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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