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12:41 pm | 15 May 2003 | in the beginning

It is 1916.

Europe is an inflamed mass, bulging with infection, the mad Kaiser with the withered arm saying "The course remains the same, full speed ahead,� without any idea of the course, only the intoxicating speed of it. You arrived here from Romania in August 1915.

You said then that you had come to study mathematics, but in the April prior the Germans had started to use their poison canisters in Ypres, the French soldiers� faces going blank, uncomprehending, as the green cloud descended upon them; within moments that cloud began to eat their lungs out the way fire eats tissue paper, and those same horrified faces were blackening even as they fell. The misery! A zeppelin has bombed a kindergarten in East London. The limits of violence have been pushed and pushed and now there are no boundaries. When you try to sleep the dead come clutching up at you (the children�s little bodies embedded with bits of mortar and steel the suffocated soldiers with their blackened faces) and so you, Samy Rosenstock, have come to Zurich. You were nineteen then.

The dissidents, the artists and pacifists and musicians and aliens, all have come to Zurich, a city like a balloon buried in sand, squeezed on all sides but holding its volume empty, free for now. In less than a year�s time you will quit the pretense of math and will change your name to something which can be not-directly-but-in-that-pigeon-Latin-pan-European-way be translated as �sad in country.� You are sad in country, indeed.

Number 1 Spiegelgasse is where they met, in droves from the very beginning, no hesitancy in their fervor. They were eager to feel something other than this numb brutality that bears down on them like the roar of a constant, violent wind, eager to see this new abstract art, to see these new poem-forms in life before them, animal sounds and disconnected African rhythms slapping their senses as one slaps an unconscious man, unbelievably treasonous sounds and words that mean nothing but suggest something new in the mind�s-eye of each spectator. From the first night they have broken chairs, have howled and clapped, have stamped feet and hurled things at the anarchy of the stage. They do this to express approval, disapproval, rage, disbelief, and sorrow. You do not care what they express. You care that they express, that even your little �sthetic outrages still retain enough power to wring a response from the deadened masses.

On this night, Hugo�s turn has just ended and he limps from the stage panting in his pasteboard costume, conical hat awry and plashed with a bit of fruit, and he smiles at you for just a second, wryly, as his wife comes forward to help him out of the contraption. You are next. You have not yet taken the stage, and the room is already so hot with human bodies and energy that a little rivulet of sweat trails down your tense taut spine. And now a hush falls over the crowd, who is waiting, sipping nervously at little tumblers of cheap sweet wine when they get the chance, a low mumble of expectancy running through them like an electrical current, and for just a moment you tip your head back, eyes closed, and clutching the fissure between the two dirty-gold-coloured curtains, you rock back on your heels, a little. You are twenty. You are Tristan Tzara. Everything around you is on fire.


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