features

It is impossible for me to conceive of a joy of the spirit otherwise than as a breath of air. How can it be at its ease within the limits imposed on it by almost all books, almost all events? I doubt if there is a single man who has not been tempted, at least once in his life, to deny the existence of the outside world. Then he perceives that nothing is so important, so definitive. He proceeds to a revision of moral values, which does not prevent him from returning afterward to the common law. Those who have paid with a permanent unrest for this marvelous minute of lucidity continue to be called poets: Lautreamont, Rimbaud, but to tell the truth, literary childishness ended with them.

When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas? What touches us generally is generally less intentional than we believe. A happy formula, a sensational discovery make their appearance in the most miserable form. Almost nothing attains its goal, although here and there something overshoots it. And the history of these gropings, psychological literature, is not in the least instructive. In spite of its pretensions, a novel has never proved anything. The most famous examples are not even worth looking at. The utmost indifference is in order. Incapable of embracing at one time the whole extent of a painting, or of a misfortune, where do we derive the right to judge?

If youth attacks conventions, we should not ridicule it: who knows whether reflection is a good counselor? Everywhere I hear innocence praised and I observe that it is tolerated only in its passive form. This contradiction would suffice to make me skeptical. To condemn the subversive is to condemn everything that is not absolutely resigned. In this I find no valor. Revolts exhaust themselves; these old liturgical sayings are not needed to dispel the storm.

Such considerations strike me as superfluous. I speak for the pleasures of compromising myself. Appeals to the questionable modes of discourse should be forbidden. The most convinced authoritarian is not the one you think. I still hesitate to speak of what I know best…

…The obscurity of our utterances is constant. The riddle of meaning should remain in the hands of children. To read a book in order to know denotes a certain simplicity. The little that most reputed works teach us about their author and their reader ought very quickly to decide us against this experiment. It is in the thesis and not the expression that disappoints us. I resent passing through these ill-lighted sentences, receiving these confidences without object, suffering at every moment, through the fault of a chatterbox, a sensation of “I knew that before.” The poets who have recognized this lose hope and run away from the intelligible, they know that their work can gain nothing from it. One can love a mad woman more than any other…

…No effort has yet been made to give Dada credit for its desire not to pass for a school. Everyone continues to insist on such words as group, squad, leader, discipline. They go s far as to claim that under cover of exalting the individuality, Dada constitutes a danger to it, without pausing to note that it is most of all our differences that bind us together. Our common exception to the artistic or moral rule gives us only an ephemeral satisfaction. We are well aware that over and above this, and irrepressible personal imagination, more “dada” than the movement, will have free reign. M. J.-E. Blanche made this clear when he wrote: “Dada will only survive by ceasing to be.”…

…The Dadaists have from the start taken care to state that they want nothing. In other words. There’s nothing to worry about, the instinct of self-preservation always wins out. When, after the reading of the manifesto: “No more painters, no more writers, no more religions, no more royalists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more police, etc.,” someone naively asked us if we “allowed the continued existence” of man, we smiled, by no means resolved to do God’s work. Are we not the last to forget that there are limits of understanding? If I am so pleased by these words of Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, it is because essentially they constitute an act of extreme humility: “What is ‘beautiful’? What is ‘ugly’? What are ‘big,’ ‘strong,’ ‘weak’? What are Carpentier, Renan, Foch? Don’t know. What is myself? Don’t know. Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know.”

The historical anecdote is of secondary importance. It is impossible to know where and when DADA was born. This name which one us was pleased to give it has the advantage of being perfectly equivocal.

Cubism was a school of painting, futurism a political movement: DADA is a state of mind. To opposed one to the other reveals ignorance of bad faith.

Free-thinking in religion has no resemblance to a church. DADA is artistic free-thinking.

As long as the schools go in for prayers in the form of explanation of texts an walks in museums, we shall cry despotism and try to disrupt the ceremony.

DADA gives itself to nothing, neither to love nor to work. It is inadmissible that a man should leave any trace of his passage on earth.

DADA, recognizing only instinct, condemns explanation a priori. According to DADA, we must retain no control over ourselves. We must cease to consider these dogmas: morality and taste.

We read the newspapers like other mortals. Without wishing to make anyone unhappy, we feel entitled to say that the word DADA lends itself readily to puns. To tell the truth, that is in part why we have adopted it. We are incapable of treating seriously any subject whatsoever, let alone this subject: ourselves. Everything we write about DADA is therefore for our pleasure. There is no petty news item for which we would not give the whole of art criticism. Finally, the wartime press did not prevent us from regarding Marshal Foch as a faker and President Wilson as an idiot.

We ask nothing better  than to be judged by appearances. It is rumored everywhere that I wear spectacles. If I told you why, you’d never believe me. It is in remembrance of a grammar example: “Noses were made to hold up spectacles; accordingly, I have spectacles.” What’s that you say? Ah, yes! That doesn’t make us any younger.

Pierre is a man. But there is no DADA truth. One need only utter a statement for the opposite statement to become DADA. I have seen Tristan Tzara without words so ask for a box of cigarettes in a tobacco store. I don’t know what was the matter with him. I can still hear Phillip Soupault asking insistently for live birds in paint stores. Perhaps I am myself at this instant dreaming.

A red host is after all as good as a white host. DADA doesn’t promise to make you go to heaven. It would be absurd, a priori, to expect a DADA masterpiece in the fields of literature and painting. Nor, of course, do we believe in the possibility of ant social betterment, even though we hate conservatism above all things and declare ourselves the partisans of any revolution whatsoever. “Peace at any price” is the slogan of DADA in time of war, while in time of peace the slogan of DADA is “War at any price.”

The contradiction is still only an appearance, and doubtless of the most flattering sort. I speak and I have nothing to say. I find not the slightest ambition in myself: and yet it seems to you that I am animated: how is it possible that the idea that my right flank is the shadow of my left flank does not make me utterly incapable of moving? In the most general sense of the word we pass for poets because we attack language which is the worst of conventions. One may very well know the word Hello and Goodby to the woman one meet’s after a year’s absence.

In conclusion, I wish only to take into account the objections of a pragmatic order. DADA attacks you with your own idea. If we reduce you to maintaining that it is more advantageous to believe than not to believe what is taught by all religions of beauty, love, truth, and justice, it is because you are not afraid to put yourself at the mercy of DADA by accepting an encounter with us on the terrain we have chosen, which is doubt.