Reading more of Marinetti’s pieces has increased my distaste for his ideas and beliefs. While I do admire the legitimacy of his ideas concerning leaving the past to more easily discover the future, I think often times it is too radical or pompous. Furthermore, after reading “Contempt for Woman”, I feel like Marinetti is the guy talking amongst a group of people who makes a claim while everyone embarrassedly avoids eye contact in utter disagreement. Certain claims such as his conviction that love “is the least natural thing in the world” and that “The great tragicomic experience of love will soon be ended, having yielded no profit and inflicted incalculable harm” (86) bothered me. I understand his contempt for the poets who glamorize the idealized vision of love, as it is a very repetitive theme over time, but I don’t understand his exclusive contempt for love. To say that love has yielded no profit and is only a source of harm is far-reaching and arrogant. If the future is a future devoid of love, then I’m not so anxious to leave the present behind.
That said, the piece I most enjoyed was Mina Loy’s aphorisms. I think the first line “Die in the Past, Live in the Future” is a hell of a motto to live by. Sometimes I feel people succumb to the past and get caught up by the noose of tradition and sway into the future lifelessly. Mina Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism” is an eloquent reminder to leap into the future and discover the endless possibilities that it offers.
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