In an ephemeral sense, I suppose I am a Dadaist. I learned that from the most intimidating professor I encountered during my college years: Neil Levi.
I took a class with Neil called “Modernism and Catastrophe.” It was an English course where we mostly watched movies (great movies) and read engaging fiction and cultural criticism about the era around the world wars. Classes were mostly small; discussion groups where we probed the context and meanings of art as a response to the modern woes of man. We were all really high on our own shit—it’s where I came to truly appreciate film (cinema! verite!), learn about varying philosophies-and-phers, and artistic movements and concepts like Futurism and, yes, Dadaism. It’s all influenced me so deeply, I think because the issues are still so resonant to now. My friend Maggie, with whom I took a few classes (with and without Neil), and I still bring this class up from time to time, to this day. Which is maybe embarrassing to admit—who still thinks about college course work? But hey, we’re nerds who still do semi-regular writing sessions together over Zoom as we work on our respective projects.
Anyway, I was absolutely terrified of Neil Levi. He was such a wonder to me: this gruff Australian intellectual who looked like he played rugby and was, yes, distressingly hot in like a, Mr. Darcy sort of way. He was quiet—a man of few words? Oh my god. I found him deeply intimidating and was therefore/of course, fascinated and maybe slightly obsessed with him. (And yes putting this in writing in this newsletter right now makes me cringe.)
The adulation of a 20-year-old English major girl who was low-key horny all the time, terribly repressed in it, forged in the fires of late 90s/early 00s teen culture, is a fucking thing, y’all. But that’s like, an essay for another day or maybe even just a course you can probably take with my friend Hope or something.
One time, Maggie and I were walking towards the English department house and I remember saying to her “I’m so scared of Neil Levi, he intimidates me so much!” in my usual too-loud, too animated, low-key-always-performing manner. Neil passed us on the right seconds later. I silently melted and combusted on the sidewalk. I wanted to turn into an Alex Mack style goo and seep into the ground, pass through the crust layer, and get slowly reabsorbed by the mantle of the earth. Maggie tried (and probably failed) to keep in her giggles.
We learn the most when we exist outside our comfort zones, but you can only really see and assess what those are after you’ve past them and are looking back. I didn’t realize until later how much being in that class, learning from someone like that, affected the sort of art and writing I love to create and watch.
I don’t often like to look back. At least not with nostalgia. I very rarely re-watch or re-read things I love. I already saw that and experienced it and had that feeling about that thing: what’s next? (Imagine me knocking on the desk like President Bartlet in The West Wing.) This is probably what I found so appealing about Futurism. Let the past die, kill it if you must, as Rian Johnson so wrote into the Star Wars universe (listen: The Last Jedi is a perfect Star Wars film—ANYWAY I DIGRESS).
He got what I—and clearly, society—constantly need to be reminded of: you can’t revere the past so much you forget to live in the future. That’s not how you evolve and grow and change. You have to look, but look too long and you might get stuck. And I’ve been terrified of being stuck. So much it got me stuck, in fact.
The problem with Futurism is that they were all a bunch of Italian nationalist babies who fancied themselves revolutionaries because, as founding member of the movement and Futurist Manifesto author, Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti basically said (listen, I’m paraphrasing here): “old things suck!” And while they would probably be into the “let the past die” thing, they would have also probably taken it way too far. The Futurists so admired speed, technology, youth, and violence to such a degree they really said “fuck the planet, humanity over nature!” (Another paraphrase.)
Elon Musk would have totally been a Fascist in that era. Sorry! Futurist. I totally meant Futurist.
Anywhoozles! History so often repeats itself is another common refrain because, well, it’s unfortunately very true. Sometimes it is important to look back. We need to reflect in order to see the whole picture—to know where next we need to go, we have to understand where we’ve been, and how far we’ve come. Looking back gives us all context, so it’s important to do it from time to time, especially as we gain further lessons from time and growing. Revisiting the past—and past version of myself—is something I’ve been doing a lot of while working on this memoir proposal and also myself. (Therapy!) And it has really revealed some things to me, in ways I both did and also never saw coming.
We really always do gotta be existing in this duality, huh? Man I am so exhausted by and in awe of this life. The irony of it all.
So I’m trying to do things differently. One thing at a time. And that means doing things I often never do. Which I’ve done a lot of over the past year (Happy Aries season! Spring is the official/real start to the year in my book! I mean, LOOK AT ALL THE LIFE SPRINGING FORTH AFTER A LONG HARD WINTER!) if you really look at it. I mean, shit, in the past year I’ve reached out to my dying estranged father and saw his face (over zoom) for the first time in 28 years. I told him what it was like to have him leave and raise another Alicia. I got a new tattoo to cover up the old one that no longer felt like me. I went through old photos from the times I was so sad and scared and angry and lonely and felt ugly and fat and terrible as a teenager. I also finally adopted a dog. And my life has never been better. Which allowed me the space to do the really scariest thing: face my old self. And that meant searching out and reading my old writings (both personal and not): the place where I reveal my truest sense the most.
I was afraid of that, for so long. Afraid of the ugliness I would see. The imperfections of thought and syntax. The bad ideas or bad person or hiding underneath a pathetic attempt at showcasing talent, skill, and understanding, aka bad writing.
But I didn’t.
To my goddamn amazement, I’ve seen that I was maybe better than I ever thought I was, on the page and in my person. That what my brain has for so long convinced me was true—that I was just bad and weird and wrong and not good—was maybe not the answer. Reading old thoughts, feelings, and old words from school or not made me see that there was a lot worth not running from. That there’s a lot to be gleaned from the me I am seeing in my rearview mirror.
And even if I was bad or weird or wrong or not good from time to time, those perceived negatives are not the whole of me. Like Dadaism, I was responding to the chaos and carnage around me. I was so often existing in response to things—and a lot of those responses were completely reasonable! Sometimes even good! Occasionally profound! (Wow, I can’t believe I called myself profound. Ew, how annoying, lol.) And frequently I was merely being very silly and frivolous and nonsensical and funny. That’s Dadaism.
Maggie thinks she still has the syllabus for Neil’s class somewhere in her house, and maybe if she reads this she’ll feel inclined to dig it up and she and I can laugh about how relevant too much of it is to now. I cannot remember so much of what we read and watched in that class, but sometimes little memories of certain things pop up. A movie here, an idea there. Like this Dadaism stuff. And when I go back and investigate, I laugh because I can see the connections—to myself and the rest of the world. To then and to now. I mean, just look at the definition of Dadaism itself (via a 2006 piece from the Smithsonian Magazine):
Dickerman traces Dada’s origins to the Great War (1914-18), which left 10 million dead and some 20 million wounded. “For many intellectuals,” she writes in the National Gallery catalog, “World War I produced a collapse of confidence in the rhetoric—if not the principles—of the culture of rationality that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment.”
And:
“Without World War I there is no Dada,” says Laurent Le Bon, the curator of the Pompidou Center’s show. “But there’s a French saying, ‘Dada explains the war more than the war explains Dada.’”
Two of Germany’s military leaders had dubbed the war “Materialschlacht,” or “the battle of equipment.” But the dadas, as they called themselves, begged to differ. “The war is based on a crass error,” Hugo Ball wrote in his diary on June 26, 1915. “Men have been mistaken for machines.”
“Men have been mistaken for machines,” eh? Dadaism was a response to the war, to capitalism, to the state of being for humans in a post-modern society that was wrenching our lifeblood from our burnt out hands in hopes of selling it back to us at a premium because it’s how things were. And how things were, were apparently noble and right and justified and good.
To be glibly Millennial about it for a second: el oh el.
We learn so much from the past that can help us shape the future. But that future can’t come at the cost of all the other things that make up this world and this life: it will be the culmination of all of it. It is about the “in tandem” of things. Everything builds on itself, there are interconnections in every moment, in every little thing we do. Not just with humanity, but with the whole entire earth—from crust to core, and all us animals who live up top. You can’t be scared at the size of it, or the unknowable potential of things. Exist in it, with it: every moment is also this moment, to be really new age-y about it.
Even the moments that feel like silly nonsense.
da da daaaa ba dee ba dooo!