Lipstick Traces (31 page)

“A terrible chaos,” Huelsenbeck said that night in London. “The meaning of chaos, that’s what I’m going to talk about.” But he never got around to it.

“Disintegration right in the innermost process of creation,” Ball wrote. “It is imperative to write invulnerable sentences.” 15 June 1916:

Huelsenbeck comes to type his latest poems. At every other word he turns his head and says: “Or is that an idea of yours?” I jokingly suggest that we should draw up an alphabetical list of our most frequent constellations and phrases, so that production can proceed without interruption; for I too sit on the window seat trying to resist unfamiliar words and associations; I scribble and look down at the carpenter who is busy making coffins in the yard. To be precise: two-thirds of the wonderfully plaintive words that no human mind can resist come from ancient magical texts. The use of “grammologues,” or magical floating words and resonant sounds characterizes the way we both write. Such word-images, when they are successful, are irresistibly and hypnotically engraved on the memory, and they emerge again from the memory with just as little resistance and friction. It has frequently happened that people who visited our evening performances without being
prepared for them were so impressed by a single word or phrase that it stayed with them for weeks. Lazy or apathetic people, whose resistance is low, are especially tormented in this way.

So it came up: the blind oath, the severed gesture, the buried curse, the dance it took an entire civilization to forget, and ten seconds to remember. The pieces Lefebvre would promise to finish smashing had been discovered. The momentum was there; the task was to increase it. “Some things assisted us in our efforts,” Ball said—“first of all, the special circumstances of these times, which do not allow real talent either to rest or mature and so put its capabilities to the test. Then there was the energy of our group; one member was always trying to surpass the other by intensifying demands and stresses.” Janco contributed the masks.

Ball saw them as abstractions of the passions, images that had somehow floated free for more than two thousand years, arriving in a crooked street in Zurich en route from the secret olive groves where the Greeks performed their first plays. At the same time he recognized the masks as absolutely modern: cutups that remained faces, but just barely. With paste and hair and cardboard Janco had taken the noses, eyes, mouths, chins, cheeks, and foreheads of his friends and skewed them, attacked them, practiced unlicensed medicine on them.

To Arp the masks were at once “fetuses and autopsies.” Flatly, they took the Cabaret Voltaire draft dodgers to the front. In Germany it was already being rumored there were soldiers so hideously disfigured by the new weapons that they would have to be imprisoned in secret hospitals for the rest of their lives; after the war, photographs were smuggled out to prove it. They are so horrible they look like fakes, photo collages—like the postwar collages of Berlin dadaist Hannah Höch, like her
Fröhliche Dame
(Happy Lady), which looks like a burn victim smiling. But cubism was dismemberment; if war was the highest form of modern art, who could say that a face blown up by a bomb did not reveal character? Ball:

We were all there when Janco arrived with his masks, and everyone immediately put one on. Then something strange happened. Not only did the mask immediately call for a costume, it also demanded a quite definite, passionate gesture, bordering on madness. Although we could not have imagined it five minutes earlier, we were walking around with the most bizarre movements, festooned and draped with impossible objects, each one of us trying to outdo the other . . . The motive power of these masks was irresistibly conveyed to us.

So much for Russian folk-song night.

The masks brought forth slow dances, made up on the spot and named after the fact: “Festive Despair,” “Nightmare,” “Fly-catching.” In every case the masks affirmed the existence of a language no one knew how to speak, but which contained the only words capable of forming the only truths worth knowing. Trabadya-la-modjere was turning into the philosopher’s stone. The dadaists were going back in time, falling through the stage: “Modern artists,” Ball would write in 1917, “are gnostics and practice things that the priests think are long forgotten; perhaps even commit sins that are no longer thought possible.” These were the sins to be found in an embrace of an ancient heresy, the belief that certain forms of knowledge, of gnosis, accessible only to a few, could bring one so close to the Godhead that the seeker would drive God out of time as if God had never been; in the early Christian era, even as the church drove the gnostics out of history, the rituals they practiced continued. With their gospels burned and adherence to them punishable by death, some adepts, the historian Benjamin Walker writes, remained familiar

with the reputed occult virtues of sound and the latent potency of sacred names, hermetic formulas and magical invocations . . . The most important of all sounds, they believed, is the phoneme, which is the smallest articulable sound unit . . . There evolved in time the practice of singing each [vowel sound of the Greek alphabet] in a single breath . . . combining the vowels with certain consonants, especially those producing a buzzing or humming sound: Zeeza, Zezo, Zoza, Ozzi, Omazu, Nozama, Amenaz, Arazaz . . . As far as possible these archaic syllables were used in unaltered form, even when their meaning, if they had any, was forgotten.

The dadaists were coming into the knowledge that what had been forgotten could be remembered, even by accident; they were realizing that the
language everyone knew how to speak was capable of forming only those truths they didn’t want to hear. They didn’t know what they wanted to hear, so they made a sound they called “medieval bruitism,” “noise with imitative effects,” a simultaneous poem, all the acts appearing at the same time, but no longer acts. It meant wails, the bass drum, glissandos, prehistoric harmony, cries of pain and hilarity; if the dadaists did not replace God, they replaced themselves. Huelsenbeck:

The problem of the soul is by nature volcanic. Every movement naturally produces noise. While number, and consequently melody, are symbols presupposing a faculty for abstraction, noise is a direct call to action. Music of whatever nature is harmonious, artistic, an activity of reason—but bruitism is life itself, it cannot be judged like a book, but rather it is a part of our personality, which attacks us, pursues us and tears us to pieces. Bruitism is a way of looking at life which, strange as it may seem at first, compels us to make an absolute decision. There are only bruitists, and others . . . In modern Europe, the same initiative which in America made ragtime a national music led to the convulsion of bruitism.

Here, Huelsenbeck, who at the time—1920—was lecturing to a psychiatrists’ convention in the Free City of Danzig (today, Gdansk), where he would set up a practice in 1922, stepped out from behind his lectern, did a few steps of the Eagle Rock, pulled a paper bag over his head, scribbled blindly on it with a grease pen, punched out eye holes, drew a pistol from his jacket, and fired a full clip of blanks at the audience. The half-dozen or so who had seen the act before were primed to applaud.

Ha. Thank you. Bruitism
—
well, you see.
Bruitism is a kind of return to nature. It is the music produced by circuits of atoms—

(at this point a member of Huelsenbeck’s claque rose from his chair and fired a pistol filled with blanks at Huelsenbeck, who bit down on a capsule secreted in his mouth, causing fake blood to drip down his chin and over his shirtfront. He grabbed the lectern and continued speaking, bent over and turned away from his listeners)

death ceases to be an escape of the soul from earthly misery and becomes a vomiting, screaming, and choking. The Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire took over bruitism without suspecting its philosophy—basically they desired its opposite: a calming of the soul, an endless lullaby, art, abstract art.
They wanted the moral safety valve
—
“Disgusted by the butchery of World War I, we devoted ourselves to the Fine Arts,” “Our sort of
Candide
against the times,” our sort of four-ply comforter
—
but dada grew into a creature which stood head and shoulders above all present. Do you understand? We are psychiatrists; we are Germans; we have read Nietzsche; we know that to gaze too long at monsters is to risk becoming one
—
that’s what we get paid for!

It all came together on 23 June 1916 in the cabaret, unless it was July 14, in a rented hall, when Ball dressed up like a sorcerer in the weird costume, designed by Janco, built out of cardboard by his brother (“It was fun to do it,” Jules Janco said in 1984, “and even more fun to undo it!”). On Ball’s head was a blue and white striped hat two feet high; his body was covered in an obelisk painted blue. Huge claws replaced his hands. Wings, red on the inside and gold on the outside, went down to his waist; as Ball chanted his sounds, two different poems on reading stands at his sides, he flapped his arms like a bird.