Future! Future! Future!

Scorn for the past! Though never fully justified - for a valorization of the future at the expense of the past is just as absurd as its converse - it brings about a certain liberating quality. What's important is your work, here & now, alive, changing.

What I'd like to note today are two vastly different ways of shucking off the past (both of which, ironically, have become canonized). The first comes from F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto:

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd. [trans. not listed]
    

Here, a dismissal of the past is the only way to innovate the present. What's past is dead, and we must actively toss aside its stinking corpse.

Here, on the other hand, we find a passage from the Taoist 莊子 (Zhuangzi or Chuang-Tzu):

Duke Huan was reading in his hall. Wheelwright Bian, who was cutting a wheel just outside the hall, put aside his hammer and chisel and went in. There he asked Duke Huan, "What do those books you are reading say?"

The duke answered, "These are the words of the Sages."

The wheelwright said, "Are the Sages still around?"

And the duke answered, "They're dead."

Then the wheelwright said, "Well, what you're reading then is no more than the dregs of the ancients."

The duke: "When I, a prince, read, how is it that a wheelwright dares come and dispute with me! If you have an explanation, fine. If you don't have an explanation, you die!"

Then Wheelwright Bian said, "I tend to look at it in terms of my own work: when you cut a wheel, if you go too slowly, it slides and doesn't stick fast; if you go too quickly, it jumps and doesn't go in. Neither too slowly nor too quickly - you achieve it in your hands, and those respond to the mind. I can't put it into words, but there is some fixed principle there. I can't teach it to my son, and my son can't get instruction in it from me. I've gone on this way for seventy years and have grown old in cutting wheels. The ancients have died and, along with them, that which cannot be transmitted. Therefore what you are reading is nothing more than the dregs of the ancients." [trans. Stephen Owen]

Taoism, too, finds in the words of the past nothing but "dregs." However, was posited instead is far less violent than the quasi-fascism of the Italian Futurists; Taoism instead cleaves to the paradox of 無為 (wu-wei, i.e. non-action or not doing). Because the wisdom of the past cannot be taught, it is only through the cessation of striving after it that it can be attained. Activity is the attempt to impose an order; what is needed is to allow things to proceed according to their nature (自然 zi-ran in Chinese, literally "what is so of itself").

Let these be put side by side and each person choose according to her/his fancy.