Ever-changing, ever-vanishing, an evocation from out the Mist, tottering forever to a doom that is never pronounced, I am the visible Invisible, The eel that slips through God's hands, A dominoed Abstraction whose lineaments the most curious cannot discover, Renascent over your head when you think I lie dead, Intruder in Time, enclayed for a moment, flinty, brittle, Flying the flag of Rebellion, chanting my hates and my dreams.
The world is the Temple of Pain grounded and mortised in lies— And that which they have told you is good I say is maggoty with lies. Hope is a whore and love is a lie and a flea has more for his labor than a man, the wisest of whom is still earth's awkward buffoon. To-morrow is God—they have added a jot to Eternity! Know they not to-day is Eternity and to-morrow its lewd, beckoning shadow? And love they have sanctified because of its delicate tickle. Pah! this rotten old breeding-patch circling the sun!
From the center to circumference, from nadir to zenith, I, the eel that slips through the Great Bungler's hands, survey and judge and cannot be lured by these old temporal cozzeners.
Yea, forever I vanish, I change, yet forever stand firm, Flying the flag of Rebellion from the Temple of Pain, knowing the Thing that skulks in the adytum
Publication History
The Shadow-Eater [1915/17 and 1923]
1923 Edition Text Changes
- Mist, tottering > Mist, ⁋ Tottering
- man, the wisest > man, ⁋ The wisest
- judge and > judge ⁋ And
- Pain, knowing > Pain, ⁋ Knowing