The artist struggle for his integrity is a kind of metaphor – must be considered a metaphor for the struggle which is universal and daily of all human beings on the face of this terrifying globe to get to become human beings. It is not your fault … it is not my fault I write. I would never be, come before you in a position of complainant for doing something that I must do. What is the importance of this effort? It would seem to me … I want to suggest two propositions. The first one is … is that the poets … by which I mean all artists … are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t … statesmen don’t … priest don’t … union leaders don’t … only poets. That’s my first proposition. The second proposition is what I really want to get at. And it may sound mystical – I think in a country like ours, at a time like this when something awful is happening to a civilization when it ceases to produce poets and what is more crucial – when it ceases in anyway whatever to believe in the report that only poets can make. People … millions of people whom you will never see, who you will never know, people who may try to kill you in the morning … live in a darkness where if you have that funny terrible thing – which every artist can recognize and no artist can define – you are responsible to those people … to lighten there darkness – and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in a way a crab is useful … the way that sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal … this force that you didn’t ask for and this destiny you must accept … is your responsibility. And if you survive it … if you do not cheat … if you do not lie … It is not only your glory – your achievement … it is almost our only hope. Because only the artist can tell and only the artist have told since we have heard of man … what it is like for anyone who gets this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or have someone die, what it is like to fear death. What it is like to fear. What it is like to love. What it is like to feel glad. Hymns don’t do this … churches really can not do it. The trouble is that only the artist can do it … the price that he has to pay – himself – that you the audience must also pay is the 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 … these children … nothing … none of it belongs to you. You can only have it by letting it 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 is a total risk of everything … of you. Of who you think you are. Who you think you would like to be. Where you think you would like to go. Everything … and this … forever.
padded papers 