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the wonderful mellow voice to life its odd acts. The drunken
bum who bumped into her was her dissipated drunken brother
and the wayward son of those with the books, parasol and hard
thumping cane. Life and the changes of life’s acts, mostly sham,
had changed their lives that none knew one another from the
other, deaf to hear, blind to see.
Later newspapers reports unknown man kills self with gas.
Unknown tramp killed riding between clickety click wheels,
the vibrating half inch rods. Unknown woman taken from river
same day, different parts of the country. Three unknowns bones
back to dust started decaying in potters field. Who were these
three with eyes they had and saw not and ears they had and
heard not, and the wages of sin from sham is death.
CHARLES L. DURBORAW
IN PRAISE OF VIOLENCE
N OTHING IS lost sooner than violence (unless it be
collective.) Only when arm in arm with his brothers
has the individual any lasting strength. War or revo
lution is all right; between two bombs nothing keeps
man from dreaming of his armchair or his cabbages.
But left alone on the tight rope with no one in front or behind,
a grenade in each hand to kill, every minute, it does not last.
A star bursts in the sky and passes in a veil of fleeting brilliance.
The warm deep darkness remains with its nightingale’s songs, its
quilts, its flakes of hope.
An epoch of violence has just ended—we do not mean the
war, but the one which assailed all the moral defenses. How
short a time it lasted! Does one still remember Dadaism, except
to laugh, to scorn and spit?
Dadaism did not last any more than the length of skirts or a
fashionable colour. It may have been the excess of violence
itself that did it, that collective violence itself more remarquable
for submerging every individual. And everyone breaking his
shell, went crowing to war, in search of the Almighty. Putting
on the airs of a general is becoming but only when heading an
army. A general in an autobus is little more handsome than a
bank clerk.
After Dadaism had scattered its parts and its glands to the
four winds, it ceased to draw attention upon its perpetual virility.
Its acquired impetus only enabled it to go on making love.