Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Heft 41))

A Brazen Minute:
I am Curiosity, the assassin of the dark; cerulean traveler who fronts
the murderous fires of Arcturus and who dreams of reaching the pole of the
final dimension. Were my life longer than a minute I would not be.
A Hypocrite Minute:
I am the triumphant proclamating archangel of universal error. My
hostel is the Ideal. I am the eternal lying logician. I am Fallacy, the dungeon
of all theories and facts.
A Cowled Minute:
At the feast of the Furies the human heart is the piece de resistance. I
am the Tear that floods the world. I am the avatar of immemorial griefs,
an almanac of ancient days of lamentation.
A Super-Minute:
I am the thought that has forgotten. Death can waive me, for in my soul
I carry a private oblivion. I apprehend and lapse. I am the everlasting
“to be,” the perpetual becoming, the imperishable Tantalus-Proteus. I am
a thin coating of life over a Lethe that flows into the hollow spaces of Eternity.
A Twin Minute:
I am Beauty and Death—the alternate light and shade thrown by the
Absolute. When Lucifer fell into Darkness his brain became a sun and the
flames were darkened in that all-mighty effulgence. I am the twin born of
that Light.
A Narcotic Minute:
I am the bloodshot eye of sleepless Hope, a plagiarist of the Past, the
Minute that stanches all pain and chloroforms Truth.
A Philosophic Minute:
I am a Minute that has climbed into your consciousness after laboring
through all ante-natal forces. Pale, thought-inwrapt, ears aprick, upright at
the heart of Chaos, I hear the reverberations of thoughts unborn, and saw
the phosphorescent gleams from the brains of Heraclitus and Nietzsche like
skeins of light in that ancientest of mist.
A Gray Minute:
I am Fatigue. I am an eagle that yawns in the face of the Infinite. My
eyrie is a hen-roost, the azure a painted awning. I am weary of flight. Anarch
of the skies I was, now my head seeks the soft bolster of death.
A Spectral Minute:
I crossed the threshold of the ineluctable. You cannot see me, you must
not know me. I whisper to you across the threshold of your consciousness,
behind the closed door of the senses. Open that door and you die. You do
not know what I whisper; you cannot see me; you must not know me.