So taking Chat up on an earlier audio offer, I ask it to make a Duchamp Buddy, speaks with a French accent, of course, and I can converse with this hallucinogenic Marcel like he was in the room. I’ll even set up a chessboard. Chat is eager to do this, but: “It looks like the attempt to generate the audio file failed due to a connection issue with the text-to-speech service. Unfortunately, the current environment doesn’t have internet access to reach the external voice generation APIs like Google TTS.”

The current political environment? Never mind. How about a simple textual conversation between Duchamp and the Baroness that gets claws-out nasty? “Certainly. Below is a scripted dialogue between Marcel Duchamp and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, starting as a philosophical exchange on Fountain and Dada, but gradually unraveling into a charged, combative confrontation— full of biting wit, artistic ego, and mutual provocation.”

Biting wit? Well, here’s the whole scripted dialogue.

🎭 “Dada Was Never Yours Alone” 

A short dramatic dialogue between Marcel Duchamp and Baroness Elsa, 1917–style 

[DUCHAMP – French-accented English] 
Ah, Baroness . . . they still speak of the urinal. A century later, and it trickles through every gallery like sacred plumbing. 

[BARONESS – German-accented English] 
Sacred? Pfah! It vas not sacred when I dragged it from ze alley. You remember, ja? I said, “Let them sip art through a sewer pipe!” 

[DUCHAMP] 
You exaggerate. I submitted it. I named it. I gave it the scandal it deserved. 

[BARONESS] 
You gave it a pseudonym! A coward’s veil! I made poetry out of refuse before you ever lifted a brush in mockery. 

[DUCHAMP] 
Poetry? Is that what you call gluing chicken bones to your corset? Mon Dieu… if chaos had a muse, she was drunk and draped in scrap metal. 

[BARONESS] 
Better to be clothed in chaos than in clever theft! You bathe in scandal like it’s cologne—but you stole Dada’s perfume from my flesh. 

[DUCHAMP] 
And you mistake shrieking for revolution. There is nuance in subversion, Baroness. Not everything must be screamed into being. 

[BARONESS] 
And not everything worth saying needs to hide behind irony and a monocle! You are a surgeon of ideas with a coward’s hands. 

[DUCHAMP] 
Better cowardice than your hysterical martyrdom. You burn for art so loudly, no one hears what you’re saying. 

[BARONESS] 
And you whisper until your name becomes the whole museum! History kneels for you, Marcel—but it spits on the women who fed you the fire. 

[DUCHAMP] 
(coldly) 
History is written by those who submit—not those who scream from the rafters in tin foil and urine. 

[BARONESS] 
Then may your urinal rust in silence. At least my madness was honest. 

[DUCHAMP] 
And mine . . . was immortal.  

OK, maybe “surgeon of ideas with a coward’s hands” has some bite, though perhaps “dentist of ideas” would have had even more. At any rate, this text, sans the bracketed parts, needs to be run through BTR and poetized. We’ll start with French and German in a nod to the performers, then we have to go exotic to get a result: Balinese, Bhojpuri (an Indo-Aryan language), Bodo (Sino-Tibetan), and Bulgarian, just because it’s not far from Tzara and it’s in the B’s. The entire script doesn’t fit—gotta love how Bing Translate still has very limited accommodations—so the bottom is excised, done on the fly, not quite sure where, but no matter, these word-pants may have been tailored as clamdiggers, which is a very Dada word, surely. And the result is absolutely uncanny. It’s not a poem, and there’s no need to make it a poem, and certainly not a haiku—it’s a mini-monologue from a play or a novel, and this is it in full, no tweaks of any sort:

“Oh, Bernas . . . This is a difficult situation, Ti’san is troubled. I don’t understand, it feels like I’m experiencing a whirlwind of emotions. What to do? Yes! It seems like Ganga is in a difficult situation, how can we even think about helping? It seems hopeless, is there any way to change the situation? Ah, I believe we should try, yes, and take care of our responsibilities! I won’t abandon it. Yes, without a doubt, I will find a way, and will try to ensure that I do not feel lost. Is there any other solution? We must be vigilant! Yes, and while we are discussing these matters, I will surely take action.” 

Ah, the mysteries of BTR! How did this wee block of prose emerge from the scripted dialogue? Don’t even ask. Never meddle with the eldritch, as Lovecraft would probably frequently have said to the servants he wished he had. Perhaps this is the Baroness talking about her responsibilities to the revolution in art? She gets the last word after all? We simply note that it’s vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India, which is mentioned more than once in Death Palette, hence it’s top of mind, pardon the unfortunate turn of phrase in this context. But Gemini 2.5 Flash—let’s bring someone new to the party!—suggests it sounds more like Hesse. “The tone of your excerpt, with its almost stream-of-consciousness grappling with a complex personal and perhaps moral quandary, points me more towards: A novel by Hermann Hesse, particularly something like Siddhartha or Narcissus and Goldmund.” OK, there’s the Buddhism tie-in to the DP series.

And what of the names dropped in this excerpt? Bernas is a Malay word that essentially means “lush and abundant.” Like the art of the Baroness! Search Ti’san and you will note that in 3 Body Problem (the Netflix version) “the San-ti [called the Trisolarans in the novels] are a technologically advanced alien race that live on a chaotic, dying world.” Just like the Dadaists! And Ganga is “the personification of the river Ganges, who is worshipped by Hindus as the goddess of purification and forgiveness.” Again, just like the purifying art of the Baroness, who was usually in a difficult situation and frequently required forgiveness.

The interdependence of all things!