Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Special number))

With curse-laden hope, to rise to man’s Babel-heights, that have missed
their heavenly aim. To those pinnacles where human souls were scorched,
so that now in dissolution they glow—a ghastly leading light—after God’s
sun has set, beyond man’s heights and towers, that are worshiped as the
sun’s keepers, by those of the valley. By those of the simple heart, whose
heaven seeking eyes were intercepted and dazzled by yonder man-made
eminence.
Those vain heights’ mystic effulgence, to them of pure fancy, appeared
like the hallelujah and glory of paradisal existence, while, in truth, they saw
but the glare of a Sardanapalian feast, whereat the son of man, having with
religious fervor his own entrails devoured, was now making a repast of his
very brain; so that even his animal hunger became spiced with delirious
mentality while in his holy of holies there was burning on one funeral pyre
all mundane joy.
Saturnalia Civilisationis! Jehovah lulled with the epitaph of a categorical
imperative, written on evolution’s flying sands. The crucifix in the medicine
chest, a specific for simplicity and senility. Ideal, like a charmer’s wand,
benumbing brawn and brain. The Olympians frozen in their marbles. Their
Pantheon—a harem of muses. At the throne—doubt and despair, with phil-
osophic laurel-wreaths on their feverish brows, their tottering burden leaning
on anaemic Science.
Ecce Homo!
There he stands in his super-manhood, his breath and hopes congealed
by the hideous grin of his own gods. A mad panic has seized him and will
not be drowned in a St. Vitus dance of vehement greed, ravenous ambition,
voracious desire and sanguine passion. His reality crumbles into primeval
dust. Through its chaos his heart-beats ring like Judas-silverlings and his
soul’s voice is as the Last Judgment’s call, piercing all being with a glancing
Cain-blow, like a shriek of all final agony.
Midas! Midas! Midas!.comes to the world-despairing ears, like
a death knell of all existence.
And still those in the valley do not hear. They are still waiting for the
watchword, with fatal faith and eyes strained upward—to man’s futile height’s-
up; and away from their own soil, whereon their bodies stand.
And over yonder, where man labored longest, stands the mighty Sphinx,
in the shadow of the Great Pyramid. His eye sweeps over man’s world and
an eternal question lies congealed in the tantalizing blankness of his eyes. . . .
Civilization-?
John Weichsel.

59