Making poetry out of being invisible.
“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. . . . I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”
This is the begining of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, a powerful book that inspired me to compose Invisible People (from the album Tamed). The narrator is an unnamed black man that lives rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a forgotten basement that he calls his hole, but a hole warm and full of light: there are exactly 1,369 filament type bulbs, the power stolen from Monopolated Light & Power. He has one radio-phonograph, but plans to have five 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.
Throughout the book we learn all the unnamed man’s vicissitudes that brought him to his hole. As in every real work of art, the story is universal, and could be that of the innumerable invisible people of this present day that—if we are not sleepwalkers—we can see crossing our ways. Today Louis Armstrong could sing What Did I Do to Be so…Migrant and Blue, or Syrian and Blue, or Different and Blue.
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