Who ever told you that an anarchist wants to change human nature? Who ever told you that an anarchist’s ideal could never be attained until human nature had improved? Human nature will never “improve.” It doesn’t matter much whether you have a good nature or a bad one. It’s your thinking that counts. Clean out your minds! If you believe these things—no, that is not enough: if you live them—you are an anarchist. You can be one right now. You needn’t wait for a change in human nature, for the millennium, or for the permission of your family. Just be one! You have seen that “the blind, heavy, stupid thing we call government” can not give you a happy childhood. It cannot educate you or make you an interesting person. It cannot give you work, art, love, or life—or death if you think it is better to die. * * * * * And finally when you see that you can never get all the love you imagined from life; that you are trapped, really, and must find a way out; when you see that here where there is nothing is the way out, and that the wonder of life begins here—when you see all this you will be an artist, and your love that is “left over” will find its music or its words. Stravinsky’s Three Pieces, “Grotesques,” for String Quartets[1] AMY LOWELL First Movement Thin-voiced, nasal pipes Drawing sound out and out Until it is a screeching thread, Sharp and cutting, sharp and cutting, It hurts. Whee-e-e! Bump! Bump! Tong-ti-bump! There are drums here, Banging, And wooden shoes beating the round, grey stones Of the market-place. Whee-e-e! Sabots slapping the worn, old stones, And a shaking and cracking of dancing bones, Clumsy and hard they are, And uneven, Losing half a beat Because the stones are slippery. Bump-e-ty-tong! Whee-e-e! Tong! The thin Spring leaves Shake to the banging of shoes. Shoes beat, slap, Shuffle, rap, And the nasal pipes squeal with their pig’s voices, Little pig’s voices Weaving among the dancers, A fine, white thread Linking up the dancers. Bang! Bump! Tong! Petticoats, Stockings, Sabots, Delirium flapping its thigh-bones; Red, blue, yellow, Drunkenness steaming in colours; Red, yellow, blue, Colours and flesh weaving together, In and out, with the dance, Coarse stuffs and hot flesh weaving together. Pig’s cries white and tenuous, White and painful, White and— Bump! Tong! Second Movement Pale violin music whiffs across the moon, A pale smoke of violin music blows over the moon, Cherry petals fall and flutter, And the white Pierrot, Wreathed in the smoke of the violins, Splashed with cherry petals falling, falling, Claws a grave for himself in the fresh earth With his finger-nails. Third Movement