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

and the Goncourt brothers found that words were live things, like humans.
Words have lungs, words have arterial systems, words have genitals, words
have claws and they may be used and used again in a million combinations
until the life in them has guttered down to its viewless socket. A word, a
musical note, an idea, is that monstrous thing—a shadow without a body,
the epitome of life itself.
Nothing which lasts is of value. Permanency, completion, perfection
have on them the stamp of death. That which changes perpetually lives per-
petually. The eternally fugacious is the eternally youthful. Incessant dying
and renewing, incessant metamorphosis, incessant contradiction—it is on
these invisible motifs that are builded the symphonies that a single note begins
and ends. The infinitesimal contains the all. The part contains the whole.
To decentralize a system is to create a myriad new centers. Decomposition
is the condition of birth.
Beyond Verlaine, Debussy, Picasso, Arthur Symons, Maurice Maeter-
linck, Lafcadio Hearn, Stephane Mallarme, Remy de Gourmont, Anatole
France, there is nothing. They are the ultra-violet rays in the great
aesthetic illumination. They have sucked the marrow out of all their moods
and pared their thoughts to the quick. They have sacked the catacombs of
feeling and thought and with the bones of ancient skeletons have re-articulated
and revivified strange and marvellous sounds and concepts. They have picked
apart the old skeins of truth and error and rewoven them into colors of a magic
strangeness, and fixed their subtle uncertainties in the fragile frames of their
art.
“Show me a man who sees a likeness in things totally different, and I
will show you a god,” said Plato. That is the essence of the passion for unity.
Show me a man who sees a difference in things absolutely the same in
appearance and I will show you the supreme decadent. The doctrine of rela-
tions has become a commonplace. Things are interesting in so far as they
differ. I desire a world without a center. I seek the Ultima Thule of each
sensation. I love the miscellaneous and the dispersed and the muffled sonor-
ities of weakened forces. I desire as many personalities as I have moods.
If I have a personal, imponderable, immortal soul I hold it in no more esteem
than I do a personal, imponderable and immortal God. I desire to be ephem-
eral, protean, and to chase the dazzling butterflies of my fancy across abyss
and meadowland and even into those fatal caves in the moon where the
Goddess of Lunacy spins her cataleptic dreams.
I will gouge out the eye of every certainty with the bare bodkin of
analysis. I find my supremest joy in my estrangements. As I become more
and more isolated from my fellow-beings, as the abysm between us widens, I
find the colors of my passions shading to deeper purples and the bristles of
my thought growing more delicate and the ghostly prophets locked within
me gleaming with a clearer vision. I desire to become unfamiliar to myself
and to startle the sinister wraiths of my million alter egos from their somnol-
ence into a fuller, more passionate life. In the universe of my brain I desire
that there shall be born a new sun each minute and that an old world shall die.

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