34
PARTISAN REVIEW
tory; 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 and felt her face expand until it filled the
whole 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
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 long as I have you develop a certain in–
genuity. I'll solve the problem. And maybe I'll invent a gadget to
place my coffee pot on the fire while I lie in bed, and even invent a
gadget to warm my bed-like the fellow I saw in one of the picture
magazines who made himself a gadget to warm his shoes! Though
invisible, I am in the great American tradition of tinkers. That
makes me kin to Ford, Edison and Franklin. Call me, since I have
a theory and a concept, a "thinker-tinker." Yes, I'll warm my shoes;
they need it, they're usually full of holes. I'll do that and more.
Now I have one 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
