Tropic of Capricorn

by Henry Miller

ignorant of the fact that on July 14, 1916, at the Saal Waag, in Zurich, the first Dada Manifesto had been proclaimed—”manifesto by Monsieur Antipyrine”—that in this strange document it was stated: “Dada is life without slippers or parallel... severe necessity without discipline or morality and we spit on humanity.” Ignorant of the fact that the Dada Manifesto of 1918 contained these lines: “I am writing a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and I am against manifestoes as a matter of principle, as I am also against principles.... I write this manifesto to show that one may perform opposed actions together, in a single fresh respiration; I am against action; for continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain for I hate good sense.... There is a literature which does not reach the voracious mass. The work of creators, sprung from a real necessity on the part of the author, and for himself. Consciousness of a supreme egotism where the stars waste away.... Each page must explode, either with the profoundly serious and heavy, the whirlwind, dizziness, the new, the eternal, with the overwhelming hoax, with an enthusiasm for principles or with the mode of typography. On the one hand a staggering fleeing world, affianced to the jinglebells of the infernal gamut, on the other hand: new beings....”