Renzo Novatore Archive


Let’s Exalt Life!


Written: 1920.
Source: Text from RevoltLib.com.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021


No deals. In integrity, in fullness, in beauty, living resolutely -Wolfgang Goethe

Those who have not descended at least once into the abyss of the darkest sorrow or amid the delirium of the blackest despair, who have not courageously spoken face to face with death to then find in Crime the supreme inspiration of the moment that exalts and purifies the strong, heroic victim who loves, who craves, who desires; I am certain, they will never understand me. Anyone who has spent his pitiful existence in the environmental mud of common and vulgar mediocrity, where the resigned, powerless moles vegetate, emasculated by all the cowardly conventionalism, cannot understand — even if dressed in red — the satanic cry of those who want to bloodily bite the pure perverse lip of free life unchained.

If — as Proudhon said — “Sorrow is the source of the greatest knowledge” or “ ... the driving principle of all our action” as Locke stated, it means that sorrow is the sole and greatest source of life, being nothing other than feverish, pulsating action and a yearning greed for knowledge. What does it matter if, transported on the frenzied wings of our philosophical and stormy quests, we have achieved the fearful unveiling of the Nothing aspiration and the uselessness of the organic Everything?

Do you not see above the raging fire, that we lit for the cremation of every phantasm, our physical and spiritual life rising up festively again, joyously singing the brilliant magnificence of the Sun?

Who is more worthy to triumphantly exalt life than the one who lives without the aid of any god and without any hope? Who is more Heroic than the one who fights, having the full and calm awareness that everything is useless and empty?

I know that gold, glory, love cannot give me Happiness. And yet I love Life with intense joy and want to live it resolutely. And what is for others “vice”, “crime”, “sin”, when it comes back into my wild nature, is transformed into a wellspring of sincerity and purity. I interpret equality before god of the law, the people of humanity, as the greatest absurdity, as the mother of all that is inconceivable absurd. Anyone who would condemn a Baudelaire or a Shelley, for example, to the same ostracism or punishment to which they would condemn a common scoundrel simply because they committed a similar “crime” carries out an act more immoral than bourgeois morality. One of Leopardi’s drinking binges cannot be compared to that of a boor, just as the heresy spoken by a saint cannot be confused with the common heresy of an atheistic sinner.

Every action of mine must remain mine, even if it is equivalent to another or a thousand others.
If the action is the same, the motive is different. I am I...

Even two mouths that come together melting in the frisson of the same kiss and two naked bodies that contort together in the same spasm to interweave a single garland of Love, still vibrate two different sounds and two different worlds in two lives, even though joined and scrambled. My sensations remain mine even when I warm myself with you in the flame of the same fire and when I die of cold with you lost among the same glaciers. Facing a woman’s beautiful naked body, where you might feel the sensual desire for an orgasmic embrace, my artist’s eye might find the powerful and delicate motive for creating an utterly pure work of Art. In short, the world that extends at our feet is, undoubtedly, in itself, a unique essence, just as we are, but for each one of us it is a different thing. This is why the world only exists as our creation. And this that is of the world... is of life.

I am the creator of the world and of my life. I am my own creator, as I am my own destroyer.
And it is for the love of this strange and tragic game that I exalt and glorify life and want to live it in its spiritual fullness without compromise. — Dangerously!

In my conversations with Death I learned this great, new love for life. She told me what no book has ever been able to tell me. “Live!” Death told me. “And if you want life to be great, free and pure, live it in the aroma of eternal Sin. When life commands it, offer me your brow. My roses are black and never wither.”

Beyond cold reason and all sinister morality, I exalt the life of the spirit and of the instincts, awaiting the final kiss.
Death is the final lover!

- Iconoclasta!, Vol 1, #8, 1920