Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Narayanan Nair writes



ON LIFE & LAUGHTER

Life is an odd mix
Of sorrow and laughter.
Sorrow at the earthmates
Languishing in want,
Denied, deprived, lost, 
Abandoned in hunger
For flyover, dam, port, 
In development spins
By crafty leader dudes, 
Pocketing piles of dough.
Worse still are some,
Bullied, threatened,
Shot bloody down for
Views against a creed!
But one truly shudders at the
Violated, slit, annihilated,
Tender buds of tomorrow
Barely out of our cradles!

Do laugh at the follies
Of cosmetic displays
And hollow eloquences
Of political dons. 
Hoping against hope of
Fascists in waiting!

Do have a hearty smile
If  you share your bread,
Or chip in your mite for
A roof over the heads
Of bare forsaken bros.
Or free, and wake, them up,
From the stranglehold of dope
Under a gloomy lonesome sky.
 Image result for fascists in waiting painting
Sintesi Fascista -- Alessandro Bruschetti

1 comment:

  1. In 1915 Benito Mussolini formed a political movement, the Fasci Rivoluzionari d'Azione Internazionalista. His followers called themselves “Fascisti” (Fascists), taking their name from the Latin “fasces,” a bundle of rods containing an ax with the blade projecting which was carried before a roman magistrate as an enplem of official power. In 1919 he reorganized it as the paramilitary Fasci Italiani di Combattimento and then again in 1921 as the Partito Nazionale Fascista, with Mussolini as “Il duce” (The Leader). He extolled opposition to socialism, democracy, and egalitarianism, and promoted the creation of a militaristic party elite that would use totalitarian methods to advance the nation itself as the ultimate end. His attitude was strongly influenced by the 1909 artistic “Manifesto del Futurismo” of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti:
    1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
    2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt .
    3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
    4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
    5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
    6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
    7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
    8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
    9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
    10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
    11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

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