Baldwin Manifesto II

The second proposition is what I really want to get at tonight, and it sounds mystical

I think in a country like ours, at a time when something awful is happening to a civilisation, when it ceases to produce poets, even more crucial ceases to believe in the report that only poets can make people

Millions of people who you will never see, who don't know you, will never know you

People who may try to kill you in the morning, they live in terrible darkness

That if you have that fun, terrible thing that every artist can recognise but no artist can define, you are responsible to those people, to lighten that darkness

It doesn't matter what happens to you

You are being used in the way a crab is useful

The way sand certainly has some function

It isn't personal, this force that you didn't ask for

A destiny, which you must accept

It's also your responsibility and if you survive it, if you don't achieve, if you don't lie, it is not only your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope because only an artist can tell and only artists

Since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it, what it's like to die or to have somebody die, what it's like to fear

To fear, to love, to be glad. Hymns don't do this

Churches really cannot, cannot

Churches really cannot do it

The trouble is that all of

The artists can do it, the price he has to pay himself, and that the audience must also pay a willingness to give up everything. To realize that although you spend 27 years acquiring this house, this furniture, this position, although you spend 40 years raising this child, children, nothing, none of it belongs to you

You can only have it by letting go

You can only take if you are prepared to give

And giving is not an investment. It is not a day at the bargain counter

It's a total risk of everything of you, of who you think you are, of who you'd think you'd like to be, where you think you'd like to go