Arise! Arise! We do not break our fast. Speed is our syntax. You know Rome never fell, il sonore non muore mai, Marconi said, sound never dies, but swells in the morning air, with the piston smoke of new machineries, who would have thought such bright metal, sciabola sharp and rattling, leaves thunder in the wake of its creation, a Hephaestus fury, we are Lupa’s children, we cannot remake the world with guillotines alone —break a few eggs, break a few more, with steel in hand, slaughter what you can of that sleep-dewed face, scald away until skull red, sear the fat, hook a grease-slick thumb in your mouth and bite, burn the bacon, savour salt and blood, coffee white, crack the door, grasp the newborn light ta da ta da, oh how the trumpets blare, data avanzata, avanzata data, dato avanzata nº II is nº XII, nº II is nº XII carpe diem; we come, not to build or praise, but to bury her
in your still cold hands the day
is a sharp instrument
TEXTUALITIES
1922 — T S Eliot
The Waste Land — dust / chorus / fragmentation / quotation / the authority of ruins.
1909 — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
The Futurist Manifesto — speed = syntax, velocity, rupture, the ecstatic violence of the new.
1976 — Sex Pistols
Anarchy in the U.K. — NEGATION / NOISE / IRONY / THE GRAMMAR OF REFUSAL.
1842 — Edgar Allan Poe
The Masque of the Red Death — masque / contagion
1599 — William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar — empire / theatre / blood
1910 — Rider-Waite
Tarot – II–XII
between two staves
the hanged man
finally literal
NOTES
Here we blend the styles of Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto and T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, with textual references to both, interleaved with the Sex Pistols Anarchy in the UK, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. The spectacle of hedonism in the face of horror. Poe’s confabulations in The Philosophy of Composition prefigure Eliot’s Notes on The Waste Land, while we don our sophist’s mask, the influenza pandemic of the early 20th haunts Modernist development and practice. Via the French Symbolists and Decadents Poe becomes the spiritual progenitor of the Post Modernists, eliding the Moderns altogether.
Here the death and empire imagery of Poe and Shakespeare, enthusiastically and performatively taken up by Fascists and their collaborators and adherents like Marinetti are both debunked and leant veracity through the predictive and subconscious narrativisation of Tarot. Nº II is nº XII joins Mussolini – Il Duce – The Dux via a misreading and resonance with Deuce – the number II, in a kind of loose semantic chain of association: staves, fasces, dux, deuce, devil, the hanged man. Tiresias, as always, is weeping.
I use Textualities rather than References because these sources are, for the most part, indirect, adapted, misremembered, renovated and repurposed, while still retaining echoes of the original. I prefer it to Intertextualities, which euphonically is less pleasing, and conceptually doesn’t suggest text and the realities – the connexions and resonances that bring a piece into being. The Textualities section also structurally mirrors Futurist formal concerns.
I could go on but – what’s that I hear? Time’s swift chariot at my door. Finally, a reminder, as Auden said – poetry makes nothing happen.
Bon appetit.
