I'm Not A Separatist. The Imagination Is

It Goes A Long Way Back, Some Twenty Years. All My Life I Had Been Looking For Something, And Everywhere I Turned Someone Tried To Tell Me What It Was. I Accepted Their Answers Too, Though They Were Often In Contradiction And Even Self-contradictory. I Was Naive. I Was Looking For Myself And Asking Everyone Except Myself Questions Which I, And Only I, Could Answer. It Took Me A Long Time And Much Painful Boomeranging Of My Expectations To Achieve A Realization Everyone Else Appears To Have Been Born With: That I Am Nobody But Myself. But First I Had To Discover That I Am An Invisible Man!

I Denounce Because Though Implicated And Partially Responsible, I Have Been Hurt To The Point Of Abysmal Pain, Hurt To The Point Of Invisibility. And I Defend Because In Spite Of It All, I Find That I Love.

We Don't All Dig Shakespeare Uniformly, Or Even 'little Red Riding Hood.' The Understanding Of Art Depends Finally Upon One's Willingness To Extend One's Humanity And One's Knowledge Of Human Life.

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.

If The Word Has The Potency To Revive And Make Us Free, It Has Also The Power To Bind, Imprison And Destroy.