In 1908, Marinetti (how also liked to call himself the “caffeine of Europe”) initiated the movement of Futurism by\u00a0published the “Manifesto of Futurism”, in which he rejects\u00a0all practices of how nature has been viewed\u00a0before and highlights\u00a0the importance of industry, machines, violence, danger, revolt, and war.<\/p>\n
Futurists saw\u00a0the idyllic part of nature that most people appreciate as ugly and boring. Natural disasters, meanwhile, were exciting and beautiful. They had the\u00a0opinion that nature will sooner or later kill you so why not embrace\u00a0all the roughness while you’re still alive? Futurists described the act of struggle as beautiful and often used poetry as a mean of expressing violent acts.<\/p>\n
This new movement rapidly found support and their first public manifesto in 1910 was\u00a0described as the “Battle of Turin” were they\u00a0“exchanged almost as many knocks as (…) ideas”. Futurists wanted a break of tradition. Everything old was pass\u00e9. Futurists aimed at the remaking of the world. People rebelling,\u00a0loud buuhing, cynical outcries, and chaos were purposely encouraged. The ideas of futurists were not only seen on stage or in literature but also carried out in form of architecture, fashion design, gastronomy, etc. Marinetti believed in the power of food and published in fact a piece of writing called “a meal that prevents a suicide”. He also wrote a manifest against pasta in 1930, however, this manifest questioned his\u00a0credibility since\u00a0paparazzis discovered\u00a0him shortly afterwards eating Spaghetti.<\/p>\n
What really surprised me is when I heard that Marinetti actually volunteered\u00a0in the battlefields of World War I. At the beginning of the lecture I thought that he was just one of these intellectual armchair\u00a0philosophers, sitting in his comfortable safe\u00a0home far up from any danger, while imagining\u00a0how amazing war and the violence it brings with it must be.<\/p>\n
What then scared me even more, is that he in fact had seen and experienced the pity of war\u00a0but did not change his attitude towards it. On the contrary, he embraced his battle wounds. The wounds and scares that kill people, or mark the ones that survive forever are described by him as beautiful because it shows that humans were altered and adored by war. According to Marinetti, these wounds are the ultimate gift because they fuse steel and flesh together and in doing so they bring us one step\u00a0closer to machines. This fusion makes men in a sense immortal and lead to the ultimate evolution desired by futurists.<\/p>\n
During the lecture, I could not stop but think\u00a0of Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. He was one of the first known authors who\u00a0questioned and disputed the notion of “Dulce et Decorum Est” (how sweet and right it is to die for one’s country), which was used by many countries to advertise war in a positive way. After having served as a commander of a foot soldier troop in World War I he wrote in one of his poems\u00a0\u201cmy subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity\u201d. Unlike most authors he\u00a0did not\u00a0hide the cruel nature of death in glorious descriptions to please the states by supplying positive war propaganda.<\/p>\n
I’m left to wonder what Marinetti would say in response to\u00a0Owen’s powerful poems that moved me to tears the first time I read them. Maybe he would\u00a0overthink his philosophy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1908, Marinetti (how also liked to call himself the “caffeine of Europe”) initiated the movement of Futurism by\u00a0published the “Manifesto of Futurism”, in which he rejects\u00a0all practices of how nature has been viewed\u00a0before and highlights\u00a0the importance of industry, machines,… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5675,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[249590],"tags":[258822,258821,1163,258820],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5675"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":558,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions\/558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}