clinging

I imagine one of the reasons

 people cling to their hates so stubbornly
is because they sense, once hate is gone, 

they will be forced to deal with pain. 

*

Love takes off the masks

 that we fear we cannot live without 

and know we cannot live within. 

I use the word “love”

 here not merely in the personal sense

 but as a state of being,

 or a state of grace –

  ~ James Baldwin

from The Fire Next Time

art by Jumbo Prior 

from the Museum of  Tropical Queensland

 

terror within

It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. 

And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however, and by definition, a provisional self — and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to bits. 

It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again? 

The lives of men — and, therefore, of nations — to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind. It is a question which can paralyze the mind, of course; but if the question does NOT live in the mind, then one is simply condemned to eternal youth, which is a synonym for corruption.

~ James Baldwin

from The Price of the Ticket

art by picasso

part of each other

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated - in the main, abominably - because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

Most of us, however, do not appear to be freaks - though we are rarely what we appear to be.  We are, for the most part, visibly male or female, our social roles defined by our sexual equipment.

But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white.  We are a part of each other.  Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I.  But none of us can do anything about it.  

~ James Baldwin

from Freaks and American Ideal of Manhood