man is a beautiful dream

Hans Arp's "Notes From a Diary," excerpted from The Vertical Age, was written in 1932. It addresses an early 20th century movement, dada. To call dada a political movement or an art movement limits our understanding of its aims and of its long-lasting effects. dada was foment. It was organized unrest, purposeful disorganization, intentional chaos, an analysis of and a prescription for contemporary society, instructions for a breakdown, recipes for deconstruction, a self-critique. Perhaps it constituted the opening gesture of - capital D - Deconstruction. dada was close examination in a myopic era. dadaist Georges Hugnet, in The Spirit of Dada Painting (1932), writes:

"Dada is ageless. . .it is always present--behind every word. It undermines established institutions. Suddenly Dada speaks and abundantly and there is an enduring silence, so enduring that suddenly and progressively sounds cease to be words, and in the morning there is new thought without confusion or expectation. A cave thought, an unfolding omen, a symbol in which experience has no past. Dada rebels against itself, it destroys itself at will, it sees red, and its despair is without genius. It has no hope, everything is identified with everything else, there are no degrees of good and evil, there is only consciousness."

"Dada is a state of mind."

dada challenged belief in what the eye beholds, in what the hand touches. We declaim, "That's the way it is." And if we believe in surface realities - and we all do or we would never make it through a tollbooth - if we believe in a fraction of the reality that we contribute to on a daily basis (depositing a check, turning on the news, going to the grocery store), then we believe in an entire framework, constructed by us, for us.

Have you ever tried to envision your neighborhood as it was before you got there? Before your parents got there? Before Columbus? Before "before Columbus"? Have you considered razing the buildings, banning vehicles, pavement and people, and letting the vegetation back in? Have you ever longed for a glimpse of how things used to be? If you long for what was, then you long for what still is. It is only buried beneath your current cemented reality. It has not gone away. It waits for your demise.

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In "Notes From a Diary," Arp longs for the demise of Modern Man. His contempt for Modern Man is visceral:

"spiders flee into the cracks in the earth in the face of man's ugliness and human thinking. from his eight curl-ringed holes he shoots off a lot of hot air. . . .when man thinks and jaws even the rats have to vomit."

Why do the rats have to vomit? Why does nature despise us? Why does Modern Man disgust Arp?

"the safe deposit vault replaces the may night. how sweetly and plaintively the
nightingale sings down there while man is studying the stock-market."

What is the stock market? Where is the stock market?

"man takes for red today what he took for green yesterday and what is in reality
black. every moment he emits final explanations about life man and art and
knows no more than the stink-mushroom what life man and art are"

Arp's contempt for the contrivances of man extends even to the use of punctuation - a system devised by man to control meaning through tempo; to limit variation; to exert a format - a format that he almost entirely forgoes.

"it is impossible for [man] to comprehend as art anything other than a landscape
with vinegar and oil or a lady's shanks cast in marble or bronze"

Formats comfort man - offer some reassurance that he indeed has some control over something and, moreover, that his influence is significant. Play by the rules that you have created and you will at least rest within the bounds of something. Never mind how flimsy that something may be. If you are in your bed dreaming of the countryside in summer while an intruder climbs your stairs, how secure are you within the bounds of your dreaming? Would you sleep through your own murder?

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Arp seems most appalled, not by Modern Man's dreaming, but by the efforts he makes to remain asleep: "only as a murderer is man creative." Arp does not challenge all reality, he doesn't challenge real reality, but the reality we have complacently come to trust.

"reason tells man to stand above nature and to be the measure of all things. Thus
man thinks he is able to live and create against the laws of nature and he creates abortions."

This man.

"through reason man became a tragic and ugly figure."

"reason has cut man off from nature."

"we must smash the toys of these gentlemen said the dadaists in order that the lousy materialists can recognize on the ruins what is essential."

This man. This modern Job. His redemption: dada.

"dada wanted to change the perceptible world of man today into a senseless world
without reason. . . .dada washed out the venus of milo and made it possible for laocoon and sons after a struggle of a thousand years with the rattle snake to at last step out for a moment. their worn out tooth brushes were restituted to the great benefactors of the people and their vocabulary of wisdom was revealed as a hieroglyph for greed and murder."

What is our hieroglyph? What is your hieroglyph? Do you struggle to find cruelty-free products? Do you watch "Cribs"? Do you read The New York Times? Or The Wall Street Journal? Do you read? Or, do you watch? How many billboards accosted you today? Are you aware of their residue? Have you ever eaten when you weren't hungry? Why? The wealthiest nation ever survives on a diet of want. We are broke, so we send ourselves rebate checks. Not to pay our bills, but to spend. We are to spend our way to salvation.

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But Arp does not engage us at this level. He does not scrutinize the minutia. We do that ad nauseum to him. He does not seek another rationale or reasoned approach to understanding current rationales:

"dada is for nonsense. Which does not mean bunk. dada is as senseless as nature and life. dada is for nature and against art."

The most important, seminal art movement of the 20th century (and here great and learned debate will ensue) - the most important, seminal art movement of the 20th century - sought its own destruction.

Not really. He states that dada is against art, but also that

"art and the dream represent the preliminary step to the true collectivity of the redemption from all reason."

He continues:

"i understand that [man] should call a cubist picture abstract because parts have been abstracted from the object which served as pretext for the picture. but a picture or a plastic for which no object was pretexted i find as concrete and as perceptible as a leaf or a stone."

"i love nature but not its substitute."

"illusionistic art is a substitute for nature."

Why would someone opposed to the distancing of humankind from nature also oppose the rendering of nature? Would such a position not call for a glorification of the natural world? A fixation on it? The attempt to capture it? It is the very notion that man can capture nature that offends. If any "nature" is to be "captured" it should be man's own and what better representation of human-ness exists than the ability to engage in abstract thought?

How so? Well, abstraction is evidence of human-mindedness. (As far as we can tell.) Dogs do not add and subtract. But we do. Abstract thought is a fact. And it appears exclusive to humans. What better means exists of expressing man's basic nature, what better way of connecting him back to his own nature - to nature itself - than abstraction?

"the seven head lengths of beauty have been cut off one after the other but nevertheless man acts as if he were a being that exists outside of nature."

Never mind your pretty skill in rendering what rests outside yourself. Your picture of fruit portrays your desire to control the environment you inhabit, to capture it, to be the god you imagine yourself to be. Instead, create a true self-portrait; a portrait of true self. What does a ruffled collar or top hat say about a man? These things speak to individual arbitrary circumstances. A true self-portrait would reflect a man's nature, his basic common denominator with all of mankind: the ability to communicate in signs.

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Language is dada's principle art form. Arp uses language to portray an unraveling of meaning (or reasonable meaning) to deliver an experience of reason imploding:

"industriously [man] adds seven to black in order to get thereby another hundred pounds of chatter."

"yes yes the earth is not a valley of tears in the vest pocket."

"shamelessly nude clouds without fig leaves or decorations ride past the blue german eyes and lay their eggs in heraldic nests."

Hugo Ball wrote the DaDa manifesto in 1916:

"Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means "hobby horse". In German it means "good-bye", "Get off my back", "Be seeing you sometime". In Romanian: "Yes, indeed, you are right, that's it. But of course, yes, definitely, right". And so forth."

"An International word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza."

"How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world's best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr Rubiner, dada Mr Korrodi. Dada Mr Anastasius Lilienstein. In plain language: the hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated. And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality."

"I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m'dada. Dada mhm dada da. It's a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz's words are only two and a half centimetres long."

"It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat miaows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn't let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words."

"Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance."

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And so, language - the emblem and end result of man's aptitude for abstract thought became the target and also the weapon in dada's attack on Modern Man's complacency. dada attacked language from the inside by developing nonsense. In undoing sense.

In a world ordered by reason, nonsense captures one's attention. And at the time of dada's inception, the disjuncture created by non-sensical language reflected the aphasia that supported WWI and social and psychological disjuncture generated by the volume of its violence.

For dada, nonsense was serious business. In Dada Was Not a Farce, written in 1949, Arp writes:

"Madness and murder were rampant when Dada in the year 1916 rose out of the primordial depths in Zurich. The people who were not directly involved in the monstrous madness behaved as if they did not understand what was going on around them. Like stray lambs they looked out into the world with glassy eyes. Dada wanted to frighten mankind out of its pitiful impotence. Dada abominated resignation. To speak only of Dada's confusing unreality and fail to penetrate its transcendent reality, is to render only a worthless fragment of Dada. Dada was not a farce."

"Today's representative of man is only a tiny button on a giant machine."

For dada, reason - a millennia-old marker of mankind's separation from and superiority to nature - was simple arrogance. To maintain the delusion of separation, man constructed a system divorced from the world as it really is. And for the dadaists, the present day manifestation of the culmination of trust in reason, the end result of creating a machine of social systems and monetary gods as a substitute for the organic machine of nature was World War I. Mass mutual suicide. Mass death. A nightmare. Purest proof that the earth is not a "fresh-air resort." Arp writes:

"all bosom friendship and love is a lot of apple sauce. like water off the duck's back so love runs off the human bacon."

Human bacon.
Human fat.
Mortal, visceral terms.

WWI lasted four years, 1914-1918 and delivered more than more than 20 million wounded, more than 20 million deaths worldwide.

Richard Huelsenbeck, mentioned by Hugo Ball in the dada manifesto, wrote:

"We had all left our countries as a result of the war. Ball and I came from Germany, Tzara and Janco from Rumania, Hans Arp from France. We were agreed that the war had been contrived by the various governments for the most autocratic, sordid and materialistic reasons. . .I had escaped by the skin of my teeth from the pursuit of the police myrmidons who, for their so-called patriotic purposes, were massing men in the trenches of Northern France and giving them shells to eat. None of us had much appreciation for the kind of courage it takes to get shot for the idea of a nation which is at best a cartel of pelt merchants and profiteers in leather, a worst a cultural association of psychopaths. . . ."

What happens when the human psyche is ripped open? Today we talk of post-traumatic stress disorder. In the 1940s they called it shell shock. WWI caused a similar psychological disjuncture worldwide. Worldwide nervous dysfunction. A shattering of belief. In the past. A loss of belief in the present. In "the way it is."

At the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud developed the theory of the unconscious - a part of our condition that eludes detection but nonethelss influences our actions and desires - revolutionizing man's image of man. Today, when we unwittingly sabotage a relationship or a job interview, we might say, "I guess I didn't really want it" - a popularized version of the idea that something lurks beneath our surface. That we lurk beneath our own surfaces as Arp's nature sits and waits beneath the parking lot of our consumer-driven idea of "the way it is."

Hans Arp could have been writing from the fallout zone of the Vietnam War or genocide in Rwanda or atomic warfare. He could have been writing today about the sad, disgusting decline of The American Identity. Or, as he would have seen it, the glorious decline of the sad, disgusting American Identity. He was responding to systematic killing and psychological dissolution and blind faith in intellectual machinery, to an ailing society reliant on the very same rationalist mind that was in need of treatment.