Philosophical Rogues and Antiheroes of the Intellectual. Mina Loy (part 1)

(Self-Portrait (c. 1905) from The Last Lunar Beadeker.)

The veil on obscurity makes things more interesting, particularly when a clear focus is used to either promote or discredit movements and ideologies. The fears within a templated idealism of regulating thought and individualism as they rely on collective opinions - has always reflected the realms of hypocrisy.  Inherent now, with digital markets all vying for credibility, through its divisiveness to perpetuate ad revenue.  What can be vague and at times hard to discern, despite the paradoxical, becomes the most sincere. These are what I deem the Philosophical rogues and Antiheroes of the Intellectual.  As mentioned, the hard to define, yet through their individualistic viewpoints, despite the obscure aspects – there is a poignancy. Unmistakable when they themselves look at all aspects of ideologies, religions and the like to formulate possibilities within their own mind.  The Buddhists, believe to remove duality from the mindset is to remove the divisiveness of the human predicament of suffering.  That we are all sinners and saints, good and bad, to know pain and suffering is to know life.  They cannot be separated, rather to be embraced and released from its burden. But, contradictions are real and exist in all dynamics of our thinking and as mentioned, it can also hold an interest, a concept in itself.  To see something unique from an idea, philosophy, religion or manifesto, that is appealing to the observer, even if it is sourced from a dark resonance or harsh imprint.  Does that viewer, more so the rogue need to fully embrace the collective concept?  By their own state of mind, they may rework a collective ideology – and reflect their own individualistic imprint back.  An inversion of thought that becomes theirs.  I can think of no other who did this so well as Mina Loy, the English poet and onetime member of the Avant-garde art movement known as Italian Futurism. 

The Industrial revolution that started in the 18th century, gathered momentum at the turn of the 19th century.   As steam power, steel and machine-made textile industries began the collective industry complex.  The early stages of the 19th century heralded newer and more established possibilities thanks to the sciences, which in turn delivered advancements in electricity, telephones and radio communication. All to be set down as the beginnings of a technologically progressive society, particular to Europe who embraced these new technologies with fervor.  As both America and Europe began to trade ideas and new concepts, with the American system of democracy, infused with their own technological advances began to spread its mass appeal.  It is about this time that an Italian poet, by the name of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1906 wrote the Futurist  Manifesto, written in Italian as a manuscript to document theses changes that he saw were more relevant to the Italian mindset – the advancement of civilization through futurist thought, to be applied within the now. The Futurist Manifesto, was not a blueprint or intended per se for later Italian Nationalism or even Fascism. It was however a fervent embracing of the philosophy of industry and science with its tinges of concern that the past, particularly Europe, was prone to the traditionalism and what they saw as failed institutionalized concepts – such as Christianity, that was viewed by the Italian Futurists as anti-intellectual. Therefor the Futurist artist, poet and philosopher were in line with the scientific innovations of the day. Which was seen later in the art, sculptures, poems and writings.  Yet, Marinetti's intensely written Manifesto of creatively destroying the old idealisms, to remake within the new, also held a contempt for women or “scorn” as he decreed in the Futurist Manifesto. But, paradoxically the Italian avant-garde art movement also attracted so many women to it, who in turn embraced the Futurist dynamism of its art, writing and poetry. Marinetti's misogyny was probably tuned to what he saw was the past weakness of the feminine, from its past traditionalism. Embracing marriage and romanticism, for Marinetti, it would be a weakness for the masculine to subordinated and defined by, what he felt, a failed past. It was his resentment of the attraction of traditionalism, within the confines of offering chastity and virtue to the male. This was most likely the extent of where the so-called Futurist misogyny lies.  But, regardless of entailed aspects of Marinetti's viewpoints on the feminine, a young English poet by the of Mina Loy, who in her 20s moved to Florence in 1907 to join with the Futurists, where she embraced the modernist and portayed futurism of their art, its dynamic movement and directness in description.  A clearing out of the past, to what she saw was the bondage of women throughout history. The new, as she used concepts of Futurism, like other women who also were attracted to the movement, to further push feminism in their art, writings and sexuality.  Loy, influenced by the intensity of Marinetti's writings,  embraced the masculine, via the Futurist concept of a revitalized society, as an absorption of herself, reflecting it back with a vigor of a renewed femininity and power.  To see things anew. 

“HERE are the fallow-lands of mental spatiality that Futurism will clear” 

Loy's work as a modernist poet, who was haunted by her privileged past as a young woman from a wealthy traditionalist English family, to which she was resentful of its restriction, the freeing up of herself under Futurism maintained Loy's paradox and obscurity of her artistry.  She, in my opinion, reworked the harsh masculine of Futurism into a unique aspect and made it her own. Drawing from Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, yet discarding it simultaneously – in adding her own modernist concepts of writing and the Futurist take on the creative destruction of past resonance to recreate new concepts. She did this wonderfully throughout her writings, her poetry came alive, more so when she completed “Aphorisms on Futurism” in 1914, did she remodel Marinetti's masculinity, fuse it with own feminine perspective, to emphasize the imperative and destroy the syntax. 

“...The business of the bland sun 
Has no affair with me 
In my congested cosmos of agony 
From which there is no escape 
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations 
Or in contraction 
To the pinpoint nucleus of being 
Locate an irritation without It is within Within It is without 
The sensitized area
Is identical with the extensity 
Of intension
I am the false quantity 
In the harmony of physiological potentiality
To which Gaining self-control 
I should be consonant
In time Pain is no stronger than the resisting force 
Pain calls up in me 
The struggle is equal...”

Excerpt from Partuition.  Mina Loy