"There is nothing else to want."

 

I have to say that recently, for me, working in an environment where it has become increasingly difficult to know who to trust (because we are so clever at being phony and outfoxing ourselves and each other, a fact I never dreamed would ever become my everyday reality) this quote shot out at me among so many other amazing quotable passages from James Baldwins "The Cross of Redemption" which is a no less than stellar collection of candid and previously unpublished essays and writings by Baldwin.

For a man long gone from the physical plain, he never ceases to continue amazing and enlightening me as if he was, and is still here, everyday, every time I pick up this book and open it. He is fearless and brutal and beautiful and loving. And he is clear about that. Very few artists come along that can break open the tight shell of human apathy and pour out it's content so irreverently, and with such unapologetic fierceness and concern for humanity. Sometimes that's all I need to get  by.

Perhaps life is not...

From "The Cross of Redemption, Uncollected writings of James Baldwin"

I am not a nigger

For years, since I was a teenager, this man has touched my life on so many levels. He was so fearless, so ahead of his time, so slept on, so fierce!!! Against all the horrible, brutal, merciless and perverse odds of his time he sought to know truly he was and to guide others to do the same. He knew who he was and who the white man was not and he made no apologies for it.

He predicted the future! And for better or worse he still is...

Watch this.

American Myth

“There is an illusion about America, a myth to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don’t believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it—and almost all of us have one way or another—this collision between one’s image of one’s self and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head on and try to become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you though you were, which is fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.”
-James Baldwin
From “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel”
In “Nobody Knows My Name

Reading James Baldwin always makes me feel better. Because the issues he dealt with and discussed so eloquently and in such a relative way then are still being echoed right now everyday. His language was so nuanced and so inclusive of something which I believe sought to transcend the boundaries of labels we know so well and seem to be so comfortable settling for that it helps me to feel less alone in feeling that there must be so much more to me than what society would seek to define based on mere relational and occupational roles, more than gender, race and class constructs can begin to tell the story of.

Here is a great article in the New York Times on the collection of essays "Nobody Knows My Name" by Irving Howe