Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1914 (Heft 47))

—“THERE IS ALWAYS A ‘MORE’—
A GREATER VISION—A GREATER REALIZATION ’ ’—
Singing, I greet you!
My spirit to yours—
I hear you—will you hear me?
There is a great wind on the world—
Today and tomorrow I greet you—the same—
Singing.
Over against your justification of the past,
Against the vision you have made prescient and real;
The mad results of blindness hurl upon us.
Chaos moving out of civilization
Into an unmitigable crisis—
War!
One must be a god to become a man, today!
Like an impossible pageant it all seems.
One comes—one goes—the leaves fall.
A procession of days, with their furious pain and their sardonic laughter,—
All—a pageant of great sound—and of greater stillness—
This, my city—that, my world—
And within this one heroic, terrible year
The events of a life-time.
Like a dream or a dreadful terror
These things pass—
And I become deeply conscious of all which is near to me,
All which means relationship to my inner life—
All which lasts livingly—amidst this going mad of human strength,
While in the distance I comprehend a battle raging between races,
It’s fiercity enveloping the globe
As men die—one upon another.
Free from the limits of this devastation
With its indestructible purity of spirit explaining even today;
A vision stands.
Conceived by one man’s sufferings and understandings
Evolved into the many.
One scarcely knows—
I think there can be no beginning to a great vision
There are so many human lives interwoven.
Justified by life and by the inner need
It comes.
Day after day of supreme effort builded it,
And upon day and night a sense of sound
Whirling—as of a million elements up-gathering

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