Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Make your connection!

pictured at right: James Baldwin, Harlem, 1963. Photo by Steve Shapiro.

Interviewer: Earlier, Jim, you mentioned that for a national policy to be straightened out, the private policies, these private, individual lives must be, too. You spoke of your job as a writer, and of how you've got to write. In that chapter on Bergman, "The Northern Protestant," is a beautiful comment: "All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up."

James Baldwin: Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort, it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover, too, the terms with which they are connected to other people.

This has happened to everyone of us, I'm sure. You read something which you though only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.
This excerpt is from an interview conducted for the Studs Terkel program "Almanac," aired on WFMT in Chicago on December 29th, 1961. They are talking about the core of Baldwin's art, his vision. What art means, what it's for.

We have to make connections. Keep our senses alert and hearts open for "The Real" (see Passing Strange note below!) to flood in, even if we're not ready. We never are.

Keep discussing, writing and creating!
And happy Week 4 of TRaC!

quick note: If you haven't seen Passing Strange on Broadway (starring one of our Fall TRaC instructors, Eisa Davis), or would like to see it again, anyone under 25 years old can get a $25 ticket. Available day of, at the box office only.

You can learn more about James Baldwin here.

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