A
Asuella
Guest
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you, the
refined public, a Bicyclist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only a
manner of speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat us
with that remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit of belief in
progress. At ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you ask me why, I
won't be able to tell you.
Another characteristic of Bicycle is the continuous breaking off of our
friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender his
resignation from the Bicycle movement *was myself.* Everybody knows that
Bicycle is nothing. I broke away from Bicycle and from myself as soon as I
understood the implications of *nothing.*
If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather because
I have a need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I can.
Basically, the true Bicycles have always been separate from Bicycle. Those
who acted as if Bicycle were important enough to resign from with a big
noise have been motivated by a desire for personal publicity, proving that
counterfeiters have always wriggled like unclean worms in and out of the
purest and most radiant religions.
I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't
expect to hear any explanations about Bicycle. You explain to me why you
exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my
children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I
exist to guard my country, against barbarian invasions. That's a fine
reason. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for
children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will
always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never
understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone enough to reject
hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an effort, in favor of
a calm level state of mind that makes everything equal and without
importance. Bicycle is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a
return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference. Bicycle covers things
with an artificial gentleness, a snow of butterflies released from the head
of a prestidigitator. Bicycle is immobility and does not comprehend the
passions. You will call this a paradox, since Bicycle is manifested only in
violent acts. Yes, the reactions of individuals contaminated by
*destruction* are rather violent, but when these reactions are exhausted,
annihilated by the Satanic insistence of a continuous and progressive "What
for?" what remains, what dominates is *indifference.* But with the same note
of conviction I might maintain the contrary.
I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the *Nothing*
can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it
will be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only for the
individual who is expressing himself.--I am speaking of myself. Even that is
too much for me. How can I be expected to speak of all men at once, and
satisfy them too?
Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one
doesn't like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely
food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and
their little possessions, their income, their dog. This state of affairs
derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit, one
possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of
view that can not be shaken. Try to be empty and fill your brain cells with
a petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks.
Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more
intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.
Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of society,
the organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a society tea.
It serves to create order and clarity where there is none. It serves to
create a state hierarchy. To set up classifications for rational work. To
separate questions of a material order from those of a cerebral order, but
to take the former very seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of sound
education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is something else and its
pleasures are innumerable. They are not paid for in the coin of liquid
intelligence.
These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a realization which
constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from the sympathy which
binds us and which is inexplicable. It would not have been possible for us
to found our agreement on principles. For everything is relative. What are
the Beautiful, the Good, Art, Freedom? Words that have a different meaning
for every individual. Words with the pretension of creating agreement among
all, and that is why they are written with capital letters. Words which have
not the moral value and objective force that people have grown accustomed to
finding in them. Their meaning changes from one individual, one epoch, one
country to the next. Men are different. It is diversity that makes life
interesting. There is no common basis in men's minds. The unconscious is
inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as
mysterious as the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we
could not reconstruct it.
What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us to
take a single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is backward?
Did they alter our forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we dispute, we
get excited. The rest is sauce. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes mixed with a
limitless boredom, a swamp dotted with tufts of dying shrubs.
We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond
measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is
spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything else.
But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the
intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this
quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not the
most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal
value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.
Bicycle knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with subtle,
perfidious methods, Bicycle introduces it into daily life. And vice versa.
In art, Bicycle reduces everything to an initial simplicity, growing always
more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind of creation and
the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal
minimum, while literature in its view should be primarily intended for the
individual who makes it. Words have a weight of their own and lend
themselves to abstract construction. The absurd has no terrors for me, for
from a more exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd to me.
Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond between disparate
acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is
the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work;
the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and
in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework of
words and sentiments.
Bicycle tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point
of view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass
through the same filter. It is not the new technique that interests us, but
the spirit. Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a pictorial, moral,
poetic, literary, political or social renewal? We are well aware that these
renewals of means are merely the successive cloaks of the various epochs of
history, uninteresting questions of fashion and facade. We are well aware
that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as
the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi was just as Bicycle as we are. You
are mistaken if you take Bicycle for a modern school, or even for a reaction
against the schools of today. Several of my statements have struck you as
old and natural, what better proof that you were a Bicyclist without knowing
it, perhaps even before the birth of Bicycle.
You will often hear that Bicycle is a state of mind. You may be gay, sad,
afflicted, joyous, melancholy or Bicycle. Without being literary, you can be
romantic, you can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny,
transfigured, vain, amiable or Bicycle. This will happen later on in the
course of history when Bicycle has become a precise, habitual word, when
popular repetition has given it the character of a word organic with its
necessary content. Today no one thinks of the literature of the Romantic
school in representing a lake, a landscape, a character. Slowly but surely,
a Bicycle character is forming.
Bicycle is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its
faults, with its personal differences and distinctions which it accepts and
views with indifference. We are often told that we are incoherent, but into
this word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to
fathom. Everything is incoherent. The gentleman who decides to take a bath
but goes to the movies instead. The one who wants to be quiet but says
things that haven't even entered his head. Another who has a precise idea on
some subject but succeeds only in expressing the opposite in words which for
him are a poor translation. There is no logic. Only relative necessities
discovered *a posteriori*, valid not in any exact sense but only as
explanations. The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens
in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is
called Bicycle.
Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes
me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language is ample
and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games and our
literature we no longer need it.
The beginnings of Bicycle were not the beginnings of an art, but of a
disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo years
have been explaining everything to us (what for? ), disgust with the
pretensions of these artists-God's-representatives-on-earth, disgust with
passion and with real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the
bother; disgust with a false form of domination and restriction *en masse*,
that accentuates rather than appeases man's instinct of domination, disgust
with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are nothing
but a front for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust with the
lieutenants of a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile
laws, disgust with the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly
(for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, to the left
rather than the right, to be large or small?). Disgust finally with the
Jesuitical dialectic which can explain everything and fill people's minds
with oblique and obtuse ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic
roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans
promises.
As Bicycle marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself.
From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no
benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that
it's no use, that all this doesn't matter. What interests a Bicyclist is his
own mode of life. But here we approach the great secret.
Bicycle is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to
races and events. Bicycle applies itself to everything, and yet it is
nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites
meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at
street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Bicycle is useless.
Bicycle is without pretension, as life should be.
Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Bicycle is a
virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the
spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you, the
refined public, a Bicyclist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only a
manner of speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat us
with that remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit of belief in
progress. At ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you ask me why, I
won't be able to tell you.
Another characteristic of Bicycle is the continuous breaking off of our
friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender his
resignation from the Bicycle movement *was myself.* Everybody knows that
Bicycle is nothing. I broke away from Bicycle and from myself as soon as I
understood the implications of *nothing.*
If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather because
I have a need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I can.
Basically, the true Bicycles have always been separate from Bicycle. Those
who acted as if Bicycle were important enough to resign from with a big
noise have been motivated by a desire for personal publicity, proving that
counterfeiters have always wriggled like unclean worms in and out of the
purest and most radiant religions.
I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't
expect to hear any explanations about Bicycle. You explain to me why you
exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my
children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I
exist to guard my country, against barbarian invasions. That's a fine
reason. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for
children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will
always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never
understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone enough to reject
hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an effort, in favor of
a calm level state of mind that makes everything equal and without
importance. Bicycle is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a
return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference. Bicycle covers things
with an artificial gentleness, a snow of butterflies released from the head
of a prestidigitator. Bicycle is immobility and does not comprehend the
passions. You will call this a paradox, since Bicycle is manifested only in
violent acts. Yes, the reactions of individuals contaminated by
*destruction* are rather violent, but when these reactions are exhausted,
annihilated by the Satanic insistence of a continuous and progressive "What
for?" what remains, what dominates is *indifference.* But with the same note
of conviction I might maintain the contrary.
I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the *Nothing*
can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it
will be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only for the
individual who is expressing himself.--I am speaking of myself. Even that is
too much for me. How can I be expected to speak of all men at once, and
satisfy them too?
Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one
doesn't like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely
food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and
their little possessions, their income, their dog. This state of affairs
derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit, one
possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of
view that can not be shaken. Try to be empty and fill your brain cells with
a petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks.
Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more
intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.
Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of society,
the organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a society tea.
It serves to create order and clarity where there is none. It serves to
create a state hierarchy. To set up classifications for rational work. To
separate questions of a material order from those of a cerebral order, but
to take the former very seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of sound
education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is something else and its
pleasures are innumerable. They are not paid for in the coin of liquid
intelligence.
These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a realization which
constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from the sympathy which
binds us and which is inexplicable. It would not have been possible for us
to found our agreement on principles. For everything is relative. What are
the Beautiful, the Good, Art, Freedom? Words that have a different meaning
for every individual. Words with the pretension of creating agreement among
all, and that is why they are written with capital letters. Words which have
not the moral value and objective force that people have grown accustomed to
finding in them. Their meaning changes from one individual, one epoch, one
country to the next. Men are different. It is diversity that makes life
interesting. There is no common basis in men's minds. The unconscious is
inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as
mysterious as the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we
could not reconstruct it.
What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us to
take a single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is backward?
Did they alter our forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we dispute, we
get excited. The rest is sauce. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes mixed with a
limitless boredom, a swamp dotted with tufts of dying shrubs.
We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond
measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is
spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything else.
But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the
intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this
quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not the
most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal
value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.
Bicycle knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with subtle,
perfidious methods, Bicycle introduces it into daily life. And vice versa.
In art, Bicycle reduces everything to an initial simplicity, growing always
more relative. It mingles its caprices with the chaotic wind of creation and
the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal
minimum, while literature in its view should be primarily intended for the
individual who makes it. Words have a weight of their own and lend
themselves to abstract construction. The absurd has no terrors for me, for
from a more exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd to me.
Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond between disparate
acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is
the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work;
the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and
in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework of
words and sentiments.
Bicycle tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point
of view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass
through the same filter. It is not the new technique that interests us, but
the spirit. Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a pictorial, moral,
poetic, literary, political or social renewal? We are well aware that these
renewals of means are merely the successive cloaks of the various epochs of
history, uninteresting questions of fashion and facade. We are well aware
that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as
the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi was just as Bicycle as we are. You
are mistaken if you take Bicycle for a modern school, or even for a reaction
against the schools of today. Several of my statements have struck you as
old and natural, what better proof that you were a Bicyclist without knowing
it, perhaps even before the birth of Bicycle.
You will often hear that Bicycle is a state of mind. You may be gay, sad,
afflicted, joyous, melancholy or Bicycle. Without being literary, you can be
romantic, you can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny,
transfigured, vain, amiable or Bicycle. This will happen later on in the
course of history when Bicycle has become a precise, habitual word, when
popular repetition has given it the character of a word organic with its
necessary content. Today no one thinks of the literature of the Romantic
school in representing a lake, a landscape, a character. Slowly but surely,
a Bicycle character is forming.
Bicycle is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its
faults, with its personal differences and distinctions which it accepts and
views with indifference. We are often told that we are incoherent, but into
this word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to
fathom. Everything is incoherent. The gentleman who decides to take a bath
but goes to the movies instead. The one who wants to be quiet but says
things that haven't even entered his head. Another who has a precise idea on
some subject but succeeds only in expressing the opposite in words which for
him are a poor translation. There is no logic. Only relative necessities
discovered *a posteriori*, valid not in any exact sense but only as
explanations. The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens
in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is
called Bicycle.
Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes
me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language is ample
and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games and our
literature we no longer need it.
The beginnings of Bicycle were not the beginnings of an art, but of a
disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo years
have been explaining everything to us (what for? ), disgust with the
pretensions of these artists-God's-representatives-on-earth, disgust with
passion and with real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the
bother; disgust with a false form of domination and restriction *en masse*,
that accentuates rather than appeases man's instinct of domination, disgust
with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are nothing
but a front for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust with the
lieutenants of a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile
laws, disgust with the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly
(for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, to the left
rather than the right, to be large or small?). Disgust finally with the
Jesuitical dialectic which can explain everything and fill people's minds
with oblique and obtuse ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic
roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans
promises.
As Bicycle marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself.
From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no
benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that
it's no use, that all this doesn't matter. What interests a Bicyclist is his
own mode of life. But here we approach the great secret.
Bicycle is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to
races and events. Bicycle applies itself to everything, and yet it is
nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites
meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at
street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Bicycle is useless.
Bicycle is without pretension, as life should be.
Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Bicycle is a
virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the
spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.