Alrighty, so I’m feeling inspired tonight, but not so much in a way that I’m going to write much myself. Rather, I’m just coming across a lot of poems, quotes, etc, that I would like to share. And so, here’s some good stuff. I hope you get something out of it.
The shape of your eyes
Paul Eluard (1926)
The shape of your eyes goes round my heart,
A round of dance and sweetness.
Halo of time, cradle nightly and sure
No longer do I know what I’ve lived,
Your eyes have not always seen me.
Leaves of day and moss of dew,
Reeds of wind and scented smiles,
Wings lighting up the world,
Boats laden with sky and sea,
Hunters of sound and sources of colour,
Scents the echoes of a covey of dawns
Recumbent on the straw of stars,
As the day depends on innocence
The world relies on your pure sight
All my blood courses in its glance.
Human nature, ever changing and as unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint. If it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, rending everything asunder, the wall, its bonds, its very self.
Franz Kafka, “The Great Wall Of China”
Allotropy
Andre Breton (1926)
Who’s coming in
It’s me pull yourself together if you want me to put you together
The closet is full of linens
There are even moonbeams that I can unfold
You’ve changed
Here’s the proof that you have changed
The gifts they give the newborns in their cribs
Are almost the same arrow shows the direction yo’re coming from
Where you’re going
Your heart is on the path of that arrow
Your eyes which will again shine bright cloud over the mist of things
Your hands grope along a road for the dark needle that can prevent a catastrophe
You see the woman you have loved
Without them seeing you you see them without them seeing you
The black wolves in turn pass behind you
Who are you
Shadow of an evildoer on the high walls
Shawdow of a signalman stretching farther than the signal
I am the primary innocent party
My head rolls from on high where my steps will never fail
What makeup
No one will recognise me
Later between the stones in a heap
The window is wide open
On that magnificent heap
Bend forward
Bend forward to change again
It is indeed you who dend and change
That photgraph you forgot to have toned
Is so like you
Come to the edge, he said. They said: We are afraid. Come to the edge, he said. They came. He pushed them and they flew.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god.
Francis Picabia
Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memroy: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determinded, enthusiastic; to divest one’s church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them – with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn’t matter in the least – with the same intensity in the thicket of one’s soul – pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangles. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colours, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE
Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto” (1918)
