When I started Library Manifesto up again as a blog, “The Final Manifesto,” by poet and essayist Joshua Mehigan, came to mind. “The Final Manifesto” was published in a special issue of Poetry magazine as part of a series commemorating the centennial of F.T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto.” The poem can double as a list of all the fears and negative thoughts about blogging that have been running through my mind. In fact those thoughts kept me from starting the blog for a year. I laughed when I first saw the poem, but reading it again now strikes a stronger chord. It is a reminder to push for something beyond the status quo and to break the rules.
I hope LM will find its place. In the meantime, I’ll learn to silence the self-doubts and be open to the next manifesto that comes along to replace this one.
The Final Manifesto
- We see you.
- We know who you are.
- Your ideas are worthless.
- Your aesthetic is stupid.
- Your “technique” is a welter of narcissism, superstition, and habit.
- All your little tiny ideas, all your whoring attempts at creation, and you yourself are nothing, nobody wants you, we despise you, it’s in our nature.
- You should be kept as a pet.
- You are a Philistine, the Paul Bunyan of decadence, an acromegalic fraud.
- You are a minnow, a speck, a stain.
- The genre humain is sick, and you are to blame.
- You are a necrophiliac.
- You are a museum of irrelevance.
- It will take years to make Art vital and important again.
- You are from this moment forbidden.
- As the Italians say, Parla quando piscia la gallina.
- We are here now.
- Our aesthetics is empirically grounded.
- Our taste will be raised to principle.
- You and your band of jays will be flushed out.
- Yes, Art is resurrected today: Victory is ours!
- History will forget you and salute us.
- Here you are, and here is oblivion.
- This is the final manifesto, and the only one.
-The Final Manifesto by Joshua Mehigan