Αόρατα Νήματα / Invisible threads

Αόρατα Νήματα / Invisible threads

Βιβλιογραφία, σημειώσεις 

Bibliography / REF/ Works Cited / Films / Performances 

Antonucci , Giovanni. Chonache del theatro futurista, Roma: Abete, 1975.

Barthes, Roland. Μάθημα γραφής, Σύγχρονος κινηματογράφος τευχος 15-16, 1977.  

http://www.cinemalab.eu.org/sygxronos-kinimatografos/details/1/27-sygxronos-kinimatografos-77

Barthes, Roland. On Bunraku, The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 15, No. 2, Theatre in Asia (Spring, 1971), pp. 76-80 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1144622


Barris, Roann, The Life of the Constructivist Theatrical Object,
 Theatre Journal, Vol. 65, No. 1 (March 2013), pp. 57-76 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41819822


Bell, John. Κούκλες, μάσκες και παραστατικά αντικείμενα στο τέλος του 20^ου  αιώνα, Νήμα, τευχ.30, Μαιος 2000.  

Βλαβιανός, Χάρης.  Το νερό έγινε πέτρα, Το Βημα, 14 Δεκ.,  2014 

https://www.tovima.gr/2013/12/14/opinions/kai-to-nero-egine-petra/

Bowlt, John E., Constructivism and Russian Stage Design, Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Winter, 1977), pp. 62-84,  https://www.jstor.org/stable/3245250

Beeson, Nora Meyerhold, Vsevolod, The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Sep., 1959), pp. 139-149

 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1124810


Corra, Bruno, antognoli Marinetti, F. T., Settimelli, Emilio. Μανιφέστο του Φουτουριστικού Συνθετικού Θεάτρου (Teatro Futurista Sintetico)   Μιλάνο, 11 Ιανουαρίου 1915 - 18 Φεβρουάριου 1915,  μτφρ.Κώστας Κουρμουλάκης. 

https://www.academia.edu/11335211/Μετάφραση_των_φουτουριστικών_μανιφέστων_του_Μαρινέτι_για_το_θέατρο

Cappelletto, Chiarra. The puppet's paradox: An organic prosthesis
 RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 59/60 (spring/autumn 2011), pp. 325-336 
www.jstor.org/stable/23647798


Craig, Edward Gordon, The Actor and the Über-Marionette, The Mask, Volume 1, Number 2, April 1908

https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnaau190804-01.2.5&

Simone Germini, Il teatro avanguardista di F. T. Marinetti, Marzo 30, 2017

https://imalpensanti.it/2017/03/30/il-teatro-avanguardista-di-filippo-tommaso-marinetti/

Güthenke, Constanze, Postclassicism, Disturbed Philology and Kleist’s Fencing Bear, Oxford German Studies, 47:2, 2018, 184-200https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2018.1452706 

Gray, John, H ψυχή της μαριονέτας – Μια σύντομη έρευνα για την ανθρώπινη ελευθερία Μετάφραση Γιώργος Λαμπράκος, Εκδόσεις Οκτώ, 2018 

Gross, Kenneth, The Madness of Puppets , The Hopkins Review, Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2009 (New Series), pp. 182-205  https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.0.0066 

Hebron, Stephen, John Keats and ‘negative capability’, British Library, 2014 

https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/john-keats-and-negative-capability

 Unger, Roberto. False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, Revised Edition. London: Verso, 2004 

http://www.robertounger.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/false-necessity.pdf

The Letters of John Keats, ed. by H E Rollins, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958

Koss Juliet, Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls.
The Art Bulletin, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Dec., 2003), pp. 724-745 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3177367


Lorefice,Tito. Ariel Bufano : Πάνω την ερμηνεία της Κούκλας, Νήμα, τευχ. 35, Μάιος 2004 

Lyons, Charles R,   Gordon Craig's Concept of the Actor, Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Oct., 1964), pp. 258-269 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3204670


Lyotard, Jean Francois,  «Ο Θεός και η μαριονέτα» στο «Το απάνθρωπο, κουβέντες για τον χρόνο», μτφρ. Βασίλης Πατσογιάννης , Αθήνα:  Πλεθρον, 2019 

Victoria Nelson. The Secret Life of Puppets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001

Obraztsov, Sergey. My Profession,  μτφρ. Ralph Parker, Valentina Scott , Moscow : Foreign Languages, 1950

Ray, William. Suspended in the Mirror: Language and the Self in Kleist's "Über das Marionettentheater", Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 18, No. 4, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (Winter, 1979), pp. 521-546 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25600209 

Schiller, Friedrich. «Περί αφελούς και συναισθηματικής ποίησεως» στο Επιλογή από το έργο του, εις.- επιλ.-μτφρ.  Ανδρουλιδάκης, Κώστας, Αθήνα : Στιγμή, 2015.

Tritschler, Paul. Negative capability, Aeon magazine, 07 November, 2018

https://aeon.co/essays/deny-and-become-the-radical-ethos-of-negative-capability

Films /Performances

“Dolls” Trailer  by Takeshi Kitano, 2002 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjXQoZRbXXY

Intro scene from the 2002 film "Dolls" directed by Takeshi Kitano (2002)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO9zWak9uwg

 

Vengono - Omaggio a Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Teatro cust 2000 di Urbino, Regia di Livio Taricco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG8ixJiO7fs

Meyerhold's Biomechanics, the university of Iova 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoq8_90id2o

Tadeusz Kantor "Umarła klasa" (Dead Class) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a235hHGFIps

Sergey Obraztsov puppets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuU12VDxCY4

 

Obraztsov, theme and variations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjdNg2zjbMU

Κωστής Βελώνης, Αδεξιότητα και νεωτερικότητα  (We Are All Clowns)

Clumsiness and Modernity (We Are All Clowns) Course 

ΑΣΚΤ -Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) Winter/Spring Semester 

Αμφιθέατρο νέας βιβλιοθήκης,  Πειραιώς 256

On the edge of the Blade we run

Kostis Velonis, Corner Soul, 2016

Concrete, plaster, wood, acrylic, soil 

14 x 45 x 26 cm

On the edge of the Blade we run paraphrases the film’s title Blade Runner, premiered in 1982. The exhibition will take place in the end of November 2019, similarly with the movie’s time of reference. The director Ridley Scott travels in the future time and space of Los Angeles, November 2019.
The concept of the exhibition is constructed around three subject matters;
First, departing from the film’s title, we run on the edge of the blade in order to reconsider the ambiguous times we live in, both on a local and a global scale.
Additionally, questions about the interchange between the corporeal and the existential are raised. When the replicants in Blade Runner developed emotional capacity, simultaneously realized the inevitability of death, something they were not supposed to acknowledge. Consequently, in order to conceal those existential agonies, they started hiding their own corporeality.
Lastly, in Blade Runner, November 2019 is presented as a dystopian environment. In the early ‘80s, when the movie was filmed, the discussion about the destructive impact of capitalism, intensive industrialization and technological culture was initiated in the West, since the ecological catastrophe had begun to be visible, a matter very relevant today. In Blade Runner’ sequel we return in the space and time of the first movie where everything has been turned into ruins- a scrap town.
With this exhibition we aim to investigate whether the director’s predictions about the future have been proved right or wrong, as well as to question the unfulfilled promises derived from the evolution of technology and digital era. We are also looking forward to reconsider the chasm between human culture and nature, to examine a general melancholy and a feeling of despair that characterize our generation, and at the same time to establish a neo-futuristic and neo-gothic aesthetic we meet in everyday life.

 Artists

Eva Papamargariti Zissis Kotionis Rallou Panagiotou Maria Papadimitriou, Alexandra Koumantaki Kostas Sahpazis
Ellie Antoniou
Ners
Kostis Velonis Sophia Vyzoviti
Voltnoi Alexandros Tzannis Loukia Alavanou Markus Selg Lap-See Lam Anastasia Douka Micol Assael Savvas Christodoulides Evita Manji
Pegy Zali Evangelia Ledaki Andreas Ragnar Kasapis Iannis Ganas Orestis Mavroudis Jack McConville Steinar Haga Kristensen Aliki Panagiotopoulou Spiros Kokkonis Adrianna Glaviano Margarita Bofiliou Despina Charitonidi Aliki Tzifa
Spiros Hadjidjanos Vangelis Papathanasiou Antonakis Christodoulou Antigone Blanda Konstantinos Lianos Tatiana Couzis Panos Profitis Nyssos Vassilopoulos Iraklis Kopitas Carina Obukhova Manos Papamichael Saklas Alexander Ruthner 

On the edge of the Blade we run will take place in a former textile industry built in 1936 at Votanikos area.

On the edge of the Blade we run

A show curated by Alexandros Tzannis
Assistant curator: Odette Kouzou
29th of November until December, 8 

PLYFA Factory

Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900-1950 – review

Paul Ginsborg’s masterly and original account puts family life at the centre of revolution and dictatorship

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/25/family-politics-domestic-life-devastation-and-survival-paul-ginsborg-review

Text by Lucy Hughes-Hallett 

Ingestion / Anti-pasta

Here is a photo of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti eating a plate of spaghetti in 1930. What looks like an anodyne photograph was in fact a highly loaded image, for this was the man who, together with his younger colleague Fillia (the pseudonym of Luiggi Colombo), had just published the "Manifesto of Futurist Cookery" (1930), which dared declare anathema Italy's sacrosanct pasta. Marinetti saw the Italian table as weighted down by heavy traditional food. The English might be content with their dried cod, roast beef, and pudding, the Germans with their sauerkraut, smoked bacon, and sausages, but for the Italians pasta would no longer do. Marinetti wanted to reverse the best-known chapter of the history of Italian cuisine. In the 17th century, the city of Naples had initiated a gastronomic revolution whereby its inhabitants, until then known as mangiabroccoli and mangiafoglie, now became mangiamaccheroni. The pasta eater, holding the spaghetti in his hands above his mouth, became a stock figure, like the characters of Commedia dell'Arte, disseminated in prints all over Europe. Now the Futurists were calling for the abolition of what they deemed an absurd Italian gastronomic religion. Marshalling the opinions of doctors, professors, hygienists, and impostors, Marinetti claimed that pasta induced lethargy, pessimism, nostalgia, and neutralism. In short, pasta stood behind everything the Futurists had been battling ever since the appearance of their initial manifesto in 1909.

They lamented that pastasciutta—dried pasta of the sort we all eat—was 40 percent less nutritious than meat, fish, and vegetables. Mixing scientific data with poetic flights of eloquence, Marinetti held that pasta ensnared Italians within the slow looms of Penelope and bound them to the sailing ships somnolently awaiting a gust of wind on a sleepy Mediterranean. Being anti-pasta meant being antipassatista, i.e., against the past.

Predictably, upon its publication in the Turin daily Gazetta del Popolo on 28 December 1930, and its translation in the Parisian daily Comoedia a few months later, the manifesto provoked an uproar. Delighted to have finally managed to write a manifesto that, in line with Futurism's intent to transform every aspect of life, had finally hit on the one realm of the quotidian that affected every single Italian, Marinetti and Fillia gleefully devoted a whole section of their 1932 Futurist Cookbook to recording the blistering effects of the initial cooking manifesto. In typical Futurist fashion, the section containing the polemic preceded the section with the actual recipes. Marinetti and Fillia claimed, in equally characteristic Futurist inflationary style, that the pros and cons of pasta were endlessly debated in the Italian press in hundreds of articles by writers, politicians, chemists, and famous cooks, not to mention innumerable cartoons. Meanwhile, foreign publications from London to Budapest, from Tunis to Tokyo, and all the way to Sydney had announced somewhat incredulously that Italy was about to abandon spaghetti. In the city of l'Aquila (a few hours from the Italian capital) women had taken the situation into their own hands by signing a collective letter of indignation, addressed to Marinetti, in favor of pasta. In Genoa, an association called P.I.P.A., an acronym for International Association Against Pasta, was formed. Thousands of miles away in San Francisco, a fight had erupted between two Italian restaurants situated on different floors of the same building. While the head cook of the Savoia, Italy's royal family, actually came out against pasta, the mayor of Naples professed that vermicelli with tomato sauce was the food of the angels. To which Marinetti responded that if that were the case, it simply served to confirm the boredom of life in paradise.

Ultimately, Marinetti believed, modern science would allow us to replace food with free, state-sponsored pills composed of albumins, synthetic fats, and vitamins that would lower prices for the consumer and lessen the toll of labor on the worker. Ultraviolet lamps could be used to electrify and thus dynamize food staples. Eventually, a totally mechanized production would relieve humankind of labor altogether, allowing man to be at leisure to pursue nobler activities. Dining could thus become a purely aesthetic enterprise. On this premise, Marinetti and Fillia's proposals for the new Italian cuisine constitute one of the most inspired chapters in the annals of Futurism. The cookbook gave a new infusion of giovinezza—a favorite Fascist word, meaning "youth"—to the slightly tired antics of a movement now known as Secondo Futurismo. While the spectator could already expect, by the 1930s, to be abused by the Futurist text, the Futurist painting, the Futurist polimaterico (multimedia sculpture), and the Futurist performance, here the abuse went not to the head, but straight to the stomach.

The polemics in The Futurist Cookbook were followed by an elaborate account of some Futurist banquets. One of the more memorable of these Aeropranzi futuristi was a banquet for 300 people held on 18 December 1931 at the Hotel Negrino in Chiavari. Guests were delighted and terrified as they braced themselves to ingest dishes prepared by the famous cook Bulgheroni, who had come especially from Milan to this small Ligurian town to preside in the kitchen over the burial of pastasciutta. Although the Futurists had advocated the abolition of eloquence and politics around the table, the guests nevertheless first had to sit through a lecture by Marinetti on the state of world Futurism. Afterward, the meal began with a flan of calf's head seated on a bed of pineapple, nuts, and dates, stuffed—oh, surprise!—with anchovies. Then, to cleanse the palate, Bulgheroni served a decollapalato (a pun on decollare, meaning "to get off the ground"), a lyrical concoction of meat broth sprinkled with champagne and liquor and decorated with rose petals. The main dish was beef in carlinga (another aeronautic term, probably referring to a kind of Dutch oven), meatballs—whose composition was best left uninvestigated—placed over airplanes made out of bread crumbs. After a few more dishes the dessert, named eletricita atmosferische candite, arrived, consisting of colorful little cubes made of fake marble crowned with cotton candy that enclosed a sweetish paste containing ingredients only a long chemical analysis could disclose. Not everybody made it to the end of the dinner.

Most memorable among other Futurist recipes was the carneplastico: a synthetic sculptural interpretation of Futurist aeropittura referring to the much-beloved Italian landscape. In honor of the beacon of Italian industry, one could taste the pollo Fiat, a stuffed chicken placed on puffy pillows of whipped cream. On a more pornographic note, one could also have a porco eccittato, a cooked salami placed vertically on the plate with coffee sauce mixed with eau de cologne.

Whatever Marinetti might have thought about his capacities for perennial transgression, such conceits of dishes as "divine surprises" had a long historical lineage. They went back to the most extraordinary passages in Petronius Arbitrius's Satiricon, thus reviving an aspect of Romanita that the Fascists, in their eagerness to revive Roman glories, would have been all too happy to endorse. Indeed, many of the ingredients were coded so that the exotic fruits that appear in so many Futurist dishes were meant to evoke Italy's hope for a firmer grip on North Africa in fulfillment of its imperial ambitions as master of the Mediterranean. There was, it turns out, some disagreement during the Fascist ventennio as to the uer-history of pasta. According to the story presently told in Rome's Museo Nazionale della Pasta Alimentare (the only such museum in the world, founded in the 1990s), traces of early pasta implements were found in the archeological remains of the Etruscan town of Cerveteri, near Rome, dating to the 4th century BC. Pasta was also identified in low reliefs of the 12th century. And yet the writer Paolo Buzzi, in an article printed in 1930 in the much-venerated journal La Cucina Italiana, pointed to the fact that no mention of pasta by the ancient Romans could be found in the history of Italian cooking by d'Apico, the Homer of cooking. This might sound strange, he added, if one thinks of the thousand stories one was told as a child about the catastrophic volcanic eruption of Pompeii, one of which told of plates, still filled with maccheroni, thrown into the lava.

As always with Futurism, Marinetti's ottimismo della tavola had its darker side in the realm of realpolitik. Not by chance, as he himself acknowledged in the manifesto, Marinetti launched his attack against pasta just when Italy, hit hard by the Depression, was struggling to achieve one of Mussolini's great dreams: autarchy, or the elimination of Italy's economic dependence on foreign markets. Pasta, quintessentially Italian as it was, depended on expensive imports of wheat. The regime thus launched a campaign in favor of home-grown rice as a better substitute. Rice, we are told, was more virile, more patriotic, and more suitable for fighters and heroes. Rice also had its part in the history of Italian cooking as the great rival of pasta; it came from the Po valley in the industrial North, while pasta, with its hypothetical birthplace in Etruria and its triumph in Naples, was identified with the center, and even more with the agrarian and backward South. This was a battle that could thus be waged on familiar Futurist geopolitical territory.

And so the Futurists offered tuttoriso: new dishes to replace the traditional Northern risotto. More sinister is the fact that among the doctors summoned by Marinetti was the eugenicist Nicola Pende, the man behind the new Instituto di Biotipologia in Rome. Marinetti's attacks against pasta coincided, significantly I think, with the first wave of Taylorization of pasta production. On display in the Museo della Pasta in Rome are vintage photographs of women (almost never men) at work in front of vertical hydraulic presses, grinders, cutters, and blenders that look no less impressive, no less daunting, and no less alienating, than the assembly line at Fiat's famous Turin factory known as the Lingotto, a Futurist favorite back in the teens. By the 1930s, the institution of biotypes as substitutes for Taylorism to attain maximal efficiency in the working place and the provision of a master race had taken hold of the Fascist imagination. Thus the New Futurist Man, the man without pasta, the homo ludens who might eventually replace homo edens, the man whom one may be tempted to theorize as the postmodern "desiring machine" of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, was, then, first and foremost, the New Fascist Man.

Fine. But what is one to make of our Marinetti snapshot? The staple photograph we see reproduced shows Marinetti instructing a female cook on how to concoct one of his recipes, both of them standing in front of a 1913 Muscular Dynamism painted by Umberto Boccioni. So is our photograph here of Marinetti caught red-handed in the act of eating the infamous dish? A good Italian who just couldn't resist? And this taking place at Biffi, if one is to believe the caption, one of the best-known Milanese establishments (still in existence) and a favorite haunt of the Futurists? Or is it a clever maneuver by Marinetti intended to bamboozle the viewer, leave him or her guessing, spinning yet still more controversy? About to send off my text and still wavering between these two interpretations of this piece of photographic evidence, I stumbled on one little paragraph of The Futurist Cookbook. There, entry number 7 in a short section on apocryphal anecdotes provided a possible answer: "Photographs of Marinetti in the act of eating pasta appeared in a few mass-circulation magazines: they were photographic montages carried out by experts hostile to Futurist cuisine, who were trying to discredit the campaign for a new way of eating."1 There could, however, be another reading: the photo is real and Marinetti, whatever he might have claimed in his cookbook, was simply lying about the montage. There must have been moments when, even for Marinetti, the desires of the everyman vanquished those of the Futurist and the Fascist in him.


1 — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, trans. Suzanne Brill (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989), p. 99.

Text by Romy Golan

Source: Cabinet magazine, Issue 10, Spring 2003

Futurist Manifesto of Lust

By Valentine de Saint-Point

A reply to those dishonest journalists who twist phrases to make the Idea seem ridiculous; to those women who only think what I have dared to say; to those for whom Lust is still nothing but a sin; to all those who in Lust can only see Vice, just as in Pride they see only vanity.
Lust, when viewed without moral preconceptions and as an essential part of life's dynamism, is a force.
Lust is not, any more than pride, a mortal sin for the race that is strong. Lust, like pride, is a virtue that urges one on, a powerful source of energy.
Lust is the expression of a being projected beyond itself. It is the painful joy of wounded flesh, the joyous pain of a flowering. And whatever secrets unite these beings, it is a union of flesh. It is the sensory and sensual synthesis that leads to the greatest liberation of spirit. It is the communion of a particle of humanity with all the sensuality of the earth.
Lust is the quest of the flesh for the unknown, just as Celebration is the spirit's quest for the unknown. Lust is the act of creating, it is Creation.
Flesh creates in the way that the spirit creates. In the eyes of the Universe their creation is equal. One is not superior to the other and creation of the spirit depends on that of the flesh.
We possess body and spirit. To curb one and develop the other shows weakness and is wrong. A strong man must realize his full carnal and spiritual potentiality. The satisfaction of their lust is the conquerors' due. After a battle in which men have died, it is normal for the victors, proven in war, to turn to rape in the conquered land, so that life may be re-created.
When they have fought their battles, soldiers seek sensual pleasures, in which their constantly battling energies can be unwound and renewed. The modern hero, the hero in any field, experiences the same desire and the same pleasure. The artist, that great universal medium, has the same need. And the exaltation of the initiates of those religions still sufficiently new to contain a tempting element of the unknown, is no more than sensuality diverted spiritually towards a sacred female image.
Art and war are the great manifestations of sensuality; lust is their flower. A people exclusively spiritual or a people exclusively carnal would be condemned to the same decadence—sterility.
Lust excites energy and releases strength. Pitilessly it drove primitive man to victory, for the pride of bearing back a woman the spoils of the defeated. Today it drives the great men of business who run the banks, the press and international trade to increase their wealth by creating centres, harnessing energies and exalting the crowds, to worship and glorify with it the object of their lust. These men, tired but strong, find time for lust, the principal motive force of their action and of the reactions caused by their actions affecting multitudes and worlds. Even among the new peoples where sensuality has not yet been released or acknowledged, and who are neither primitive brutes nor the sophisticated representatives of the old civilizations, woman is equally the great galvanizing principle to which all is offered. The secret cult that man has for her is only the unconscious drive of a lust as yet barely woken. Amongst these peoples as amongst the peoples of the north, but for different reasons, lust is almost exclusively concerned with procreation. But lust, under whatever aspects it shows itself, whether they are considered normal or abnormal, is always the supreme spur.
The animal life, the life of energy, the life of the spirit, sometimes demand a respite. And effort for effort's sake calls inevitably for effort for pleasure's sake. These efforts are not mutually harmful but complementary, and realize fully the total being.
For heroes, for those who create with the spirit, for dominators of all fields, lust is the magnificent exaltation of their strength. For every being it is a motive to surpass oneself with the simple aim of self-selection, of being noticed, chosen, picked out.
Christian morality alone, following on from pagan morality, was fatally drawn to consider lust as a weakness. Out of the healthy joy which is the flowering of the flesh in all its power it has made something shameful and to be hidden, a vice to be denied. It has covered it with hypocrisy, and this has made a sin of it.
We must stop despising Desire, this attraction at once delicate and brutal between two bodies, of whatever sex, two bodies that want each other, striving for unity. We must stop despising Desire, disguising it in the pitiful clothes of old and sterile sentimentality.
It is not lust that disunites, dissolves and annihilates. It is rather the mesmerizing complications of sentimentality, artificial jealousies, words that inebriate and deceive, the rhetoric of parting and eternal fidelities, literary nostalgia—all the histrionics of love.
We must get rid of all the ill-omened debris of romanticism, counting daisy petals, moonlight duets, heavy endearments, false hypocritical modesty. When beings are drawn together by a physical attraction, let them—instead of talking only of the fragility of their hearts—dare to express their desires, the inclinations of their bodies, and to anticipate the possibilities of joy and disappointment in their future carnal union.
Physical modesty, which varies according to time and place, has only the ephemeral value of a social virtue.
We must face up to lust in full conciousness. We must make of it what a sophisticated and intelligent being makes of himself and of his life; we must make lust into a work of art. To allege unwariness or bewilderment in order to explain an act of love is hypocrisy, weakness and stupidity.
We should desire a body consciously, like any other thing.
Love at first sight, passion or failure to think, must not prompt us to be constantly giving ourselves, nor to take beings, as we are usually inclined to do so due to our inability to see into the future. We must choose intelligently. Directed by our intuition and will, we should compare the feelings and desires of the two partners and avoid uniting and satisfying any that are unable to complement and exalt each other.
Equally conciously and with the same guiding will, the joys of this coupling should lead to the climax, should develop its full potential, and should permit to flower all the seeds sown by the merging of two bodies. Lust should be made into a work of art, formed like every work of art, both instinctively and consciously.
We must strip lust of all the sentimental veils that disfigure it. These veils were thrown over it out of mere cowardice, because smug sentimentality is so satisfying. Sentimentality is comfortable and therefore demeaning.
In one who is young and healthy, when lust clashes with sentimentality, lust is victorious. Sentiment is a creature of fashion, lust is eternal. Lust triumphs, because it is the joyous exaltation that drives one beyond oneself, the delight in posession and domination, the perpetual victory from which the perpetual battle is born anew, the headiest and surest intoxication of conquest. And as this certain conquest is temporary, it must be constantly won anew.
Lust is a force, in that it refines the spirit by bringing to white heat the excitement of the flesh. The spirit burns bright and clear from a healthy, strong flesh, purified in the embrace. Only the weak and sick sink into the mire and are diminished. And lust is a force in that it kills the weak and exalts the strong, aiding natural selection.
Lust is a force, finally, in that it never leads to the insipidity of the definite and the secure, doled out by soothing sentimentality. Lust is the eternal battle, never finally won. After the fleeting triumph, even during the ephemeral triumph itself, reawakening dissatisfaction spurs a human being, driven by an orgiastic will, to expand and surpass himself.
Lust is for the body what an ideal is for the spirit—the magnificent Chimaera, that one ever clutches at but never captures, and which the young and the avid, intoxicated with the vision, pursue without rest.
Lust is a force.

11th January 1913