PUSH   NEVAHDA

I am a writer who cares for nothing but writing – that’s how I feel. When I am with people I feel like a doctor with his patients – very sympathetic – very interested in the case! very anxious for them to tell me all they can – but as regards myself – quite alone, quite isolated – a queer state.

 – Katherine Mansfield

You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning.

 -James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

She said I'm sorry baby I'm leaving you tonight
I found someone new he's waitin' in the car outside
Ah honey how could you do it
We swore each other everlasting love
She said well yeah I know but when
We did - there was one thing we weren't
Really thinking of and that's money
Money changes everything

 -Cyndi Lauper, Money Changes Everything

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the
children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the
long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or
nothing.

 -Helen Keller, lecturer, writer, reformer

"...It was in that chair that my mother said the most extraordinary thing. Years before. We were sitting with a couple, some friends of my parents, a doctor and his wife, when suddenly the wife, who was a wit, asked this question: If you were a character in literature who would it be? Not who would you want to be, but who is it in literature you most closely resemble?.... And then my mother spoke. "I'm the Lady Brett Ashley," she said. "Why?" the doctor's wife asked. "Because I believe in living the way she lived. You wreck your own life and then, very gently, you wreck the lives of those around you."

-Robert Goolrick, "The END of the World AS WE KNOW IT"

People who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth – and, indeed, no church – can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. That is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne.

 -James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"

".....don’t ever say what you will and what you won’t do, boy. You don’t ever know what the hell God got in store for you. One time I had to steal meat from the corner store to feed y’all when ya daddy ran off'ta Chicago when he hit the numbers fa $900 dollas. Shyt, I ain't know what to do!  I had neva stole nuthin' before, but all I knew was that y’all had to eat, and that nigga had dun hit the numbers and went to Chicago . That’s how life be sometimes, boy. So, don’t ever let me hear you tellin’ bout what you won’t do cuz the lord will humble you quick..."

-My momma responding to me telling her that I would never steal, circa 1979

It is very hard to be genuine and real with people. The more you try to reveal your emotional side the more people reject you. People prefer that you put on airs, be fake, unreal, and something other than what you really are, which is  - in the face of Nature - a fragile, sufferable human being. But, to be weak, fragile, fallible, and sufferable—which is what truly makes us human—is often met with scorn, condemnation, and pity. I think it’s because to deal with such a human predicament is to deal with oneself, so by rejecting people that are seen as weak and fragile is to reject that very human quality within ourselves that we so earnestly hate.

 -Push Nevahda, "Push Nevahda and the Vicious Circle: scenes from a random life"

I just want you to
Recognize me
I'm the temple
You can't hurt me
I found peace
Within myself

Michael Jackson, Jam

What a writer is obliged to realize at some point is that he is involved with a language which he has to change. For example, for a black writer, especially in this country, to be born into the English language is to realize that the assumptions of wich the language operates are his enemy.

James Baldwin, U. C. Berkeley Campus, circa 1979

What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Franz Kafka

One of the reasons for my being in hospital, besides dementia praecox [schizophrenia], is a complex condition on my mind, split up, as it were, in two parts, one normal, the other schizoid. My schizoid side is the Raskolnikov-Dedalus-George Webber-Duluoz side, the bent and brooding figure sneering at the world of mediocrities, complacent ignorance, and bigotry exercised by ersatz Ben Franklins; the introverted, scholarly side; the alien side. My normal counterpart, the one you're familiar with is the half-back-(w)horemaster-alemat e-scullion-jitterbug-jazz-crit ic side, the side in me which me which recommends a broad, rugged America; which requires the nourishment pf gutsy, redblooded associates....

Jack Kerouac to his friend, George Apostolos

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Souls of Black Folks"

"The only real thing about a writer is what he has written, and not his so-called life."

William Burroughs

"[Herbert] Huncke was a hipster, a thief, a junkie, but also a very romantic and Dostoyevskian character. I'm sure that, if you asked Jack [Kerouac] about it, he would say that he associate the word beat with Huncke, who was sort of a great visionary too. Because the point of Beat is that you get beat down to a certain nakedness where you are actually able to see the world in a visionary way, which is the old classical understanding of what happens in the dark night of the soul."

Allen Ginsberg discussing the meaning of the term 'Beat Generation'

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

James Baldwin

Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked,, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

Jack Kerouac, On The Road

“For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.”

Ama Ata Aidoo

My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.

Jack Kerouac, On The Road

"....the search for belief is very likely the most violent known to man."

Gilbert Milstein