Soul on Ice

September 5, 1965

...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. I feel humiliated by the words you inspire me to write to you. I refuse to write them.

You have tossed me a lifeline. I have changed tremendously over the years. But I had always had a strong sense of myself and in the last few years I felt I was losing my identity. There was a deadness in my body that eluded me, as though I could not exactly locate its site. I would be aware of this numbness, this feeling of atrophy, and it haunted the back of my mind...a certain intimation of emptiness.

Now I know what it was. And since encountering you, I feel life strength flowing back into that spot. My stride, which was tentative and uncertain, has begun to recover.

Emphatically Yours,

Eldridge.

///

September 15, 1965,

...I place a great deal of emphasis on people really listening to each other, to what the person has to say, because one seldom encounters a person capable of taking either you or themselves seriously. I had a profound desire for communicating with and getting to know other people, but I was incapable of doing so, I didn't know how.

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, that I deserve to have all this happening. What have I done to merit this?

I seek the profound. And it is not a fraud, forced out of desperation. We live in a disoriented, deranged social structure, and we have transcended its barriers in our own ways and have stepped psychologically outside its madness and repressions. It is lonely out here. We recognize each other. And, having recognized each other, is it any wonder that our souls hold hands and cling together even while our minds equivocate, hesitate, vacillate and tremble?

Peace. Don't panic, and don't wake up.
Dream on, I am
Yours,
Eldridge.


Extract from "Soul on Ice" by Eldridge Cleaver. 1968.