Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 31))

What I feel, I draw. I am sad, curious, cruel, flippant, vicious, just as
the moment dictates. But what I draw is not me. It is not art. It is not
myself. Like Pierrot I am the slave of lawless emotions that drift through me.
For in this instance it is not the artist who creates the rhythm, but it is the
essential rhythm of persons that scan and direct the caricaturist. Ah! who will
say what laws of hydraulics, what trajectory of the stars, what strange currents
of attraction and repulsion produce a De Zayas sketch.
His, I take it, is an analysis of an extremely subtle and effective sort; it
mirrors in a glass—which distorts—the intellectual and moral grimaces of the
age. And these grimaces—commentaries on the evolution of the human race
as they are—only the uncultured person can neglect. S. H.

THE LAND OF DELUSION
Alone in the land of delusion,
Beyond the lost kingdom of truth,
Around me the phantoms of faces,
I met with the ghost of my youth.
On her lips was a whispering shadow
Like the shadow of boughs on a stone,
And her sighs were like echoes that haunted
A ruin whence music had flown,
And with eyes, like sad exiles, returning
She wandered to meet me alone.
Like the moon, the pale sister of silence,
She drooped through that valley of sighs,
And the look of her face was as lovely
As the face of a dream when it dies.
She leaned to me, leaning, and whispered
A secret of awe, and the air
Was chilled into winter and over
My heart swept the cold of despair,
And my tongue was a shriek that was frozen
And a shivering wind was my hair.
I turned like a stag from the hunter,
I fled to the ends of the dark;
But ever before me the vision
Of that mystery, naked and stark.
Pursued by myself the pursuer,
And pierced by that pitiless stare,
I fled to the planet of pleasure
That circles the dead sun of care;
And the stars, like lions of hunger,
Leaped out of their listening lair.

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