My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt
there is a brighter spot in all of New York than this hole of mine, and
I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State building on a photographer’s
dream night. But that is taking advantage of you. Those
two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization – pardon,
me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I’ve heard) – which might
sound like a hoax or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean)
is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang. (Beware
of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang.
Keep a steel helmet handy.) I know; I have been boomeranged across
my head so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness. And
I love light. Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man
should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly
because I am invisible. Light confirms my
reality, gives birth to my form. A beautiful girl once told me
of a recurring nightmare in which she lay in the center of a large dark
room, becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the
chimney. And so it is with me. Without
light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware
of one’s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some
twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.
That is why I fight my battle with Monopolated
Light & Power. The deeper reason, I mean: It allows me to
feel my vital aliveness. I also fight them for taking so much of
my money before I learned to protect myself. In my hole in the basement
there are exactly 1, 369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every
inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate
kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know. I’ve
already begun to wire the wall. A junk man I know, a man of vision,
has supplied me with wire and sockets. Nothing, storm or flood, must
get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light.
The truth is in the light and light is the truth.
When I finish all four walls, then I’ll start on the floor. Just
how that will go, I don’t know. Yet when you have lived invisible
as ling as I have you develop a certain ingenuity. I’ll solve the
problem. And maybe I’ll invent a gadget to warn my bed – like the
fellow I saw in one of the picture magazines who made himself a gadget
to place in his shoes! Call me, since I have a theory and a concept,
a “tinker-thinker.” Yes, I’ll warm my shoes; they need it, they’re
usually full of holes. I’ll do that and more.
Now I have a radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain
acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its
vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like
to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing “What
Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue” – all at the same time.
Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla
ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound,
watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument
into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because
he’s mad poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because
he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility
aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette,
some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening
to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let
me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never
quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometime you’re behind.
Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time,
you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from
which it laps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.
That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.
Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The
fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one
violent flow or rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred
times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But
suddenly the yokel, rolling about in a gale of boxing gloves, struck a
blow and knocked the science, speed, and footwork as cold as a well-designer’s
posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot
got the nod. The yokel simply stepped inside his opponent s sense
of time. So under the spell of the reefer I discovered a new analytical
way of listening to music. The unheard sounds came through, and each
melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said
its peace, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That
night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well.
I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante,
into its depths. And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo
there was a slower tempo and a cave
and I entered it and looked around and heard an old woman singing as spiritual
s full of Weltschmerz as flamenco, and beneath
that lay still lower level on which I saw a beautiful girl the color o
ivory pleading in a voice like my mother’s as she stood before a group
of slaveowners who bid for her naked body.