You might know that James Baldwin is one of my favorite writers, both for the sharp, skillful form of what his writes and for its insightful content. When you find yourself talking about the mixture of form and content you're often talking about art. Baldwin himself is very much an artist because of this. But he's also an artist because he does what an artist is supposed to do.
In 1962 Baldwin wrote an essay called "The Creative Process." In it, he explains that the "primary distinction of the artist" is that he or she must "actively cultivate" a state which most of us try to avoid: the state of being alone. Why does an artist have to be alone? Well, first of all Baldwin isn't talking about being physically alone like walking through the woods or locking yourself in your room. He means alone in sensing something difficult, something that everyone else is likely to miss. Alone, as Orwell put it, in having the strength to face things that other people don't want to face."It is like the fearless alone that one sees in the eyes of someone who is suffering," Baldwin writes, "whom we cannot help."
An artist must step back-to pull back-to see what other people in their day-to-day scramble usually miss. From that vantage-point the artist can correct the illusions to which we're all susceptible in our attempts to avoid knowing what we should know.
There's a reason that the phrase "we've always done it this way" has such power. Many people invest traditions with permanence and necessity. And they feel a questioning of tradition as little more than an assault on order itself. But, remembering what we said about Norman Rockwell a few weeks ago, the civil rights movement had to confront and then dismantle the phrase "we've always done it this way." Rockwell helped us see something that needed fixing.
Baldwin refers to the social role of the artist then as being an "incorrigible disturber of the peace," and I think understand what he means by that. I think he means the disturber of our complacency.
In short, artists as artists have an important job to do in society-Showing us something that might be wrong, or unjust, or challenging "we've always done it this way," is a lonely position to take. But someone needs to do it. "That nation is healthiest that has the least necessity to distrust or ostracize these people," Baldwin says. An artist deserves our attention, our patience, and our support, because a society needs what they can give.
