The (exuberantly grandiloquent) Schmurptzist Manifesto Life has no meaning; no supra-cosmic entity is there to guide us in the corridors of the great supermarket of life: the old ideals have died away and without their support Men feel lonely and unworthy of the capital letter they give to their name. The feeling of Absurdity is winning ground: our duty is not to erect a dam against this tide – for we are not the Reactionaries of Meaningfulness – but to fight the desperation and hopelessness it inspires.
“Life gets its meaning once you’ve understood it has none” : this motto shall replace the disgust engendered by the emptiness of the world, this cheap spleen that passes for elegance among the likes of Michel Houellebecq. Let us rather rejoice of the absence of theoretical bindings, and, following the steps of the Monty Pythons, dash joyfully and without unhesitatingly toward the oceans of Absurdity, on which all fights deserve to be fought, for it is in the fight itself that the human mind finds its satisfaction. “One does not fight in hope for success / No; fights are much more beautiful when there’re futile” : the verses from Rostand contain all the self-conscious fecklessness of the Schmurptzist Samurais. For success would mean the end of the struggle, of the savage jubilation it inspires and therefore, in the end, inaction, solitude, old age, decadence and death.
What we call “Schmurptzism” is not a new form of Romanticism (for we do not intend to backpaddle to some “golden age” of enthusiasm or share the stupid exaltation of Mussolini’s aficionados), but a multi-dimensional Idealism aware of the dangerous idea it would have to choose itself a single, definitive goal, even an unreachable one. The Schmurptzist is a Don Quixote who knows he is mad, but who refuses to abandon the field anyway: a Knight with a Smiling Face who squashes himself against windmills with panache and elegance. This Knights has two heads : Bananism, and the Schmurptz – the two necessary components of Schmurptzism.
Bananism is intellectual enthusiasm, religious illumination, the senseless pursuing of inordinate ends, the madness of war guided by great universal principles such as Right or Reason; as to the “Schmurptz”, it is the very moment when all these dreams break into pieces – now the talent of the Schmurptzist artiste precisely consist in describing the phenomenon in sufficiently aesthetic a way not to deter his audience from having such senseless designs. To this end, the Schmurptzists shall let Bananism neither the time to wither away (for its is as light as the air and devoid of any universal value) nor the time to stultify into an ideology (for every ideology is totalitarian in essence); as to Schmurptz, one should keep in mind that it is merely the instant of intellectual clear-sightedness which stops, for humoristic purposes, the rise of the Schwärmerei [great romantic dreams]: now, if we let this instant transform into a permanent state, then all the illusions that sustain life die away and the essence of Man perishes.
By Julien Peltier and Jean Saintot, October of 2003.
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