Renzo Novatore

 

written under the pseudonym Brunetta the Incendiary

 

“Only Beauty and Force exist, but for balance, louts and weaklings invent Justice.”—Raffaele Valente

    I thought it was a frightening dream and instead it is a bloody reality. I am besieged and suppressed in a double circle of the mad and the possessed.

The world is a pestilent, filthy, slimy church where everyone has an idol to worship as a fetish and an altar on which to sacrifice themselves. Even those who lit the iconoclastic pyre to burn down the cross on which the god-man was nailed, have not yet understood life’s cry or freedom’s howl. After Jesus Christ, from the depths of his legend, spat the bloodiest insult in man’s face, inciting him to deny himself so that he could approach god, the French Revolution came—savage irony—making the very same appeal by proclaiming the “rights of man.”

For Christ and the French Revolution, man is incomplete.

Christ’s cross symbolizes the POSSIBILITY of becoming MAN; the “rights of man” symbolize the same thing.

For the former, it is necessary to become divine to reach perfection, and for the latter, it is necessary to become human.

But both agree in proclaiming the incompleteness of the human-individual, the actual I, affirming that only through the realization of the ideal can man achieve the magic peaks of perfection.

Christ tells you: if you will patiently climb bleak Calvary and be nailed to the cross, becoming MY image, I, the god-man, you will be the perfect human creature worthy to sit on my Father’s right hand in the kingdom of heaven.

And the French Revolution tells you: I have proclaimed the rights of man. If you devoutly enter the cloister of human social justice to sublimate and humanize yourself through the moral canons of social life, you will be a citizen and I will give you your rights, proclaiming you a man. But anyone who’d dare to throw the cross where the god-man hung and the tablets where the rights of man are ominously incised into the flames, to then set the focal axis of their life on the virgin, granite boulder of free force, would be an impious and wicked person against whom the bloody jaws of two sinister phantoms would turn: the jaws of the divine and of the human.

To the right, the sulfurous and everlasting flames of hell that punish SIN, and to the left, the hollow creaking of the guillotine that condemns CRIME.

The cold and dispirited cowardice of human fear, sprouted from the theorization of  a mystical and diseased emotion, could finally triumph over the healthy and primitive, instinctive and spirited INJUSTICE that was merely Force and Beauty, Youth and Daring. So-called progress and so-called civilization, so-called religion and the so-called ideal have locked life in a deadly circle where the most baleful phantoms have built their unctuous realm.

Now is the time to put an end to it! We need to violently break through the circle and escape. If the chimeras of divine legend have had a horrible influence on human history and if human history requires the mutilation of the instinctive-actual man to follow its course: we will rebel against it!

It isn’t our fault if the most purulent drops of pus have spurted from Christ’s symbolic wounds onto humanity’s red light, breeding the corrupting civil rot that proclaimed the rights of man. If men want to rot away in the systematic caverns of social putrefaction, they can settle right in. We won’t be the ones to free them! Rather we are the ones who love the Sun and want to abandon ourselves to the violent passion of its kiss.

 

When I look around me, I get the urge to vomit.

On one side, the scientists who I am supposed to believe so as not to be ignorant. On the other side, the moralists and philosophers, whose commandments I am supposed to accept so as not to be a brute.

Then comes the Genius that I am supposed to glorify and the Hero before whom I am to bow, moved.

Then along come the comrade and the friend, the idealist and the materialist, the atheist and the believer and an infinity horde of defined and undefined apes who want to give me their good advice and finally set me on the true path. Because—of course—the path I walk is false, as my ideas, my thoughts, my entire being are false.

I am a false man. They—poor lunatics—are all obsessed with the idea that life has called them to be priests officiating at the altar of the greatest missions, since humanity is called to the greatest destinies… These poor, pathetic beasts, scarred by sham ideals and transfigured by madness, could never understand the tragic and merry wonder of life, as they could never see that humanity is not really called to any great destiny. If they had understand any of this at all, they would have at least learned that their so-called likes actually have no desire to break their backs bridging the chasm that separates one from the other.

But I am what I am, it doesn’t matter.

And the cawing of these multicolored magpies only serves to brighten up my personal and noble wisdom. Oh, apostolic apes of humanity and social progress, don’t you hear something thundering above your phantoms?

Listen, listen! It is the piercing roar of my wild laughter that is rumbling overhead, in the heights!

 

—from Vertice, Arcola, April 21, 1921