Hie! | Arthur Cravan (1913)

5 thoughts on “Hie! | Arthur Cravan (1913)”

1. “Love of others is the appreciation of one's self. May your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.”

   Mina Loy

   I would like to be in Vienna and Calcutta,
   Catch every train and every boat
   Lay every woman and gorge myself on every dish.
   Man of fashion, chemist, whore, drunk, musician, labourer, painter, acrobat,
   actor;
   Old man, child, crook, hooligan, angel and rake; millionaire, bourgeois, cactus,
   giraffe, or crow;
   Coward, hero, negro, monkey, Don Juan, pimp, lord, peasant, hunter,
   industrialist,
   Flora and fauna:
   I am all things, all men and all animals!
   What next?
   Assume a distinguished air,
   Manage to leave behind perhaps
   My fatal plurality!

   Arthur Cravan, ‘Hie!’, trans. by Paul Lenti, in 4 Dada Suicides, ed. by Roger L. Conover, p. 42. Originally published in Maintenant, issue 2 (1913).

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2. Though you have never possessed me
   I have belonged to you since the beginning of time

   Mina Loy, One O'Clock at Night from Three Moments in Paris

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   One night King Dada [Duchamp] and Colossus [Cravan] lolled about a divan in Walter’s [Arensberg] parlor, engaged in the privileged male sport of the evening which consisted of drawing their forefingers along the green stockings of the blond Countess stretched among the cushions. Every now and then a man would rise, giving his place to another. Colossus had been occupied with one leg for ages, and when he had had enough, he came and laid on the floor beside me, tilting the brim of my hat onto the tip of my nose to cover my eyes — so as to hide from them the approval in his.
   “Don’t have him,” urged Carlos [Williams], joining us. “ You will only find yourself in a ridiculous situation. All these pugilists are bunglers in bed. I’m off,” said the Doctor, kissing me good night. “You’re all so damned sophisticated, I might as well be deaf and dumb.”

   “All of your irony is assumed,” he whispered to me, “You really have the heart of the romantic. Why will you not let me show you what life can be in the embrace of my boundless love? My one desire,” he continued, parting the ethereal green grapes that hung from my hat and burying his lips in my hair, “my one desire is to be so very tender to you that you will smile without irony.”
   While I laughed inwardly at how unknowingly men use stock phrases to advance their amour, Colossus importuned me again. “If you won’t take me home with you, I shall never address you again.”
   “Colossus, I couldn’t bear that. I give you my word of honor that the next time I meet you I will take you home with me.”
   “You needn’t shout,” he reproached with severe pudency, as if the whole scene had been staged in private, “everyone can hear you.”

   Mina Loy, ‘Colossus’, New York Dada, ed. by Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986), p. 107-108.

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3. Letters Of The Unliving

   The present implies presence
   thus
   unauthorized by the present
   these letters are left authorless —
   have lost all origin
   since the inscribing hand
   lost life.

   The harshness of the past
   croaks,
   from creased leaves
   covered with unwritten writing
   since death's erasure
   of the writer —
   erased the lover

   Well-chosen and so ill-relinquished
   the husband heartsease —
   acme of communion —

   made euphonious
   our esoteric universe.

   Ego's oasis now's
   the sole companion.

   My body and my reason
   you left to the drought of your dying:
   the longing and the lack
   of a racked creature
   shouting
   to an unanswering hiatus
   'reunite us!'

   till slyly
   patience creeps up on passion
   and the elation of youth
   dwindles out of season.

   Agony
   ends in an equal grave
   with ecstasy.

   An uneasy mist
   rises from this calligraphy of recollection
   documenting a terror of dementia.

   This package of ago
   creaks with the horror of echo.

   The bloom of love
   decoyed
   to decay by the finger
   of Hazard the swindler —
   deathly handler who leaves
   no post-mortem mask
   but a callous earth.

   Posing the extreme enigma
   in my Bewilderness
   can your face excelling Adonis
   have ceased to be
   or ever have had existence?

   With you no longer the addresser
   there is no addressee
   to dally with defunct reality.

   Can one who still has being
   be inexistent?

   I am become
   dumb
   in answer
   to your dead language of amor.

   Diminuendo
   of life's imposture
   implies no possible retrial
   by my present self —
   my cloud-corpse
   beshadowing your shroud.

   The one I was with you:
   inhumed in chasms.
   No creator
   reconstrues scar-tissue
   to shine as birth-star.

   But to my sub-cerebral surprise
   at last on blase sorrow
   dawns an iota of disgust
   for life's intemperance:

   'As once you were'

   Withhold your ghostly reference
   to the sweet once were we.

   Leave me
   my final illiteracy
   of memory's languor —

   my preference
   to drift in lenient coma
   an older Ophelia
   on Lethe.

   Mina Loy / The Lost Lunar Baedeker

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4. http://thunderstruck9.tumblr.com/post/131576409731/eduardo-arroyo-spanish-b-1937-arthur-cravan
   Arthur Cravan après son combat contre Jack Johnson / 1993 / Eduardo Arroyo

   http://cousinmosquito.tumblr.com/post/37755730678/arthur-cravan-tras-el-combate-contra-jack
   Arthur Cravan tras el combate contra Jack Johnson / 1994 / Eduardo Arroyo

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