History Memes

The Italian Futurists were weird

1. One must destroy syntax and scatter one's nouns at random, just as they are born.

2. One should use infinitives, because they adapt themselves elastically to nouns and don't subordinate them to the writer's I that observes or imagines. Alone, the infinitive can provide a sense of the continuity of life and the elasticity of the intuition that perceives it.

3. One must abolish the adjective, to allow the naked noun to preserve its essential color. The adjective, tending of itself toward the shadows, is incompatible with our dynamic vision, because it supposes a pause, a meditation.

4. One must abolish the adverb, old belt buckle that holds two words together. The adverb preserves a tedious unity of tone within a phrase.

5. Every noun should have its double; that is, the noun should be followed, with no conjunction, by the noun to which it is related by analogy. Example : man-torpedo-boat, woman-gulf, crowd-surf, piazza-funnel, door-faucet. |ust as aerial speed has multiplied our knowledge of the world, the perception of analogy becomes ever more natural for man. One must suppress the like, the as, the so, the similar to. Still better, one should deliberately confound the object with the image that it evokes, foreshortening the image to a single essential word.

6. Abolish even the punctuation. After adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions have been suppressed, punctuation is naturally annulled, in the varying continuity of a living style that creates itself without the foolish pauses made by commas and periods. To accentuate certain movements and indicate their directions, mathematical symbols will be used: + - X : : and the musical symbols.