INVISIBLE MAN
35
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 made poetry out of being in–
visible. 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 phono–
graph. 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 sometimes 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 leaps 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 of 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 the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked
science, speed and footwork as cold as a well-digger's posterior. The
smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel
had simply stepped inside of 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 piece,
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 a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as flam enco, and beneath
that lay a still lower level on which I saw a beautiful girl the color
of ivory pleading in a voice like my mothers as she stood before a
group of slaveowners who bid for her naked body, and below that I
