🚀 go-pugleaf

"Jim Artman" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:2srqkqF1otv67U1@uni-berlin.de...
> Ladies and Gentlemen:
>
> I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you,
tlhe
> refined public, a Bicyclist is the equivalent of a leper.

I'm not, but then right now I am a person sitting indoors at a
computer keyboard.  Am I then a bicyclist?  I drive about four times
as many miles in a year as I cycle.  Am I then a bicyclist?  Surely I
am an avid motorist, and should be so treated in my discussions with
other motorists

[snip]

>.... We are often told that we are incoherent,

That varies with the individual, I think.

>  ... but into this
> word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to
fathom.

but surely neither coherence nor incoherence exist until reception,
except in the narrow technical sense that physicists use..  Apparent
incoherence might well be a defect in the receiver rather than the
transmitter

Inability to fathom insults might well be a useful survival trait.
It's less useful, of course, if you don't get many insults, but
becomes ever more so as the number of insults rises.  Count your
blessings, or at least try to make an approximate estimate.

> Everything is incoherent.

Note my comments above.  If I went to an electronics store, and
bought a receiver, and found that with it everything was incoherent,
I would consider that the receiver had a serious problem, and would
take it back for a refund.

Jeremy Parker

Very original.
http://www.kunstwissen.de/fach/f-kuns/o_mod/dada05.htm

--Art


"Jim Artman" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message 
news:2srqkqF1otv67U1@uni-berlin.de...
> Ladies and Gentlemen:
>
> I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you, tlhe
> refined public, a Bicyclist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only 
> a
> manner of speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat us
> with that remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit of belief in
> progress. At ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you ask me why, I
> won't be able to tell you.
>
> Another characteristic of Bicyclism is the continuous breaking off of our
> friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender 
> his
> resignation from the Bicyclist movement *was myself.* Everybody knows that
> Bicyclist is nothing. I broke away from Bicyclist and from myself as soon 
> as
> I understood the implications of *nothing.*   If I continue to do 
> something,
> it is because it amuses me, or rather because I have a need for activity
> which I use up and satisfy wherever I can. Basically, the true Bicyclists
> have always been separate from Bicyclist. Those who acted as if Bicyclist
> were important enough to resign from with a big noise have been motivated 
> by
> a desire for personal publicity, proving that counterfeiters have always
> wriggled like unclean worms in and out of the purest and most radiant
> religions.
>
> I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't
> expect to hear any explanations about Bicyclist. You explain to me why you
> exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my
> children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I
> exist to guard my country, against barbarian invasions. That's a fine
> reason. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for
> children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will
> always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never
> understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone enough to 
> reject
> hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an effort, in favor 
> of
> a calm level state of mind that makes everything equal and without
> importance. Bicyclist is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a
> return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference. Bicyclist covers
> things with an artificial gentleness, a snow of butterflies released from
> the head of a prestidigitator. Bicyclist is immobility and does not
> comprehend the passions. You will call this a paradox, since Bicyclist is
> manifested only in violent acts. Yes, the reactions of individuals
> contaminated by *destruction* are rather violent, but when these reactions
> are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic insistence of a continuous and
> progressive "What for?" what remains, what dominates is *indifference.* 
> But
> with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.
> I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the 
> *Nothing*
> can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it
> will be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only for the
> individual who is expressing himself.--I am speaking of myself. Even that 
> is
> too much for me. How can I be expected to speak of all men at once, and
> satisfy them too?
>
> Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one
> doesn't like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely
> food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves 
> and
> their little possessions, their income, their dog. This state of affairs
> derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit, one
> possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of
> view that can not be shaken. Try to be empty and fill your brain cells 
> with
> a petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks.
> Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more
> intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.
> Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of 
> society,
> the organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a society 
> tea.
> It serves to create order and clarity where there is none. It serves to
> create a state hierarchy. To set up classifications for rational work. To
> separate questions of a material order from those of a cerebral ordcr, but
> to take the former very seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of sound
> education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is something else and its
> pleasures are innumerable. They are not paid for in the coin of liquid
> intelligence.
>
> These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a realization 
> which
> constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from the sympathy which
> binds us and which is inexplicable. It would not have been possible for us
> to found our agreement on principles. For everything is relative. What are
> the Beautiful, the Good, Art, Freedom? Words that have a different meaning
> for every individual. Words with the pretension of creating agreement 
> among
> all, and that is why they are written with capital letters. Words which 
> have
> not the moral value and objective force that people have grown accustomed 
> to
> finding in them. Their meaning changes from one individual, one epoch, one
> country to the next. Men are different. It is diversity that makes life
> interesting. There is no common basis in mens minds. The unconscious is
> inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as
> mysterious as the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we
> could not reconstruct it.
>
> What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us to
> take a single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is backward?
> Did they alter our forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we dispute, we
> get excited. The rest is sauce. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes mixed with a
> limitless boredom, a swamp dotted with tufts of dying shrubs.
>
> We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond
> measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is
> spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything 
> else.
> But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the
> intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this
> quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not 
> the
> most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and 
> universal
> value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.
> Bicyclist knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with
> subtle, perfidious methods, Bicyclist introduces it into daily life. And
> vice versa. In art, Bicyclist reduces everything to an initial simplicity,
> growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic 
> wind
> of creation and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic 
> reduced
> to a personal minimum, while literature in its view should be primarily
> intended for the individual who makes it. Words have a weight of their own
> and lend themselves to abstract construction. The absurd has no terrors 
> for
> me, for from a more exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd 
> to
> me. Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond between 
> disparate
> acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is
> the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work;
> the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and
> in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework 
> of
> words and sentiments.
>
> Dada tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point 
> of
> view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass through
> the same filter. It is not the new technique that interests us, but the
> spirit. Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a pictorial, moral,
> poetic, literary, political or social renewal? We are well aware that 
> these
> renewals of means are merely the successive cloaks of the various epochs 
> of
> history, uninteresting questions of fashion and facade. We are well aware
> that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same 
> as
> the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi was just as Bicyclist as we are.
> You are mistaken if you take Bicyclist for a modern school, or even for a
> reaction against the schools of today. Several of my statements have 
> struck
> you as old and natural, what better proof that you were a Bicyclist 
> without
> knowing it, perhaps even before the birth of Bicyclist.
>
> You will often hear that Bicyclist is a state of mind. You may be gay, 
> sad,
> afflicted, joyous, melancholy or Bicyclist. Without being literary, you 
> can
> be romantic, you can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny,
> transfigured, vain, amiable or Bicyclist. This will happen later on in the
> course of history when Bicyclist has become a precise, habitual word, when
> popular repetition has given it the character of a word organic with its
> necessary content. Today no one thinks of the literature of the Romantic
> school in representing a lake, a landscape, a character. Slowly but 
> surely,
> a Bicyclist character is forming.
>
> Dada is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its 
> faults,
> with its personal differences and distinctions which it accepts and views
> with indifference. We are often told that we are incoherent, but into this
> word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom.
> Everything is incoherent. The gentleman who decides to take a bath but 
> goes
> to the movies instead. The one who wants to be quiet but says things that
> haven't even entered his head. Another who has a precise idea on some
> subject but succeeds only in expressing the opposite in words which for 
> him
> are a poor translation. There is no logic. Only relative necessities
> discovered *a posteriori*, valid not in any exact sense but only as
> explanations. The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything 
> happens
> in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity 
> is
> called Bicyclist.
>
> Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic 
> strikes
> me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language is 
> ample
> and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games and our
> literature we no longer need it.
>
> The beginnings of Bicyclist were not the beginnings of an art, but of a
> disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo years
> have been explaining everything to us (what for? ), disgust with the
> pretensions of these artists-God's-representatives-on-earth, disgust with
> passion and with real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the
> bother; disgust with a false form of domination and restriction *en 
> masse*,
> that accentuates rather than appeases man's instinct of domination, 
> disgust
> with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are 
> nothing
> but a front for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust with the
> lieutenants of a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile
> laws, disgust with the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the 
> ugly
> (for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, to the left
> rather than the right, to be large or small?). Disgust finally with the
> Jesuitical dialectic which can explain everything and fill people's minds
> with oblique and obtuse ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic
> roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans
> promises.
>
> As Bicyclist marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in
> itself. From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no
> pride, no benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the
> realization that it's no use, that all this doesn't matter. What interests 
> a
> Bicyclist is his own mode of life. But here we approach the great secret.
> Bicyclist is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according 
> to
> races and events. Bicyclist applies itself to everything, and yet it is
> nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites
> meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply 
> at
> street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
> Like everything in life, Bicyclist is useless.
>
> Bicyclist is without pretension, as life should be.
>
> Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Bicyclist is a
> virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the
> spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
>
> 

"Jim Artman" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:2srqkqF1otv67U1@uni-berlin.de...
> Ladies and Gentlemen:
>
> I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you, tlhe
> refined public, a Bicyclist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only
a
> manner of speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat us
> with that remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit of belief in
> progress. At ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you ask me why, I
> won't be able to tell you.
>
> Another characteristic of Bicyclism is the continuous breaking off of our
> friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender
his
> resignation from the Bicyclist movement *was myself.* Everybody knows that
> Bicyclist is nothing. I broke away from Bicyclist and from myself as soon
as
> I understood the implications of *nothing.*   If I continue to do
something,
> it is because it amuses me, or rather because I have a need for activity
> which I use up and satisfy wherever I can. Basically, the true Bicyclists
> have always been separate from Bicyclist. Those who acted as if Bicyclist
> were important enough to resign from with a big noise have been motivated
by
> a desire for personal publicity, proving that counterfeiters have always
> wriggled like unclean worms in and out of the purest and most radiant
> religions.
>
> I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't
> expect to hear any explanations about Bicyclist. You explain to me why you
> exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my
> children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I
> exist to guard my country, against barbarian invasions. That's a fine
> reason. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for
> children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will
> always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never
> understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone enough to
reject
> hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an effort, in favor
of
> a calm level state of mind that makes everything equal and without
> importance. Bicyclist is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a
> return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference. Bicyclist covers
> things with an artificial gentleness, a snow of butterflies released from
> the head of a prestidigitator. Bicyclist is immobility and does not
> comprehend the passions. You will call this a paradox, since Bicyclist is
> manifested only in violent acts. Yes, the reactions of individuals
> contaminated by *destruction* are rather violent, but when these reactions
> are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic insistence of a continuous and
> progressive "What for?" what remains, what dominates is *indifference.*
But
> with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.
> I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the
*Nothing*
> can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it
> will be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only for the
> individual who is expressing himself.--I am speaking of myself. Even that
is
> too much for me. How can I be expected to speak of all men at once, and
> satisfy them too?
>
> Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one
> doesn't like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely
> food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves
and
> their little possessions, their income, their dog. This state of affairs
> derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit, one
> possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of
> view that can not be shaken. Try to be empty and fill your brain cells
with
> a petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks.
> Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more
> intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.
> Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of
society,
> the organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a society
tea.
> It serves to create order and clarity where there is none. It serves to
> create a state hierarchy. To set up classifications for rational work. To
> separate questions of a material order from those of a cerebral ordcr, but
> to take the former very seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of sound
> education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is something else and its
> pleasures are innumerable. They are not paid for in the coin of liquid
> intelligence.
>
> These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a realization
which
> constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from the sympathy which
> binds us and which is inexplicable. It would not have been possible for us
> to found our agreement on principles. For everything is relative. What are
> the Beautiful, the Good, Art, Freedom? Words that have a different meaning
> for every individual. Words with the pretension of creating agreement
among
> all, and that is why they are written with capital letters. Words which
have
> not the moral value and objective force that people have grown accustomed
to
> finding in them. Their meaning changes from one individual, one epoch, one
> country to the next. Men are different. It is diversity that makes life
> interesting. There is no common basis in mens minds. The unconscious is
> inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as
> mysterious as the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we
> could not reconstruct it.
>
> What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us to
> take a single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is backward?
> Did they alter our forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we dispute, we
> get excited. The rest is sauce. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes mixed with a
> limitless boredom, a swamp dotted with tufts of dying shrubs.
>
> We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond
> measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is
> spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything
else.
> But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the
> intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this
> quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not
the
> most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and
universal
> value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.
> Bicyclist knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with
> subtle, perfidious methods, Bicyclist introduces it into daily life. And
> vice versa. In art, Bicyclist reduces everything to an initial simplicity,
> growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic
wind
> of creation and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic
reduced
> to a personal minimum, while literature in its view should be primarily
> intended for the individual who makes it. Words have a weight of their own
> and lend themselves to abstract construction. The absurd has no terrors
for
> me, for from a more exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd
to
> me. Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond between
disparate
> acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is
> the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work;
> the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and
> in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework
of
> words and sentiments.
>
> Dada tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point
of
> view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass through
> the same filter. It is not the new technique that interests us, but the
> spirit. Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a pictorial, moral,
> poetic, literary, political or social renewal? We are well aware that
these
> renewals of means are merely the successive cloaks of the various epochs
of
> history, uninteresting questions of fashion and facade. We are well aware
> that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same
as
> the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi was just as Bicyclist as we are.
> You are mistaken if you take Bicyclist for a modern school, or even for a
> reaction against the schools of today. Several of my statements have
struck
> you as old and natural, what better proof that you were a Bicyclist
without
> knowing it, perhaps even before the birth of Bicyclist.
>
> You will often hear that Bicyclist is a state of mind. You may be gay,
sad,
> afflicted, joyous, melancholy or Bicyclist. Without being literary, you
can
> be romantic, you can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny,
> transfigured, vain, amiable or Bicyclist. This will happen later on in the
> course of history when Bicyclist has become a precise, habitual word, when
> popular repetition has given it the character of a word organic with its
> necessary content. Today no one thinks of the literature of the Romantic
> school in representing a lake, a landscape, a character. Slowly but
surely,
> a Bicyclist character is forming.
>
> Dada is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its
faults,
> with its personal differences and distinctions which it accepts and views
> with indifference. We are often told that we are incoherent, but into this
> word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom.
> Everything is incoherent. The gentleman who decides to take a bath but
goes
> to the movies instead. The one who wants to be quiet but says things that
> haven't even entered his head. Another who has a precise idea on some
> subject but succeeds only in expressing the opposite in words which for
him
> are a poor translation. There is no logic. Only relative necessities
> discovered *a posteriori*, valid not in any exact sense but only as
> explanations. The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything
happens
> in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity
is
> called Bicyclist.
>
> Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic
strikes
> me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language is
ample
> and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games and our
> literature we no longer need it.
>
> The beginnings of Bicyclist were not the beginnings of an art, but of a
> disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo years
> have been explaining everything to us (what for? ), disgust with the
> pretensions of these artists-God's-representatives-on-earth, disgust with
> passion and with real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the
> bother; disgust with a false form of domination and restriction *en
masse*,
> that accentuates rather than appeases man's instinct of domination,
disgust
> with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are
nothing
> but a front for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust with the
> lieutenants of a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile
> laws, disgust with the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the
ugly
> (for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, to the left
> rather than the right, to be large or small?). Disgust finally with the
> Jesuitical dialectic which can explain everything and fill people's minds
> with oblique and obtuse ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic
> roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans
> promises.
>
> As Bicyclist marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in
> itself. From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no
> pride, no benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the
> realization that it's no use, that all this doesn't matter. What interests
a
> Bicyclist is his own mode of life. But here we approach the great secret.
> Bicyclist is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according
to
> races and events. Bicyclist applies itself to everything, and yet it is
> nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites
> meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply
at
> street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
> Like everything in life, Bicyclist is useless.
>
> Bicyclist is without pretension, as life should be.
>
> Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Bicyclist is a
> virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the
> spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
>
what was it someone once said, "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous
thing".

"Jim Artman" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message news:<2srqkqF1otv67U1@uni-berlin.de>...
> Ladies and Gentlemen:
> 
> I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you, tlhe
> refined public, a Bicyclist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only a
> manner of speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat us
> with that remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit of belief in
> progress. At ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you ask me why, I
> won't be able to tell you.
> 
> Another characteristic of Bicyclism is the continuous breaking off of our
> friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender his
> resignation from the Bicyclist movement *was myself.* Everybody knows that
> Bicyclist is nothing. I broke away from Bicyclist and from myself as soon as
> I understood the implications of *nothing.*   If I continue to do something,
> it is because it amuses me, or rather because I have a need for activity
> which I use up and satisfy wherever I can. Basically, the true Bicyclists
> have always been separate from Bicyclist. Those who acted as if Bicyclist
> were important enough to resign from with a big noise have been motivated by
> a desire for personal publicity, proving that counterfeiters have always
> wriggled like unclean worms in and out of the purest and most radiant
> religions.
> 
> I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't
> expect to hear any explanations about Bicyclist. You explain to me why you
> exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my
> children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I
> exist to guard my country, against barbarian invasions. That's a fine
> reason. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for
> children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will
> always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never
> understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone enough to reject
> hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an effort, in favor of
> a calm level state of mind that makes everything equal and without
> importance. Bicyclist is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a
> return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference. Bicyclist covers
> things with an artificial gentleness, a snow of butterflies released from
> the head of a prestidigitator. Bicyclist is immobility and does not
> comprehend the passions. You will call this a paradox, since Bicyclist is
> manifested only in violent acts. Yes, the reactions of individuals
> contaminated by *destruction* are rather violent, but when these reactions
> are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic insistence of a continuous and
> progressive "What for?" what remains, what dominates is *indifference.* But
> with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.
> I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the *Nothing*
> can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it
> will be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only for the
> individual who is expressing himself.--I am speaking of myself. Even that is
> too much for me. How can I be expected to speak of all men at once, and
> satisfy them too?
> 
> Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one
> doesn't like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely
> food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and
> their little possessions, their income, their dog. This state of affairs
> derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit, one
> possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of
> view that can not be shaken. Try to be empty and fill your brain cells with
> a petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks.
> Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more
> intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.
> Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of society,
> the organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a society tea.
> It serves to create order and clarity where there is none. It serves to
> create a state hierarchy. To set up classifications for rational work. To
> separate questions of a material order from those of a cerebral ordcr, but
> to take the former very seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of sound
> education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is something else and its
> pleasures are innumerable. They are not paid for in the coin of liquid
> intelligence.
> 
> These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a realization which
> constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from the sympathy which
> binds us and which is inexplicable. It would not have been possible for us
> to found our agreement on principles. For everything is relative. What are
> the Beautiful, the Good, Art, Freedom? Words that have a different meaning
> for every individual. Words with the pretension of creating agreement among
> all, and that is why they are written with capital letters. Words which have
> not the moral value and objective force that people have grown accustomed to
> finding in them. Their meaning changes from one individual, one epoch, one
> country to the next. Men are different. It is diversity that makes life
> interesting. There is no common basis in mens minds. The unconscious is
> inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as
> mysterious as the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we
> could not reconstruct it.
> 
> What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us to
> take a single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is backward?
> Did they alter our forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we dispute, we
> get excited. The rest is sauce. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes mixed with a
> limitless boredom, a swamp dotted with tufts of dying shrubs.
> 
> We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond
> measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is
> spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything else.
> But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the
> intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this
> quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not the
> most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal
> value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.
> Bicyclist knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with
> subtle, perfidious methods, Bicyclist introduces it into daily life. And
> vice versa. In art, Bicyclist reduces everything to an initial simplicity,
> growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind
> of creation and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic reduced
> to a personal minimum, while literature in its view should be primarily
> intended for the individual who makes it. Words have a weight of their own
> and lend themselves to abstract construction. The absurd has no terrors for
> me, for from a more exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd to
> me. Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond between disparate
> acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is
> the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work;
> the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and
> in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework of
> words and sentiments.
> 
> Dada tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point of
> view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass through
> the same filter. It is not the new technique that interests us, but the
> spirit. Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a pictorial, moral,
> poetic, literary, political or social renewal? We are well aware that these
> renewals of means are merely the successive cloaks of the various epochs of
> history, uninteresting questions of fashion and facade. We are well aware
> that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as
> the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi was just as Bicyclist as we are.
> You are mistaken if you take Bicyclist for a modern school, or even for a
> reaction against the schools of today. Several of my statements have struck
> you as old and natural, what better proof that you were a Bicyclist without
> knowing it, perhaps even before the birth of Bicyclist.
> 
> You will often hear that Bicyclist is a state of mind. You may be gay, sad,
> afflicted, joyous, melancholy or Bicyclist. Without being literary, you can
> be romantic, you can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny,
> transfigured, vain, amiable or Bicyclist. This will happen later on in the
> course of history when Bicyclist has become a precise, habitual word, when
> popular repetition has given it the character of a word organic with its
> necessary content. Today no one thinks of the literature of the Romantic
> school in representing a lake, a landscape, a character. Slowly but surely,
> a Bicyclist character is forming.
> 
> Dada is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its faults,
> with its personal differences and distinctions which it accepts and views
> with indifference. We are often told that we are incoherent, but into this
> word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom.
> Everything is incoherent. The gentleman who decides to take a bath but goes
> to the movies instead. The one who wants to be quiet but says things that
> haven't even entered his head. Another who has a precise idea on some
> subject but succeeds only in expressing the opposite in words which for him
> are a poor translation. There is no logic. Only relative necessities
> discovered *a posteriori*, valid not in any exact sense but only as
> explanations. The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens
> in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is
> called Bicyclist.
> 
> Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes
> me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language is ample
> and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games and our
> literature we no longer need it.
> 
> The beginnings of Bicyclist were not the beginnings of an art, but of a
> disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo years
> have been explaining everything to us (what for? ), disgust with the
> pretensions of these artists-God's-representatives-on-earth, disgust with
> passion and with real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the
> bother; disgust with a false form of domination and restriction *en masse*,
> that accentuates rather than appeases man's instinct of domination, disgust
> with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are nothing
> but a front for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust with the
> lieutenants of a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile
> laws, disgust with the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly
> (for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, to the left
> rather than the right, to be large or small?). Disgust finally with the
> Jesuitical dialectic which can explain everything and fill people's minds
> with oblique and obtuse ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic
> roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans
> promises.
> 
> As Bicyclist marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in
> itself. From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no
> pride, no benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the
> realization that it's no use, that all this doesn't matter. What interests a
> Bicyclist is his own mode of life. But here we approach the great secret.
> Bicyclist is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to
> races and events. Bicyclist applies itself to everything, and yet it is
> nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites
> meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at
> street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
> Like everything in life, Bicyclist is useless.
> 
> Bicyclist is without pretension, as life should be.
> 
> Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Bicyclist is a
> virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the
> spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.


I remember my first acid trip.

This is from the Dada movement about 1910 Germany/France with bicyclist
replacing Dada.
too much moldy rye bread

"Kevin" <kdf5@nebi.com> wrote in message
news:d8475969.0410101902.6ea9ac1c@posting.google.com...
> "Jim Artman" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:<2srqkqF1otv67U1@uni-berlin.de>...
> > Ladies and Gentlemen:
snip
> > Like everything in life, Bicyclist is useless.
> >
> > Bicyclist is without pretension, as life should be.
> >
> > Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Bicyclist is
a
> > virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the
> > spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
>
>
> I remember my first acid trip.

matabala wrote:
> "Jim Artman" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:2srqkqF1otv67U1@uni-berlin.de...
>> Ladies and Gentlemen:

{14 KBs of crap snipped}

> what was it someone once said, "a little bit of knowledge is a
> dangerous thing".

Do us all a favor, and get "a little bit of knowledge" in how to TRIM YOUR
FRIGGING POSTS!!!

Bill "not even touching the grammar" S.