Enzo Martucci

Heroic Spring

1922

Retrieved on June 6, 2011 from sites.google.com

From Proletario # 5, December 12, 1922

To nomads, to vagabonds, to rebels.

Where is the man, brothers, where is the man that I seek?

Where is the valiant and reckless rebel, where the heroic warrior, filled with a dream of freedom or greatness like the Argonauts, who playfully faces the titanic battle against the universe, for the conquest of a higher, more beautiful life? Where are the strength, the courage and the daring that my pagan spirit, anarchically, loves? Wherever are they? ... Oh! ... It is useless to trouble myself in looking... In today’s bourgeois, industrial society, there are only the base and cowardly... There are only servile slaves...

The hero belongs to a past era, to the splendor of gallant epics and of free, adventurous, warrior energy... Perhaps he will belong to future Anarchy, when the individual, no longer tethered by the legal yoke, will renew the audacious deeds of the past for the complete triumph of himself...

But now? Now there is only the brutalized plebeian, resigned to his fate, and the small-minded, pitiful petty-bourgeois, puffed up with arrogance and saturated with vulgarity... Obsequious subjects and despotic masters splash about in the filth that covers the world in a sad shroud, like worms in the mud. But under the rags of the one and the luxurious clothes of the other, a chicken’s heart beats. Both are weak, enervated... Thus, the proletarian isn’t able to emancipate himself, as the tyrant rules not by virtue of his own force, but only through the passivity and renunciation of the people...

Today there is only litter, mud, dung...

The pirates have disappeared from the Oceans, the bandits have disappeared from the forests... The virile instincts and vigorous feeling of humanity — distant memories... The hero is dead...

* * *

Flowering oases in the sad desert of human putridity — blossoming roses amidst the stinking fetor of the sewer — we, nomads, vagabonds, rebels, will produce the divine miracle. We, we will revive the Hero. Banned from society and damned by the oblivious crowd, we preserve in the fragrant garden of our hearts a gentle nightingale that sings melodious songs of Nostalgia and sorrow.

Tempered by struggle and arduous peril, we host in the cavernous twists and turns of our minds a red demon, always ready to go wild with irresistible force.

And when the nightingale warbles, the demon leaps onto the bloodstained battlefield where the furies dance the macabre round dance of destruction and the waltz of death.

We are the poets of negation and revolt, the singers and authors of ever more sublime madness.

In the fiery craters of our inner volcanoes, made with the lava of emotion and the fire of passion, we’ve fed our lust for life... And to Society that wanted to impose its laws and its morals on us, we will firmly respond with our “no,” while all others repeat their cowardly “yes.”

Now we are at the mercy of the battle. The decisive, mortal battle... With smiles on our lips, we have leapt into the abyss of supreme adventure, at the bottom of which the nymph and the harpy wait for us. Either the intoxication of triumph and liberation from every shackle, or the glorious end in the whirl of war.

Proud and disdainful, we have valiantly played our last card, and it is, therefore, necessary for us to intensify our effort and increase our energy a hundredfold to achieve victory.

We have already been brave fighters. Now we much become heroes. It is necessary, indispensable.

For the good outcome of our cause, for the elevation of our individuality.

* * *

And toward Anarchy — matrix of liberty, fount of joy, treasury of power — we, children of Pride and eternal Rebellion, will go forward with greater energy and force, toward the Anarchy that is not the dream of pietists, not the goal of the weak, but the means with which intrepid and desperate iconoclasts are able to get rid of even the harshest chain.

We will all march on while the blue river of courage overflows from the deeps and the mad wind of Audacity batters us with wild fury, in the thick of battle.

And we will fire our arrows, honed with hatred, against the strongholds of the law and of Society ... And we will embrace freedom on Christ’s desecrated altars... Hypocrites and cowards will fear us; the rabble will shout for our heads without thinking... But what do the curses of fools matter to us?

We are the aristocrats of thought and action, solitary dweller of the highest peaks, and reptile drool could never concern us...