LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

mind with blastoderms and sources of life. And this magazine or
manifesto was in its way a harbinger (I am never quite sure about that
word harbinger), but it does seem to be generally accepted as meaning a
sign of something about to come. Well, the other war came and
prevented its being a periodical or annual publication, got out a second
number in 1915 and that ended it, Gaudier-Brzeska the sculptor havin’
been killed in the interim.
And that manifesto was the best we could then do toward assertin’ what
has now become known to the world, or at least to the European
continent as the crisis OF the system. Crisis OF, not IN the system; not a
crisis in side the system. But of the SYSTEM, crisis OF the system,
DEL sistema, not merely nel sistema.
Now the particulars about the art movement, insofar as they affect
merely painting and sculpture may not much matter in themselves, you
will say. But the point is these things ONLY occur, changes like that in
art and writin’ ONLY occur when something moves deeper down, some
thing gets going, something is workin’ inside, and the LIVE artists, as
distinct from exploiters and deadheads, get the itch to DO something
about it, itch to do something LIKEWISE.
Anyhow, Blast appeared, and somewhere inside it or in some
contemporary explosion of Wyndham’s there was the statement:
“MATTER when there is not certain amount of intelligence INSIDE it,
decays and rots.” It would have been a happier day for all England, if all
England had looked at that sentence. Which marks the end of an era,
marks the end of the Marxist era (if there was a Marxist era), marks the
end of the XIXth century usurocracy and mercantilism. Matter in which
there is not a certain amount of intelligence decays and ROTS.
Waal, Blast made a bit of a stir, mebbe on the surface. It penetrated into
society circles, etc., New Zealand attacked it. The stinking old
Manchester Guardian took six months to discover that Blast was satiric.