Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 37))

MODERNITY AND THE DECADENCE.

rTlHE brain that seeks shadows, nuances, seeks the spectre behind its own
thought; that creates newer and unfamiliar combinations out of the
A old materials of life and thought—that I call the decadent brain. It
creates in its destruction. It dives into the bottomless mystery of the things
we know and comes back glittering with coral and sea-wrack and sinister
phosphorescent gleam.
In the beginning God said, “Let there be light.” In the end the intellect
that dissociates says, “Let there be shade.” Infinite variation spins her web
before the delighted mental eye of the brain of man tombed in his thought-
world. Corporate solidity has by the power of its own immanent thaumaturgy
faded into spectral evanescence. Unity, void and flat, is rent by a billion
billion fissures. The seismic convulsions of the thought of to-day have cracked
in a thousand places the mystical One of Porphyry and the Neoplatonists.
The old ideas that seemed united forever by the power of an indestruc-
tible utilitarian principle have been freed from their eternal liaisons by the
minds of the great destructive thinkers. Like giant birds they have been set
free to rove in the azure of the mental firmament to find strange and often
seductive mates. Fatality, wrinkled, fatigued, by the endless sameness of
her combinations, clothes herself once again in the flaming garments of youth
in the brains of the poets and philosophers of the decadence.
In poetry, physics, practical life there is nothing any longer that does
not pass through the spectrum of our overrefined brains, nothing that is any
longer moored to a certainty, nothing that is forbidden, nothing that cannot
be stood on its head and glorified. The indefinite, the uncertain, the para-
doxical, is the scarlet paradise of intellectual intoxication. In the vast inland
sea of our consciousness there are only phantom flying isles. With a little
thought, with a little sensibility we have gored the heart out of every cer-
tainty.
Anarchy? No. It is the triumph of discrimination, the beatification of
paradox, the sanctification of man by man, the apostasy from unity. It is
just the other extreme of anarchy. In the beginning was unity and chaos;
to-day there is nothing but laws and diversity. Unity, the great superstition,
sleeps. We have dissolved it into an infinite number of iridiscent particles.
Unity sleeps; nothing remains but units.
In the eyes of orthodoxy each newborn thought is a bastard. Into the
latrine with it!—while the high-priest of unity stands by and heals up the
gaping, blood-oozing thought-cell. But we who strip the petals from the
Rose of the World and build mosaics and arabesques out of the debris of the
ancient theorems are forever procreating imps and changelings. Thought
breeds thought; mood breeds mood; feeling breeds feeling. And so long as
this continues to be a psychological law the decadent will have the last word.
Every atom in the brain is now an individual, with its own peculiar
sense of smell and its gift of exotic vision. We used to see with our eyes, but now
we dissect with them. Our lips listen and our ears perceive colors. Flaubert

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