear them...

...We are now ready to get our touch sensations more directly and with less effort...

...Not, certainly, in any such life as that recommended by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti...

...Is not noise the eternal enemy in his most eternal form...

...By the time anything has been discerned and exploited, it has already slipped from the future into the past, and—oh horror of all horrors most to be dreaded!—has begun to date...

...There is little voluptuous pleasure in seeing...

...I do not presume to judge him...

...Bang, whang, whang, goes the drum, Tootle te tootle the fife Oh, a day in the city square...

...He declared himself," says Huddleston, "especially hostile to all the paraphernalia of fatal women, moonlight, memories, nostalgia, eternity, immortality, picturesqueness, solitude, twilight, ruins, pessimism and that patina which he called the filth of time...

...For noise is the implacable foe of thought, and not to think is certainly the beginning of unwisdom...

...If it had been it would now be old, and forgotten...

...It so happens, however, that the savage breast does not care for soothing— which is the same as being put to sleep and done away with as a savage...