From the loading dock of an abandoned warehouse whose insides are a strange open labyrinth of antiques which stares out at a gutted and destitute Cleveland which seems to always harbor some shrieking siren I was smoking a cigarette and contemplating how fitting DADA would be now in 2010, a time which is arguably more absurd than any time which has yet come to pass.
Dada was breathed into life by a Europe mad with war in the clamour and the gloom of a land gashed with muddy trenches filled with the viscera of thousands upon thousands of poor men who were sent to die by prospectors. DADA was man’s disgust with itself. It was man’s utter disappointment with the cards we were dealt in the Nature game, but more so it’s despair at how we chose to play those cards, how we cheated and lied and counted and rigged and killed just steal all the chips in the end.
DADA never died and it never will. It changed as the people and the drugs and the culture and the art changed because it had to. DADA is a rejection of the prevailing cultural and artistic norms to its deepest, most distrustful degree. It became the Beats and it drove across the absurd face of the country spewing unedited poetry into the night in wanton futility. Then it became Rock and Roll which ranted and raved and snorted and fucked until it got lost. The eighties was a decade of purist DADAism when nothing made any sense at all and DADA was left to walk the streets in leather jackets with spikes and patches and hard faces with open, undisguised malice for the modern world, broken glass clenched in a bleeding fist. This was punk rock. DADA softened with depression in the nineties to the tune of ten-thousand strangely tuned guitars admitting that everything that could be said has been said and the only way to tell the world to stop was through the barrel of a shotgun. But now, in this last decade of the new millenium, post suicidal tendencies, DADA has forgotten it’s own name and it’s true purpose in a pharmaceutically dystopian nightmare future while it is coming to grips with the fact that through one-hundred years of life it has known only war and it has failed to stop it, or to learn to manifest it’s only message purely to be truly understood. Still DADA is an alien vagrant from space who cannot communicate with these anxious monkeys determined to self-destruct.
Oh Mother DADA, what is one to do? Journals, self-indulgent books, obscure paintings, angry, bitter music and all that you’ve produced. None of it was worth a damn. In what direction do we go now with your sacred message?
Maybe we should abandon the species and our hopes that they will learn to save themselves. Maybe we ought to take our time to look into the colors and to enjoy our personal spectacle here on the planet like a Beat poem, something written which can only allude to a moment that can never be recreated. Maybe we should learn to find God’s reflection in every mirror cascading around the activities of every atom of everything that has existed and be content. Maybe we should forget about the government and the wars and the politics, leaving them to make a Hell of their own lives. Maybe we should use our creative energies to form for ourselves a nouveau Garden of Eden to be kept forever pure of the hysteria of a world which even DADA in all of its grace through all of the madness of time corrupted even DADA in the end. Maybe we should take time to finally edit our unfinished artworks. Maybe some day some other creature, some other species which is more rational, will pick up our pieces and learn from the lessons that you, DADA, have carried inside your cleverly defended labyrinth which from the bird’s eye view reads as the history of man’s mistakes in all of his doings.
I love you DADA, because you never told me what the answer was. That was the answer. There are no answers. It is always this thing, and it is always wrong, and to make ammends with it one must learn a kind of flexibility and readiness for abandonment, one must craft a kind of celebratory spirit around the tragedy of the whole thing, which is such a difficult and exhausting task to keep up for the remainder of one’s life. But if you were easy, DADA, and you wore your message on your sleeve, we would not want you.
Just one more example of the absurdity which lies inside of our hearts and our minds which expresses itself in everything that we do as a species no matter how much time we invest in discussing the finer details of Ethical Philosophy.
Ah, to be one of the Cult of DADA, it is a heavy and loathesome burden, for there is no sure way to end up on the shores of this delusional island without at first passing through that which DADA was built to destroy, for DADA is transmitted to people, or rather people are transmitted to DADA, through War and War alone it seems. I was delivered to DADA with the keys to POW cages in my hands which was, comparatively, a rather easy entrance. Some come through blood and some through fire. They crawl across DADA’s threshold with a rifle in their hand and a brand new horrible memory of some terrible thing which could never be undone. Nobody leaves the DADA alive.
My ruminations are interrupted by a man hanging from the fence which surrounds this Bunker of Culture. His fingers push through the links in the fence in a way that reminds me of the detainees. He wants to ask me if I am a florist.
I want to tell him that there are no flowers in the DADA, because in the flower there is nothing against which one could rebel, but I chose instead to stare at him as if he has interupted me in the middle of something very important.
“Yes. In a way. In a sort of a way. I guess that I am.”
The Paper Trail 