this title comes from James Baldwin’s speech, the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity, which he gave in 1962 at New York Community Church. the whole speech is worth a listen1, you can also read it in The Cross of Redemption.2
he says:
it seems to me that the artist’s struggle for his integrity is a kind of metaphor, must be considered as 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.
What we might get at this evening if we are lucky, if the mic doesn’t fail and my voice holds out, if you ask me questions, is what the importance of this effort is.
this phrase keeps coming back to me, if the mic doesn’t fail and my voice holds out, i think for its surrender — there’s no way of knowing if the mic will continue to work, there’s no way of knowing if we will stay alive from one moment to the next, if we will be able to speak through the trembling, the fear.
somehow, often enough (?), we do, enough of us do; it’s easier too, sometimes, when we acknowledge what we’re up against.
this expression of humility, this including of the precarity, makes me trust him. it is not self-depricating it is just naming up front that we are not necessarily in control of much.
he reminds us, too, that we are in control of what we give of ourselves, to each other; that our humanity depends on it.
one year is largely in the rearview mirror, another stares us down—approaching from the horizon—arbitrary and fresh.
i hope your voice holds out.