Saturday, February 27, 2021

Love Letters ~ Soul On Ice

Excerpts from love letters taken from the book SOUL ON ICE, by Eldridge Cleaver. This is from the part in the book where Mr. Cleaver, who is in Folsom Prison, and attorney Beverly Axelrod exchange letters. The letters began September 5, 1965.  

E.C. “I feel impelled to express myself to you extravagantly, and words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs leap in my mind.  But I beat them down, refuse to write them, because it all seems so predictable and trite...What right have you to summon my soul from its slumber?......You have tossed me a lifeline.  If you only knew how I’d been drowning, how I’d considered that I’d gone down for the third time long ago, how I kept thrashing around in the water simply because I still felt the impulse to fight back and the tug of a distant shore...”
 
B.A writes back:  “...Believe this:  I accept you.  I know you little and I know you much, but whichever way it goes, I accept you.  Your manhood comes through in a thousand ways, rare and wonderful...I have no measuring stick.  I accept you...What an awesome thing it is to feel oneself on the verge of the possibility of really knowing another person.  Can it ever happen?  I’m not sure.  I don’t know that any two people can really strip themselves that naked in front of each other.  We’re so filled with fears of rejection and pretenses that we scarcely know whether we’re being fraudulent or real ourselves...” 

E.C. answers back:  “Your letters to me are living pieces, chunks of you, and are the most important things in my life...It only happens in books – or...Do you know what shameless thought just bullied its way into my consciousness? That, I deserve you, that I deserve to know you and to communicate with you...I seek a lasting relationship, something permanent in a world of change, in which all is transitory, ephemeral, and full of pain.  We humans, we are too frail creatures to handle such titanic emotions and deep magnetic yearnings, strivings and impulses… 

…The reason two people are reluctant to really strip themselves naked in front of each other is because in doing so they make themselves vulnerable and give enormous power over themselves one to the other.  How awful, how deadly, how catastrophically they can hurt each other, wreck and ruin each other forever!...Better to maintain shallow, superficial affairs; that way the scars are not too deep, no blood is hacked from the soul.  You beautifully – O, how beautifully!! – spoke...of ‘What an awesome thing it is to feel oneself on the verge of the possibility of really knowing another person...’ and...I do not believe that a beautiful relationship has to always end in carnage.  I do not believe that we have to be fraudulent and pretentious,...I know that sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings.  They see themselves as so inadequate that they feel forced to wear a mask in order to continuously impress the other.  I do not want to ‘hold you’, I want you to ‘stay out' of your own need for me.  ...It takes time and deeds, and this involves trust, it involves making ourselves vulnerable to each other, to strip ourselves naked, to become sitting ducks for each other...I am vulnerable and defenseless and I make myself a duck for you.  ...And it is not a fraud, forced out of desperation...”  


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