Notes on Invisibility

I am an invisible man. Not a ghost, I am a man of substance. Of flesh and bone. Fiber and liquids. I live, surrounded by mirrors Of hard distorting glass. When people approach me They see only their surroundings, Themselves, or figments of their imagination Indeed, everything and anything except me. It is a matter of the construction of the inner eye. Those eyes with which they look through their Physical eyes upon reality with. It is at times advantageous to be unseen, Although rather wearing on the nerves. You often doubt If you really exist. You wonder, whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. You ache with the need to convince yourself of your existence. That you too are part of all the sound and anguish. You strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. Then you remember that you are invisible and walk softly so as not to wake the Sleeping Ones. there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers. I gave up my old way of life: That was based upon the fallacious assumption that I, like other men, was visible. Now aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a section of a basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century. I have discovered a new analytical way of listening to music. In which the unheard sounds come through, and each melodic line exists of itself, stands out clearly from all the rest, says its piece, and waits patiently for the other voices to speak. I have come to find myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well. I can not only enter the music, but descend, like Dante, into it’s depths. And beneath the swiftness of the obvious tempo, there is a slower tempo and a cave. I enter it and look around. I heard an old woman singing a spiritual. Beneath that there is a still lower level, on which I have seen a beautiful girl the color of ivory pleading in my mother’s voice before a group of slave-owners who bid for her naked body. Below that, there is a lower level still, and a much more rapid tempo This music is Schizophrenic: one moment unbearably beautiful, the next a near-unlistenable squall of hisses, thuds, vicious snare rushes and rhythmic meltdowns. It is profoundly nostalgic in the distressing sense that it evokes lost, even false, memories, that form an otherworldly dirge of corpse like weeping. It is the music of a writer's dream. A muddied and muffled dream – In which I am descending upon a distressed landscape of mud and dung. shapes push up through the sodden, shapeless turf; cows' heads, body parts, boxy shapes, sludge and slush, all brown-coloured, embedded in a slurry of shitten and mud, rain buckets down overhead from an invisible sky. My vision here is very close-up, too close! as if I too were being drawn down into the muck. But the feeling is not desolate, it promises impending revelation! As the last note ends, I hear someone shout: In the beginning At the very start, when they cried together- There was Blackness And the sun was bloody red. Now Black is bloody. And Black will get you. Yes it will. Before I found the music, I lived in a darkness into which I was chased, But now I see! I’ve illuminated the darkness of my invisibility- And, vice versa. And so now I play the invisible music of my isolation and gaze at the intricacy of it’s design. You can only hear this music, because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians. What I can’t define though, is this compulsion; this urge to make music of invisibility? What are the memories of an unseen invisible man; who for his whole life thought himself to be visible like the rest? Are they the terrifying memories of pallid weeping corpses, Roaming, shapeless, and without form? False creatures, Impressionistic left-overs of too many violent deaths? Can a person who still lives manifest his own ghost? Can his dual identity hold that sort of power? And if so, when this walking self imposed lie, Finally stands at the threshold of truth, knowledge, And illumination, who will let him in? Who let him see His Self? It is the one you in your own home! The one who you did not see! He knows the ghost. He writes his memories, He lives his lie, and it is his burden to deliver his revelation. And when they have finished, the invisible man and his ghost, The ones who have consumed your human agency; The errors, memories, both true and false, Un-requited love, suicidal tendencies… It is the Invisible Man who will open the door, and let the ghost back in.