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Translator’s Introduction

An Older Future: Gabriel Alomar’s

El Futurisme (1904)

Ara H. Merjian

MODERNISM / modernity
VOLUME SEVENTEEN,

With fanfare both ceremonious and critical, 2009 witnessed NUMBER TWO, PP 401–420.
the exhumation of an incendiary tract that had demanded to be © 2010 THE JOHNS HOPKINS
buried like a dead letter: the “Founding and Manifesto of Futur- UNIVERSITY PRESS

ism” (1909), which, now a noble manuscript in its own right, has
found itself prodded back into the limelight over the past year
like a reluctant Lazarus.1 The first in a long series of raucous
interventions penned by F. T. Marinetti—poet, publisher, and
tireless promoter—the manifesto appeared on the front page
of Paris’s Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. Seeking to liberate
Italy from its role as Europe’s cultural cemetery—a storehouse
of relics, an open-air museum for the ages—Marinetti proposed
a ruthless purge of his country’s aesthetic and poetic sentimental-
isms. He launched his venture from the most modern of Euro-
pean capitals, in a widely distributed daily; the hurly burly of the Ara H. Merjian is
Assistant Professor
manifesto’s reception duly catapulted his ambitious program onto
of Italian Studies and
the world stage. For all of Marinetti’s famous condemnations of
Art History at New
passéisme, however, the shibboleth of his own movement was, York University. He is
by 1909, already a bit old hat. completing a book on
We might think of 2010, in fact, as marking the incidental Giorgio de Chirico’s
anniversary of a slightly older, less strident, Futurism. On June early cityscapes in the
18, 1904, the Mallorcan poet and journalist Gabriel Alomar light of Nietzschean
philosophy. He has
(1873–1941; Fig. 1) delivered his lengthy lecture, El Futurisme,
taught at Stanford and
to a small audience at Barcelona’s Ateneu (a private literary soci-
Harvard, and is a regu-
ety). The redacted version of his address appeared the following lar critic for Modern
year in the journal l’Avenç (“advance,” “progress”)—an outlet, Painters, Art in America,
as its name would suggest, of Catalan political vanguardism— and Frieze.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

402

Fig. 1. Gabriel Alomar (1873–1941)

before being translated into Castilian and published as a slim volume. Reviews in the
Parisian Mercure de France and other publications further circulated the basic tenets
of El Futurisme, as well as the importunate ambition of its name, throughout some
prominent literary circles.2
Marinetti likely first caught wind of Alomar’s essay through Marcel Robin’s sub-
stantial 1908 review in the Mercure, a journal that Marinetti—like the better part of
forward-thinking individuals in turn-of-the-century Paris—read avidly, and to which
he occasionally contributed. This fact was not lost on Alomar, who reacted vehemently
against the expropriation of his title, accusing Marinetti, in March 1909, of plagiarism.3
At the latter’s professed ignorance of Alomar’s essay, the Spanish poet Ruben Darío
insisted, already in 1909, that the Italian impresario recognize “the priority of the word
if not the entire doctrine.”4 It remains impossible to verify the extent to which Marinetti
availed himself of El Futurisme or its subsequent translations and reiterations.5 The
tracing of Alomar’s potential influence on Marinetti will necessarily remain specula-
tive. Since Lily Litvak resurrected Alomar’s text from relative oblivion a few decades
ago, however, scholars have squared off as to the extent of Marinetti’s indebtedness to
the Catalan’s precedent.6
 MERJIAN / “an older future: gabriel alomar’s el futurisme (1904)”
Alomar’s text did not prefigure Marinetti’s Futurist venture in any prescriptive, or 403
even descriptive, sense. To be sure, the Catalan’s Futurists are notably “hyperaesthetic,”
and he insists upon poetry and art as the only possible vehicles of social and political
renewal. Yet he is not eager to adumbrate what his “future” will look like, nor to dis-
articulate and reconfigure—as Marinetti would—the very terms in which it might be
conceived, conveyed, or hastened. The rupture with academic dogma and religious
fetishism, Alomar promises, will entail a certain violence. But the look and feel of that
violence in his figurations—manifested as a butterfly shrugging off its chrysalis, for
instance—seem naïve compared with the hard-bitten sneers of the century’s modernism
that followed. Even when Alomar excoriates the encrusted institutions that his futurists
would vanquish, his language remains eminently civil in tone, texture, and lilt. As Marcel
Robin noted in his early review in the Mercure, while the rhapsodic energy of Alomar’s
language is stirring, the dimensions of his particular “future” remain elusive.7
Alomar’s invectives against “the catacombs of pedantic erudition,” and “our putrid
educational system” stand, perhaps, as his most proto-Marinettian pronouncements—
echoed in countless Italian tirades against “the despotism of pedantic academies,” and
“the virus of routine, of imitation and pedantry.”8 Likewise Alomar’s harsh critique of
the Church—and its hold on education in Spain and Catalonia (and, thus, his native
Mallorca)—anticipates Marinetti’s violent denunciations of clericalism in both rhetoric
and tone. The regeneration of Catalonian culture in particular significantly subtends
Alomar’s project. His Futurisme, in short, is inseparable from his catalanisme. To a great
extent, he conceived of the former as a handmaiden to the latter.9 As Jordi Castellanos
has argued, Alomar helped to reconfigure the very concept of catalanisme, from a
retardataire dogma “opposed to modernity,” to a youth-driven sensibility increasingly
in sync with a burgeoning literary avant-garde.10
Any comparison with Marinetti’s writing is conditioned not only by the texts’ dif-
ferent formats and figurations, but also by the divergent trajectories that they carved
out for their respective authors. Alomar’s essay inspired the founding of a few journals
under the (somewhat amorphous) designation of Futurisme, as early as 1907. Though
Alomar contributed to their short runs, his address at the Ateneu did not usher in a
larger movement, whether aesthetic or political. As his project became rather quickly su-
perseded by the increasingly reactionary impulses of Catalan Noucentisme—headed by
Eugeni d’Ors after 1906—Alomar channeled his own energies into more wide-ranging
journalistic pursuits. Marinetti, by contrast, dedicated his entire life to the develop-
ment of Futurism, as both an exponentially interdisciplinary enterprise and a political
program. Whereas that program found an afterlife in—indeed, served as an animating
prolepsis to—Italian Fascism, Alomar’s writings were largely shirked not only by d’Ors’s
conservative agenda, but also by the dictatorships that followed.11 Marinetti agitated
unabashedly for Italian colonial expansion. The same year as he penned El Futurisme,
Alomar, by contrast, dedicated an entire work to the defense of Algeria against French
colonialism.12 Alomar repeatedly disavows a facile nationalism in El Futurisme, taking
pains at every turn to inflect his Catalanism with conditions and caveats.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

404 Despite its extensive appeals to a renewed poetic sensibility, El Futurisme stands
more as a treatise on political economy than an aesthetic manifesto, more a humanist
homily than a proposed transvaluation of language itself. Its language represents, in
fact, a hodgepodge of various nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century modes (transcen-
dentalist, theosophic, and anthroposophic), shot through as much as with lingering
Enlightenment principles as with anti-positivist, Bergsonian inflections. For Alomar,
Giosuè Carducci’s “Hymn to Satan” still epitomized radical defiance; Marinetti and his
cohorts dismissed the same poetry as “nostalgically monotonous weepy”—the epitome
of passéisme, despite its ostensible iconoclasm.13 While Alomar rejects as deficient
the wan, “plaster model” of man cast by nature, he figures its futurist foil as a marble
statue—a metaphor inimical to Marinetti’s mechanized poetics, even constitutive of
its chief anathema.14 Even—or especially—in his Parnassian (and often pompier)
hyperbole, Alomar unwittingly caricatures certain nineteenth-century tropes and af-
fectations.15 What Norbert Bilbeny calls Alomar’s “republican radicalism,” and what
Joan Ramon Resina dubs his “positivist libertarianism,” unfurls in a Whitmanesque
blend of fiery defiance and quixotic utopianism.16 By whatever name we call it—aside
from Futurism—some form of dynamic liberalism appeared to Alomar as an exciting
political prospect. The very yoking of these binaries seemed, to Marinetti and his ilk,
a ridiculous prospect by the end of the century’s first decade. It is precisely Alomar’s
lingering ingenuousness that now spares his text any suspicion of bad faith.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the tension between Alomar’s aims and his somewhat
outmoded stylistics invites the dismissal of his Futurisme as revealing simply a “vaguely
modernizing curiosity.”17 Even the great modernist, Catalan poet, J. V. Foix would later
describe Alomar’s writing as politically adventurous, but “anachronistic” in a literary
sense.18 Still, to chalk up Alomar’s text as “insufficiently modern” is to forget what
passed muster as modern at the turn of the century, to disavow the shifting conditions
of modernity—and its modernist foils—as they took shape.19 As Resina notes, innova-
tion and historicism were inextricably intertwined in modernist discourse at the turn
of the century. Consider, in this vein, Nietzsche’s deliberations on history’s “Uses and
Disadvantages” (which, not coincidentally, earned him Marinetti’s categorical dis-
missal as a crusty “Academic Professor,” the philosopher’s most radical blasphemies
notwithstanding).20 El Futurisme, for its part, is as elegiac as it is exhortative. Alomar
never posits the future—and the rupture that will usher it in—as entirely divested
of the forces that brought about its becoming. “Tradition,” he writes, “is a supremely
powerful cultural element, since, as you well know, no man may boast of the complete
invention of any idea or method.” As Daniel Cottom has recently argued, Marinetti’s
embrace of a misanthropic, mechanized poetics of anti-individualism—which literal-
ized and fetishized novelty as a technological revolution, a notion entirely absent from
Alomar’s purview—often betrays a fundamentally anachronistic sensibility, quite in
spite of his intentions.21
Conversely, some of Alomar’s earliest expositors claimed to spy another affect be-
neath his ostensibly humanist logos. “Alomar,” Marcel Robin declared in his Mercure
review, “is better armed for negative criticism, for offensive combat rather than the
 MERJIAN / “an older future: gabriel alomar’s el futurisme (1904)”
investiture of some impossible peace in his chimerical city; an anarchist should occupy 405
himself solely with destruction.”22 According to Robin, Alomar’s rhetoric of synthesis,
of collaborative construction, gives the lie to some fundamentally iconoclastic—even
“anarchic”—tendencies. This seems more the projection of contemporary French
anxieties than the discernment of any actual political predisposition on Alomar’s behalf.
Alomar’s anarchic “rebellion” is a rhetorical one, marked more by chivalrous earnest-
ness than any militant machinations. His language insists, again and again, upon the
constructive benefits of meliorist cooperation, based upon “Poetic” intuition and liberal
individualism. Still, while Robin seems slightly off the mark as to the core of Alomar’s
sentiment, he rightly identifies at its heart a dialectical tendency, the nuances of which
become flattened when compared to Marinettian bombast.
In this vein, Alomar’s writing resonates far less with the latter’s scorched-earth
rhetoric, than it does with the Florentine Futurists’ more nuanced approach to the
politics of historicism. The “secular religion of spiritualized nationalism”23 developed
by Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici—beginning around the same years as Alo-
mar’s first Futurist pronouncements, and taking further shape in the journals La Voce
and Lacerba—is rehearsed in terms strikingly similar to Alomar’s.24 The Florentines
actively distinguished their “new sensibility” from Marinetti’s “new technicality”; they
differentiated their “disdain for the cult of the past” from Marinetti’s “disdain for the
past,” tout court.25 Just as Florentine Futurism pursued conflicting Italian and Tuscan
interests, so too Alomar’s text must be considered in the cultural, ideological, and epis-
temological contexts out of which it developed and to which it contributed. Indeed,
El Futurisme need not be held hostage—whether nominally or notionally, politically
or poetically—to its disparities from any other iteration of “futurism.” Aside from
its importance to the fitful developments of twentieth-century Catalan and Spanish
culture, and its unclassifiable resistance to various categorical imperatives (whether
modernisme, noucentisme, or unreconstructed catalanisme), the text merits further
consideration as a tract on its own terms. It is hoped that the present rendering—the
first substantial translation in English, to my knowledge—will at the very least afford
Alomar’s writing more scholarly attention in the Anglo-American world.
The pyrotechnics that have accompanied the centenary of Italian Futurism have
passed over Alomar with barely a sound. If we are to take him at his word, he would
have preferred at least some earnest refutation to utter silence. “Oh, the supreme
delight that our sons may contradict us!” reads one of the last lines of El Futurisme.
This invitation to the funeral of his Futurisme, even as he pens its birth announce-
ment, envies little of Marinetti’s summons for new generations to bury his movement
in its turn. More than a hundred years on, however, Alomar’s self-effacing cadences
ring with far more sincerity.

A note on the translation

The translation is based upon Alomar’s 1905 text (Fig. 2), written in Catalan,
reprinted in Gabriel Alomar, Obres Completes de Gabriel Alomar, Volume II; El
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

406

V
Fig. 2. The cover of the published Catalan text of Alomar’s El futurisme (1905).

futurisme: seguit del articles d’El poble català, 1904–1906 (Mallorca: Editorial Moll,
2000). I have chosen to omit from the present translation Alomar’s lengthy excursus
on the question of Catalanism, as it deals more specifically (and at times ploddingly)
with internal political economy at the expense of the text’s other, more evocative, and
representative themes.

Notes
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. “When we reach forty, other, younger, and more courageous men will very likely toss us into the
trash can, like useless manuscripts. And that’s what we want!” F. T. Marinetti, “The Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism” (1909), reprinted in F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, Günter Berghaus, ed.,
Doug Thompson, trans. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 15–16.
2. Marcel Robin, “Lettres espagnoles,” Mercure de France, December 1, 1908, 557–59.
 MERJIAN / “an older future: gabriel alomar’s el futurisme (1904)”
3. Gabriel Alomar, “Sportula: El Futurisme a Paris,” El Poble Català, March 9, 1909. Alomar 407
would likely have been horrified to find that even Wikipedia’s Catalan entry on “Futurism” makes no
mention of his precedent, nor even of his existence: <http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurisme> (last
accessed February 1, 2010).
4. Cited in Lily Litvak, “Alomar and Marinetti: Catalan and Italian Futurism,” Revue des Langues
Vivantes 38:6 (1972), 586. As early as 1909, Marinetti peremptorily (and perhaps defensively) averred
that the tag of Futurism had occurred to him “in a flash.” See the preface to Gian Pietro Lucini,
Revolverate (con una Prefazione futurista di F. T. Marinetti) (Milan: Poesia, 1909). He reiterated the
originality of his invention in 1915, writing, “For a moment, I hesitated between the words ‘Dyna-
mism’ and ‘Futurism.’ My Italian blood, however, surged the more strongly when my lips proclaimed
aloud the freshly invented word ‘Futurism.’” Marinetti, Guerra sola igiene del mondo, reprinted as
“Futurism’s First Battles,” in F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, 151.
5. On the details of these various incarnations, see Andrew A. Anderson, “Futurism and Spanish
Literature in the Context of the Historical Avant-Garde,” in Günter Berghaus, ed., International
Futurism in Arts and Literature (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000).
6. A few notable studies—from Lily Litvak’s pioneering essay more than three decades ago, to a
more recent reappraisal by David Bird—have done much to elucidate the affinities and divergences,
both potential and practical, between Alomar’s essay and Marinetti’s numerous Futurist writings. Lily
Litvak argues for the two Futurisms as bearing “identical foundations and aspirations” (Litvak, “Alomar
and Marinetti,” 603). Giuseppe Sansone and, more recently, Andrew Anderson, have argued for their
fundamental difference. For a summary of the polemic, see Anderson, “Futurism and Spanish Litera-
ture,” 153–54. I concur with Joan Ramon Resina’s assessment in “Observaciones sobre la vanguardia
catalana” that, while we cannot exaggerate the affinities between the two authors’ texts, or even their
world views, the insistence to the contrary often comes at “the expense of Alomar’s modernity.” Joan
Ramon Resina, ed., El aeroplano y la estrella: El movimiento de vanguardia en los Países Catalanes,
1904–1936 (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997), 18. David Bird’s recent essay scrupulously
differentiates between the two authors, but admirably refuses, in doing so, to let Alomar’s Futurism
to be “critically subordinated to Marinetti’s Italian one.” In other words, Bird seeks to reverse the
prevalent iteration of Marinetti’s “Futurism” as the originary or paradigmatic one. David Bird, “Dif-
ferentiating Catalan and Italian Futurisms,” Romance Quarterly 55:1 (Winter 2008), 13–27.
7. Marcel Robin, “Lettres espagnoles,” 559.
8. Marinetti, “Futurism, an Interview with Mr. Marinetti in Comoedia,” 19; “The Necessity and
Beauty of Violence,” 63, 69, in F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings.
9. “Catalanism must futurize itself,” Alomar insists toward the end of his polemic. Gabriel Alomar,
El futurisme: seguit del articles d’El poble català, 1904–1906 (Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 2000), 73.
10. See Jordi Castellanos, “Gabriel Alomar i el Modernisme,” in Alomar, El futurisme: seguit del
articles d’El poble català, 1904–1906, 7–39.
11. See David Bird “Unrealized Speculative Models of Cultural Formation in Late 19th and Early
20th Century Spain,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Spring, 2006, University of Kentucky.
12. Gabriel Alomar, Un poble que es mor: Tot passant (Barcelona: Edit. L’Avenç, 1904).
13. See F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, et al., “The Futurist Cinema” (1916), reprinted and translated
in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 217–18.
14. In this regard, the congruence of Alomar’s writing to other European avant-gardists of the period
seems as important as his potential anticipation of—or difference from—Marinetti. Writing during
the very same years from Paris, the expatriate Italian, Ricciotto Canudo, describes a Homo Novus,
and repeatedly insists upon artistic “synthesis” as the only way forward: a gathering of all expression
into the “Temple” of “universality.” Both Canudo and Alomar reveal the same millennial optimism,
verging on the chronically vague, rendered in a new-age language in which grand concepts—Poetry,
Music, Spirit—are capitalized and consecrated as the new (old) crux of society, both Mediterranean
and modern. See Ara H. Merjian, “A Screen for Projection: Ricciotto Canudo’s Exponential Aesthet-
ics and the Parisian Avant-Gardes,” in European Film Theory, Temenuga Trifonova, ed. (London:
Routledge, 2008).
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

408 15. His secularized cry of “non serviam” evinces what Herbert Marcuse has called the “search for
an authentic language” that informed Hegelian dialectic and its “Great Refusal.” See Herbert Marcuse,
“A Note on Dialectic,” originally published in Telos 8 (1960); reprinted in The Essential Frankfurt
School Reader, Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds. (New York: Continuum, 1997), 448.
16. Norbert Bilbeny, Política Noucentista, de Maragall a d’Ors (Catarroja: Editorial Afers, 1999),
chapter four (“The republican radicalism of Gabriel Alomar”); Resina, “Observaciones sobre la van-
guardia catalana,” 15.
17. The term is Joan Ramon Resina’s, paraphrasing those authors dismissive of Alomar’s modern-
ism (Resina, “Observaciones sobre la vanguardia catalana,” 17).
18. Cited in Resina, “Observaciones sobre la vanguardia catalana,” 16–17.
19. Resina, “Observaciones sobre la vanguardia catalana,” 16–17.
20. F. T. Marinetti, “Ce qui nous sépare de Nietzsche” (1912), translated and reprinted as “Against
Academic Teachers,” in F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, 81.
21. David Cottom, “Futurism, Nietzsche, and the Misanthropy of Art,” Common Knowledge 13:1
(Winter 2007), 94.
22. Robin, “Lettres Espagnoles,” 559.
23. Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993), 21.
24. The journal Leonardo, in which Papini, Soffici, and Giuseppe Pressolini first joined forces, was
founded in 1903. Their subsequent efforts toward a “collective project of cultural renewal” evince,
as Walter Adamson’s account of Florentine modernism demonstrates, a fundamental affinity with
Alomar’s rhetoric. Adamson writes, “No word was more important to the message of Leonardo, or
recurred more often in its pages, than ‘renewal’ and its various equivalents: ‘rebirth,’ ‘reawakening,’
‘renaissance,’ ‘regeneration,’ ‘resurgence,’ ‘resurrection.’” Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence, 79. The
same terms mark Alomar’s text at every turn, and to similar ends.
25. See, in particular, Aldo Palazzeschi, Giovanni Papini, and Ardengo Soffici, “Futurismo e
Marinettismo,” Lacerba, 3:7 (February 14, 1915), 49–51; emphasis mine. Alomar would not follow
the Florentines, however, in their eventual “critique of the illusion of democracy,” and their support
for Mussolini’s Fascism. See Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence, 25–6.
Futurism

Gabriel Alomar
Translated by Ara H. Merjian

According to natural law there exist in societies, as in everything else, two elements,
two capital manifestations, two formulas for human expression which would appear to
be impossibly, or at least paradoxically, reconciled. We have here two coexisting worlds,
which perpetually weave history: one, with its gaze turned backward, nourishes itself
on tradition, cherishes its sacred heritage, takes scrupulous care in the conservation of
old tabernacles; from the shadow world of legend it descries the profiles of heroes and
messiahs, and transfigures their primeval exploits into the luminous theater of epic;
it lovingly dusts off the pages of forgotten codices and intones once again the songs
lost in uncharted lands; it refills the waning oil lamps before deserted sanctuaries, and
kneels trembling over the tiles that cover the nameless dust of heroes and saints. Its
spirit drinks from an inexhaustible fount: yesterday. It takes shelter under the wing of an
infinity: the past. Under its impulse old metaphors are converted to dogma; prophetic
words become symbols of ultrahuman truth; the spirit is revealed in the divine form
of letters; habit is consecrated as an intangible right, sealed with the kiss of centuries
immemorial; cold and vulgar formula becomes liturgical rite. This world is the unity
of our collective soul. It has lovingly swaddled us in our infancy and transmitted to us
the sacred word; in an unfamiliar paradise it has assembled the shadows of the fathers
and formed from them a tactile and active personification: the Fatherland. It has gath-
ered together the treasure of the race’s pious visions, all the infantile and rudimentary
explanations of the mysterious, and, dignifying and exalting them, has extracted from
them Religion. This element is, then, a fundamental, indestructible, everlasting part
of the pristine constitution of our lives. Let us put it in more vivid and material terms:
it is the feminine element of human nature.
But note that man suddenly feels a new force stir in the unfathomable depths of his
being. His heart beats with new vigor, and his spirit opens unexpectedly onto an unprec-
edented brightness. Like Zeus who fathered him, man feels Athena burst forth from
his forehead. An instinct of power awakens in his heart and drives him to action. What
kind of action? I believe that in the continual and mysterious becoming of all nature,
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

410 in that millennial operation that transmutes and destroys all things and extracts life
and consciousness from the amorphous confusion of chaos; in that slowest and feverish
universal instability that constitutes the great induction, the highest synthesis of positive
philosophy, which the sages trace through all of life’s laws and manifestations, there
beats a sovereign, primordial impulse, the foundation and touchstone of all movement;
it is the impulse toward personalization, individualization, and diversification.
Who has not felt, in great or small measure, according to the energy immanent to
his nature, that impulse of the self reacting against the impulse of passive reception,
rising up against education, bravely rebuffing common wisdom, courageously pro-
claiming the independence of his own spirit, fearlessly dissenting from the liturgical
chorus of the crowds, demolishing and destroying, scandalizing and terrorizing meek
souls, uprooting the deepest of social structures, and crying in a thunderous voice to
the person still stupefied and half-dead under the protective cobwebs of the family:
Fiat! Be YOURSELF! Be unique! Contradict! Stop being someone else! Cry out and
disturb! Dissent from the multitude! Live!
And thus the individual is born again. But alas, in truth, not all undergo this second
birth. How many there are who remain prisoners of the inextricable web of prejudices,
a priori-isms, dogmas, infused truths, immovable principles, from which are weaved
the common lives of the multitudes. How many failed existences, plaster models cast
by nature in preparation for the final marble creation of true men! How many elemen-
tary spirits that, like birds in the nest, require pre-chewed food to sustain their meager
growth. This is the veritable selection, the great selection of humanity. It is a more
exalted step along the path that rises from man’s unconsciousness to his consciousness;
it is a new—more intimate and perfect—episode in man’s appropriation of nature, as he
moves from mere contemplation to complete possession. The lyrical becomes the prey
of power. And what is the secret to attaining this eclosion or awakening of the soul to a
second sight? It is the discovery of one’s own word, that word we all carry within us, as
an endowment or present from the unknown, from which we have awakened. It is the
skill of identifying in the depth of each individual’s soul his particular coloration, and
presenting it before the iris of humanity as a new facet. It is a new note, never before
intoned, that joins the immense spectrum. It is an unknown mode in the evolution of
the universal spirit.
In this process of personalization there are two moments; a negative moment and
an affirmative moment. One negates the present, and the other more or less distinctly
affirms and formulates the future. Only those who arrive at the second succeed in
clearly perceiving the pace of life. They are the futurists.
Consider that history is a perennial struggle between two forces, two wills: nature
and man. Each time I read that political aphorism, by now showing its age, which
recommends that systems, theories, tendencies and programs always follow the laws
of nature, I have the same reaction. What does this mean? Accommodate ourselves to
nature? Is not nature perchance our great enemy, the great tyrant, who spies on our
every step so as to reabsorb us, awaiting the fatal, ineluctable moment of our fall, to
imbibe new life from our blood? Does nature perchance not supply the heart of man,
 MERJIAN / “an older future: gabriel alomar’s el futurisme (1904)”
of our own brother, with the axe or the mace of the fittest? Does it not keep pain, dis- 411
ease, and death to remind us of its inevitable presence at every station of life? What
is more, we might also ask: to which nature must we accommodate ourselves? The
nature of yesterday, of today, or of tomorrow? For, nature does not have one single
form, but rather infinite forms, and one could very easily appeal to tomorrow’s nature
as opposed to that of today, just as once we appealed to the nature of today as against
that of yesterday.
The entire epic tale of man, from the first farmer and sailor onward, constitutes
a struggle to defeat one adversary, Nature, or to master or to profit from her forces,
facing the eternal danger of their sudden rebellion, their cruel vengeance against
their master. In this cosmic dualism between man and nature, the observer and the
observed, man begins in a state of wonder, trying out his voice, pure and supreme
poetry, which in its eloquent silence comprehends all the forces of Nature. But then
the struggle begins, and while the feeble multitudes deify and worship, the heroes,
those initial select few, engage in the first battles, which in every national legend are
represented in the sculptural feats of Heracles with the Hydra and the Lion, Perseus
and the monster, Theseus and the Minotaur, Siegfried and Fafner, Saint George and
the romantic knights with the dragons and giants of enchantment.
Man’s desire for differentiation from the great Mother is the most ancient of hu-
man traditions. It is so ancient as to merit the name Adamization. Here we have the
best known of symbols, the first Man, surrounded by all the splendors of nature, but
also immersed in them, incapable of full consciousness, his arms useless, his heart
condemned to a monotone and maddening beat, his words inapt for grand expres-
sions. And, here, a dormant impulse begins to beat and to speak to him softly, offering
him light, concept, knowledge. And even this impulse has become personalized in
the germinative, collective fantasy, as Lucifer, or Phosphorous, the light-bearer: he
who wants to know, he who shoots the arrow of reason into the volcanic chasm of the
unknown. It was the Rebellious Angel, the first troublemaker, the first insubordinate,
the first wayward soul, who, at the cost of the greatest sacrifice, the sacrifice of infinite
glory, cried out Non serviam. How could the first patriarch, he who counted among his
powers the future flowering of races and of men, not imitate him? How could he not
boldly embrace his heroic renunciation, shattering the delightful prison of Paradise,
and taking up the endless paths of the earth, and drinking, forever unquenched, from
the springs of delectable bitterness that lie along the way. Nothing will hold him back.
His nails will bleed from the ascension over steep cliffs, but he will see at his feet cit-
ies and lands, which he will enliven with his inspiring and stirring breath; his forehead
will drip over newly-tilled furrows, but his mouth will taste the fruits of unknown
gardens. Age will weigh him down over his future tomb, but his eyes will shine with a
supernatural light, stolen from the supreme light . . . And here we come upon another
of the great symbols in which the eternal struggle takes shape: Prometheus, the clas-
sical incarnation of the great Agon. Man was no longer satisfied to pluck the fruit of
science, but instead, defying earthly truths, he turned his gaze to penetrate the clouds
that cover the dwelling place of the gods. This corresponds to a higher moment of his
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

412 escape from nature’s yoke. The passage from science to poetry. If Adam represented
the protest of humanity, Prometheus personifies that of the individual. And, in the
midst of the horror of his punishment, with his entrails in pieces, he hurls invectives at
rival forces, eternally invincible, and foresees in the haze of the future generations of
men obstinate in their desperate struggle. Ah! In truth: the supreme grandeur of that
obstinacy, of that effort of which all epics are made, lies in its glorious and magnificent
futility, in the absolute certainty that the struggle will never end, and in the fact that
the pleasure savored in battle is sufficient to keep one’s arms moving in the pursuit of
an impossible victory.
But no: victory is not impossible. On the contrary, victory can be had every day,
every hour, every minute. Because you have asked yourself: this struggle between man
and Nature, how can it be? If man is occasionally permitted a triumph, however small,
over nature, it is because that triumph was already something natural, it is because it is
nature’s essence to let itself be apparently defeated by man, and to change the condi-
tions of life, without denaturalizing them, since that would be impossible. Ah! Well,
then: we find here the precise explanation for the principle objective of man’s enduring
work on earth. To shape the earth according to man’s free will; to breathe into it, like
Elohim, the breath of life; to animate it with humanity, to adapt it to human conditions
as one domesticates a wild animal; to humanize and subjugate its forces, to sculpt our
image in the world, in short, to create, attaining in one flight the very status of divinity.
And how can we apply such an effort to life? By never confusing the current and ap-
parent conditions of nature with its potential conditions; never sacrificing tomorrow
to today; never sanctifying states (which are states because they do not move, because
they remain fixed) or attempting to accommodate the incessant process of becoming
to the ideal and the utopic; never judging power by the act nor concluding on the basis
of emphatic induction from the constant analysis of the sages that it is impossible to
undo the most evident laws of the world. Tomorrow is a monster that feeds on the
dismembered body of today, just as today once devoured the corpse of yesterday. Fu-
ture law is, indeed, not always secured from present law, but rather is often produced
in resistance to it, and at the cost of the latter’s destruction. And, above all, we must
have faith in the triumph of our ideal, for if faith moves mountains—according to the
greatest of utopians—perhaps, if we find the magical word of incantation, the unspoken
and secret word, those forces that fight us will turn their energies in our favor, and will
forge the world anew atop the quivering ruins of the old.
Here we find another unformulated problem, but which, as far as I can tell, is
the defining feature of the scientific current that passes over us at present. After the
glorious era of positivism; after the profound analyses, the penetrating and fastidious
studies, the time for inductions, of high syntheses, has arrived; the time to translate the
meticulous and enlightening studies of wise men into norms of life; time for excessive
erudition to be transformed into intuition, time for the gaze—still wounded by the
myopia of microscopes and the presbyopia of telescopes, dizzy from the immeasur-
able immensity of the infinitely small, a discovery that belongs to the gaze in all its
glory, or horrified by the abyss of the infinitely vast, glimpsed in the ephemeral and
 MERJIAN / “an older future: gabriel alomar’s el futurisme (1904)”
obscure arc of sidereal orbits—also to probe the realm of ultimate reasons and the 413
recondite ends of life; Baconian observation and experiment must become creation,
that is, poetry; and among the submissive and dutiful ranks of disciples, there must be
raised voices of new truths and new illusions; new, purifying breezes must waft over
the lake of human culture.
“One should not seek to cultivate disciples,” De Greef1 remarked in a lecture on
integral education. This is precisely the world’s greatest concern at the moment: to
ensure the permanence of intellectual emancipation, preventing dogma or definitive
principles—swaddled in the hateful old res judicata—from ever intervening again in
the education of future generations, which will be the sole guarantee that the peren-
nial, incessant becoming of the idea should never find itself obstructed by the idolatry
of some consecration or the fearful sanction of some anathema. Allow me, then, to
note in this vein, even if in passing, my beliefs about the grand problem of education
from the political point of view. When one speaks of educational freedom, and when
one sees with utter disbelief that those who attach themselves to said freedom—like
survivors of a shipwreck to a log—are the very individuals who in fact denounce it
and attack it most furiously, one realizes that we are not really talking about freedom.
Educational freedom must not mean the right to educate children and youth without
restraint, the right to form and shape the spirituality of students, that is, the world
that will succeed us. No, freedom of instruction, or rather, educational freedom, must
guarantee in every way possible that the pupils’ souls will open up to the light without
obstacle, and will see unfold before them the summation of the formulas we have been
at such pains to abstract, in order to judge them without the pressure or coercion of
any idea or personality. Let us not sanction—as if in a pact with error—the freedom
to create old spirits and enslaved mentalities. Let us, instead, establish the obligation
to engender free and autonomous spirits, which will aid us and set us right in the im-
mortal task of becoming free.
Love of tradition! Who would doubt it? Tradition is a supremely powerful cultural
element, since, as you well know, no man may boast of the complete invention of any
idea or method. The tacit collaboration of previous generations; the passing on of the
old treasures of the ancestors; the laboriously compiled store of encyclopedias; the
thousand odd elements that have formed our minds, these are the real sources of so-
cial energy, the only forces that lead to action, to the renewal of life, and to creation,
which never ends. But there are two traditions: that of light and that of darkness;
that of those who fought in the past for knowledge and for emancipation, and that
of those who lent all their forces to the smothering of such struggles. These are two
irreconcilable, antithetical traditions. Likewise, the old treasure of tradition is stained
with blood; onto it has dripped the blood of redeemers in their infinite via crucis, and
martyrs in obscure catacombs, the blood of heroes rising up in favor of the ideal, for
liberty or life; onto it has spilled the tears of the meek, during their sleepless nights as
starving workers, fighting for truth or beauty in the corners of derelict workshops; it
has been scorched and blackened by the flames of torment; it has been harmed and
plundered by the march of marauding armies that have covered it in dreadful rubble.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

414 Thus, in this spiritual bond that links us to the world of yesterday, we only feel a true
kinship with those spiritual brothers who, living in hostile societies, hoisted the flag of
light and courageously proclaimed the word of life over the deafening hymn of death
and evil. Thus, all of us who feel enamored and enthralled by that which lies beyond
all dreams, we too possess our own particular and glorious tradition. Thus, futurism
is not a random system or some passing school of thought, a sign of decadence and
transition. No: it is a select human cadre, which over the centuries continues to renew
its own beliefs and principles, imbuing the world with them in an eternal apostolate.
It is, in short, a way of coexisting with future generations—the prevision, premonition,
and anticipatory belief in future formulas.
Just as geniuses are the concentration of the dispersed soul of an entire race or an
entire epoch, the inaugural genius of modern times, Goethe, is the highest example
of that coexistence and belonging across time and space. From atop the pinnacle that
separated two worlds, he looked upon two humanities; he was a worthy companion
of the classics, but he also illuminated the future descent of the continuators, his ec-
static vision extending over the fertile valley of the promised land. Consider his work,
and you will find the matrix of ideas2 of posterity alongside the powerful evocation of
the Hellenic ideal. For the Germanic spirit, for which the clarion call of hegemony
and dissemination had rung out, did not rise up only with the bravado of their own
virtue, but rather drank its inspiration in the old foundations of university culture,
whose tradition, especially in the Teutonic school, is so brilliant. Thus Dr. Faust, the
incarnation of that humanity rejuvenated by revolt, vanquisher of doubt through the
affirmation of life and love, became enraptured in the symbolic transfiguration of two
nights; and if during one the thousand personifications of medieval legend, fairies and
witches, goblins and devils, decorative monsters and infernal satyrs, appeared to him
in their real existence, during the second he saw the demigods and heroines of classi-
cal tradition file past in flesh and blood, rising up from the pages read in his study or
stepping out from the canvases aligned in the museums. After the love of Gretchen,
which initiated a new era in human love, he found himself drawn to the sexual beauty
of Helen and in her arms he learned the secret of extinguished civilizations. It was in
much the same way that the Latin conquerors who launched the empire drank from
the deliciously depraved lips of oriental queens the nectar of an unknown femininity
that represented for them the votive offering of a new world. It was in this way, too,
in the legend of Tannhäuser, that the Teutonic knight trembled with terror at Venus’s
breast, as he listened to the hymn of the Crusades urging him on to a new life.
The same artist who resurrected Iphigenia, the Greek virgin, also initiated that ex-
acerbation of the spirit of revolt which could well be called Satanism and which later
exploded with such force. Humanity heard Mephistopheles’s tempting voice, and poetry
idealized the great exiles of humankind: Schiller’s bandits; Walter Scott’s outlaws; Byron’s
corsairs, fratricides, and incest and orgy makers; Musset’s courtesans; the wretched of
every sort in Victor Hugo; Satan himself in Baudelaire and Carducci.
What is more, do you not find, that same satanism evidenced in the primitive equiva-
lence of the word genius with the words that denote the spirits of diabolical supersti-
 MERJIAN / “an older future: gabriel alomar’s el futurisme (1904)”
tion,3 with the etymology of the very name of Satan, with household daemons,4 with 415
the secret inspirations of the works of the sages, spirits captured in the phials of Faust
and German legend? Are not the poets the great possessed, those who dialogue face to
face with the gods, who receive from them inspiration and words of prophecy? Do they
not attain a certain thaumaturgical or divinatory power in the eyes of the people, with
their intuitive mastery of meter, their knack for rhythm, which seems to the multitudes
a strange force? And the learned, do they not penetrate occult and demonic forces
with their daring gazes? It is clear, then, that when poetry and science became voices
of protest, they did nothing more than readapt to their original meaning.
Do not many of us also experience, in diverse ways, that solidarity which transcends
time and nation, or race and death, that unifying trait which yokes our souls to those of
all past and future rebels? Have you never, during your nocturnal meditations, poring
over the pages of history, asked yourselves which army you would have marched with,
which standard would have shielded you, which temples would have welcomed you in
prayer?5 Have you never felt your heart beat with delight in persecuted ideals, or your
eyes well up at the fate of doctrines under siege? Have you never imagined yourself to
be Christians in the reign of Domitian, heresiarchs in the Byzantium of the Paleologists,
Ghibellines in Dante’s Florence, Hussites in Segimon’s court, defenders of heterodoxy
in the Habsburg Spain, Orangists with William the Taciturn, Anabaptists with Tomas
Muntzer, Huguenots under Catherine de Medici, encyclopedists in the Madrid of 1808
or Constitutionalists in the Madrid of 1824, conspirers in Restoration France, followers
of Mazzini in the young Italy, revolutionaries in the American colonies?
Well then: this undaunted exertion of sacrifice and redemption—offered up to an
unworthy humanity in the hope of the advent of a better humanity, or coldly accepted
with faith only in an unknown and imprecise ideal—is the first cause6 of every becoming,
of every evolution. It is redemptionism, it is futurism, it is the prophetic vision of the
new day, a vision that is the privilege of the chosen, sufficient for the arms to embrace
death with a glorious gesture that will remain as a memorial and as a testimony to the
truth. Up there, on the red hills, the menacing crosses rise; between the shadows of
the olive trees flash the torches of the assassins; but beyond extends humanity, poor,
dear humanity; the throngs that unfurled carpets in our honor and showered our heads
with laurels, oiled our feet with aromatic salves, and waved palms and posies around
us . . . And even farther on—hazy and chaotic—swarms future humanity, those who
will make gods of us and seat us to the right of the Father, and will utter our name in
moments of tenderness and moments of anguish, and will come to seek shelter under
the very arms of our horrible instrument of torture. Let him who has never felt in his
soul the persistence of this burning longing surrender all right to speak to men in a
new language; try as he might, he would never find the words.
I would like to discover the animus that sparks the yearning for rebellion, its awak-
ening in the spirit. Among our insufficient habits, pedagogy is a pedantic, insufferable
routine. One could almost say that its principle aim is to render the temperament inept
in every way for rebellion. The system that does not consecrate a religious dogma,
consecrates a social or political one instead, which is, as you can see, much worse. One
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

416 sector of opinion complains that the state clings to religion and that official instruction
consecrates Catholicism as the definitive form of belief. In contrast, Spain has forbidden
professors from officially teaching the contrary curriculum . . . the Constitution!
Naturally. The more rigid and doctrinaire public education is, the less the liberal
spirit has penetrated pedagogical habits, [then] the stronger will be the reaction of
temperaments against those institutions, when these temperaments finally find the
sufficient energy to emancipate themselves. There have even been those who have
praised religious education for having produced—through backlash or protest—the
greatest heretics and the great liberators of the spirit. But this would be tantamount
to proclaiming the excellence of evil, because without it there would be no virtue. For
every Voltaire, for every Renan, how many poor souls who might have turned their
humbly budding sentimentalities to the light have seen themselves smothered as mere
stalks, in the name of any old idol! Imperial eagles break through the shell of the ma-
ternal egg, even if human hands squeeze and oppress them; but the poor little branch
birds die in the nest before they hatch. How can any society boast of having created
a truly liberal system when it does not respect the most transcendent and sacred of
liberties, the liberty of generations to come, the liberty of its children, who today play
innocently; swept up in the maelstrom of our dissensions how are they to build a name
for themselves tomorrow in their image? To impose boundaries on free expansion, to
restrict the flight of disciples, is to commit an outrage against the infinite.
But consider this. In the midst of this cloying mixture of programs and courses, of
classes and texts, which transform what ought to please the soul into a vexing and dread-
ful chore, our pedagogy remains sterile and routine. A dry, sophistic, lifeless, snobbish
excess of erudition kills it, or else sterilizes it. Amid the irksome mountain of books and
classes there is not a single lesson or explanation of how to study. Hardly a classroom
is dedicated to the discourse, research, or exploration of new paths, of untrammeled
roads: everything is dedicated to assimilation, nothing to initiative. One is not taught
to individualize oneself, to unfurl the wings of the self: over the lintel of the solemn
doors, hollow to the knock, an anathema appears against the word that contains the
individual’s absolute independence: the word heresy, that is, opinion.
And it is clear: when the rupture with this world of fetishes and cheaply apotheosized
emblems occurs, it rarely occurs serenely, with the coolness of academic dialogue. No:
the soul suffers a kind of expulsion, a crisis that imputes a sentence either of death
or of rage. The butterfly shrugs off its old chrysalis, becomes drunk on light and on
scents of all kind, without looking back. The apostolate degenerates into sectarianism.
The deliberate pace of efflorescence speeds up or breaks down. Of course there are
exceptions. Perhaps, for certain spirits, this reaction provokes sudden intuitions, the
spontaneous visions of states to come, the unconscious modulation of future formulas.
And it is these select spirits, along with those who have managed to escape the clutches
of a vile and specious education, striving toward free individualization, who constitute
the futurists.
I wish I had time to evoke the endless variety of florescence of those exceptional souls,
at odds with the world that incites them. While they all share the knack for prophecy
 MERJIAN / “an older future: gabriel alomar’s el futurisme (1904)”
and prediction; while they all feel the repercussions of future explosions, the march 417
of future caravans, the vibration of future trumpets, every one of them contributes a
personal and genuine interpretation to the hymn of the new times. The select flowers
of sentiment, they feel the disquiet of their misunderstood vocations. Sensibility beats
in their bodies like a caged bird flapping its wings. A great impulse from beyond, super-
sensitive and spiritual, breathes new life into them. The world deems them unhinged,
because they have lost that sterile and static normalcy of the content. Their kingdom
is truly not of this world. John Stuart Mill calls them the discontents; Spenser, the
misfits; Nietzsche, the untimely. They are hyperaesthetic, possessed, inspired. Their
work begins with a great negation, and in the midst of that absolute pessimism, on
the ruins of the present, they glimpse, unformulated and amorphous—but certain
and resplendent—future reality. They are the Precursors, the Annunciating Angels,
the Messiahs. Some bring good tidings to virgins in the calm of their quarters, while
others cry out prophecies no one listens to in the wilderness, and still others preach
the gospel in the atrium of old temples or among the crowds of Capharnaum, and die
atop the mountain.
Their spirit is indeed the soul of the world, which, aching for birth, seizes upon
man to attain the only creation that humanity is permitted. For this reason these spirits
must be called poets par excellence, poets in the original sense of the word, that is,
creators.
And do not mistake “poets” solely as those who make use of words to create subtle,
harmonic, and pleasing combinations, sweet to the ear, just as the miniaturist once
inscribed initials in the margins of his codex, or as the dance master arranged his ex-
quisite inventions during the great century. No: the poet is he who feels in his heart
the intense beat of that that diversification of which I spoke, and reveals it to the world
in the most highly sentimental—or, if you will, even the most religious—form. Over
the heads of that vast herd of men, the poets stretch out their hands, across the ages,
passing on the sacred chalice of communion or participation in one sole and unique mys-
tery. They are the wounded of the eternal battle, condemned to continually aggravate
their own wounds, to inquire of the most excruciating sensations of pain the unknown
meaning of life. They delicately scan their words into hemistiches, building them up
like the vaulted arches of superb porticoes, herding the solemn flock of their strophes,
which march forward like a Hellenic chorus, or else they yoke them with subtle art, by
the spiritual ties of rhyme, because Music is the first vehicle of sentiment, and each
recognized melody stores in the folds of its invisible cloak the memory of man’s most
vital emotions. Oh, truly! Poetry is the only permanent religion, transcendent of the
frenetic flight of time and the ravaging pace of centuries! Priests of this indestructible
church, the poets dance the sacred dance, pristine ceremony of their faith, hand in
hand atop the rubble of nations and armies.
How many men there are, in truth, who have learned the construction of poetic forms
from the academies, from reading or from instinct, and yet show not a trace of true
Poetry! How many others in contrast, bring the sacred breath of Poetry to the works
of other worlds of human activity! How many there are who anoint the cold corpse of
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

418 science in the Institutes and Academies with their baptismal salve, or beat their supple
wings over the dead and dim libraries where erudition makes its nest! How many
who invigorate the glacial dryness of the schools with the powerful and thaumaturgic
vitality of rhythm! For Poetry is the great mediator with tomorrow’s infinity, just as it
is for yesterday’s infinity, philology—according to the words of Niebuhr7 —that most
inspired and intuitive of investigations. I am convinced not only that science and all
the other fundamental applications of the human spirit must defer to Poetry, but that
they are otherwise powerless to realize of any fruitful induction without the perennial
cooperation of poetic fantasy. If poetry does not fall like a divine dew upon the pages
of books or the instruments of laboratories, science will become a mere stockpile, an
attic, a flea market, and will never manage to create a foam or a ray of light no matter
how hard it strikes together the flint gathered on field trips or the morsels of lava that
one day buried unsuspecting cities.
The glory days of the school of positivism produced an intrusion of science into art.
Now the attempts at fusion are inverted: it is Poetry that revitalizes the whole vocation
of humanity.
We find here one of the defining characteristics of our time, which appears conscious
of its incessant and frenetic becoming. We are advancing towards integration, union,
synthesis; and this growing harmony between Poetry and everything else, joining to-
gether the dispersed forces of men to create a work of solidarity and totality, proves that
the concern of all great contemporary spirits may be expressed in one word: tomorrow.
Turn to the four corners of spirituality and you will find everywhere the existence of a
great, common ideal: the continual progression toward something better; and a great
collective undertaking to attain that ideal: collaboration.
[...]
Shakespeare possessed the prescience of this febrile, contradictory, and delirious,
spirit; and that most sane of geniuses—nourished on a world of vitality, the contem-
porary of a vigorous and material epoch—engendered the morbid figure of Hamlet,
typical/characteristic model of the futurists. The Prince of Denmark, alone in a vile
and corrupt court, felt his affinity with the youth of centuries to come, and in his heart
beat the disquieting heart of the entire Romantic cycle.
I believe that the categories that classify human production onto the shelves of
booksellers or into the display cases of collectors—are ultimately vague and pedantic
disquisitions that do not correspond to the truth. I believe that the work of men, the
expansion of their spiritual faculties, is more unified than it would seem, and that
beyond the sophistic schemata of classical and romantic, obscurantist and humanist,
ideal and real, lies a single, unchanging essence, of which the whole of humanity is the
manifestation and representation. Clearly that which has been deemed classicism is one
of the eternal, precise conditions of aesthetic vision in its entirety, and forms an integral
part of the universal spirit; it is not the formula of a single day or of a century, nor of a
historic era, but rather the perennial sediment of human nature. Are not, perchance,
expression, image, form, and figuration the soul’s most nourishing food? Is the idea
itself, which seems purely intellectual, conceivable any other way than as an image,
 MERJIAN / “an older future: gabriel alomar’s el futurisme (1904)”
as the very etymology of its name would suggest?8 In this vein, what has been called 419
romanticism is also a permanent and immanent condition of humanity—not opposed
to classicism, but confraternal and complementary. Throughout history, evolution is
an undulating line that passes from one predominating tendency to the other, even
within the nuances of a single school. Is Greek tragedy—that which Nietzsche called
the Dionysian ideal—not perchance the monument of a Romantic generation? Is
Prometheus not perchance the incarnation of the eternal element of romanticism in
the midst of Hellenic culture? Is romanticism not perchance the aura of an idealized
mysticism that emanates from the Platonic and Neo-Platonic cycles? With respect to
the Israelite people, did the poetry of prophets not represent perchance a moment of
correspondence with the Dionysian ideal, as did the Pentateuch with the Apollonian
ideal, and the Ecclesiastic with the democratic? Moreover, did the dawn of Romanti-
cism not appear, perchance, to be the return to the true vision of things? Is Victor Hugo
not perchance a great pontifex of form? Are the Parnassian cenacle, the colorism of
Gautier, the stylization of Merimée not perchance the manifestations of a fundamentally
classical culture? The fact is that today’s world, as regards its general characterization,
still remains under the influence of the Romantic star, and the old foundation of our
paganistic culture has been marvelously romanticized. And since the principal char-
acter of this mode is the consciousness of eternal transmutation, of eternal becoming,
the sense of a continual struggle for the ideal, for infinite improvement, the primary
objective of this state of universal consciousness is the concern with tomorrow.
[ . . . ] Romanticism, which created us, is also, let us not forget it, the father of hu-
manitarianism. And is it not licit for us to appeal to humanity against the fatherland,
the patria, when what the fatherland represents is the suffocating wave of the majority,
or the weight of traditional formulas, or the odious consecration of prejudices, or the
imposition of custom in the name of who-knows-what intangible gods?
In any case, nationalism is the persistence of the old neoclassical foundation, which
preserved absolutism through the Revolution, substituting the idolatrous adoration of
the formulas and personifications of illustrious national sovereignty for the adoration
previously reserved for the King’s personal authority; and thus, the fatherland, the flag,
and the nation became gods in the hands of the same men who had boasted of destroy-
ing the last idols and the last autocrats. Frankly, between, the tyranny of an individual
and the tyranny of a formula, I certainly would not opt for the latter.
Ah! Let us not doubt: if we substitute one ideal for another quantitatively, without
improving the quality of the ideal, it would be better to abandon the endeavor alto-
gether. What point is there in substituting one chauvinism for another? The fatherland
as an idea, as an end in itself, is yesterday’s idea, a consecration of the past, a petrifica-
tion of the present in the name of tradition and patrimony. Those of us whose pulse
does not quicken before a parade of waving flags, or who do not deck our balconies
for the processions that captivate the multitudes, must create a new incarnation of
the fatherland; and instead of the superstitious veneration of the fathers who sleep in
soundless, eternally empty tombs, we must worship—in an inspirational and reassuring
embodiment—the unknown multitudes of descendants who will take up and perpetuate
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

420 our work, over the centuries, turned towards a horizon more luminous and splendid
with every day. Oh, the supreme delight that our sons may contradict us! The nameless
pleasure of seeing our credos set right by our grandchildren as they gather round our
death beds! Oh, the happiness of seeing our dear land renew itself infinitely, and of
dying and closing our eyes upon a life we never imagined that will stir up for the last
time that eternal longing for the beyond.
After the classical ideal of the Fatherland [Pàtria], which perpetuates the loving
adoration of the Fathers, Christianity established the ideal of Fraternity, an alliance
that unites brothers in a single prayer and a single life before a common Father. The
world’s new orientation will be founded, I dare to believe, upon an ideal that we may
deem Filiation, the ideal of the sons [fills] to come, sons who are still asleep, waiting
for the moment to appear in the east, in a morning full of sun and life.
Tradition is a strong foundation, certainly; but it is propitious only on condition that
upon it shall rest the foot of the bow that will launch itself, like a rainbow through the
clouds, sheltering the countryside and the towns in its divine transfiguration, tending
the seeds of the peoples to come, who will be eternally new, infinitely diverse.

Notes
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Mary Ann Newman for her astute criticisms of my original
translation. Any errors or oversights that remain are entirely my own. Thanks also to Joan Ramon
Resina, who encouraged this project from the start, and to Xavier Vila for his insightful remarks on
the text.
1. Arthur De Greef (1862–1940), Belgian pianist and composer.
2. “Les idees mares” (literally “the mother ideas”), a significance that I hope “matrix” still pre-
serves.
3. Alomar refers here to the denotation of genius as it relates to the spirit, and more specifically
the notion of a “genie.” See the Oxford English Dictionary: “A demon or spiritual being in general.
Now chiefly in pl. genii (the sing. being usually replaced by genie), as a rendering of Arab. jinn, the
collective name of a class of spirits (some good, some evil) supposed to interfere powerfully in hu-
man affairs.”
4. Here again Alomar underscores the correspondence between valences of genius, divinity, and
spirit, with that of evil, of the demonic—all deriving from the Greek term daemon.
5. El futurisme’s origins as a public lecture are preserved in various aspects of its written manifes-
tation, most notably its frequently conversational rejoinders (“Observeu-hi,” “Veieu-ho”), rhetorical
prompts and queries (“¿No trobeu ja . . .?,” “¿Es que no . . .?”), as well as its deictic and vocative
modes.
6. The term “primer mòbil” (“first cause”) here is one of many theological tropes threaded—to
emphatically secular ends—throughout the essay.
7. Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831), German statesman, historian, and author of Römische
Geschichte (1811–32).
8. Again see the OED: cf. Gk. idea (“ideal prototype,” lit. “look, form,” from idein “to see”).