On this Wednesday, 25 April 2012 I finally break my silence to post. There is much that has transpired from within my sphere and without. I have been asked to officiate a Chicago wedding; my wife and I are shopping for a new vehicle; my classes have gone well this semester and finals week is catching up to me (and I am sure with my colleagues too).

I continue to process and to write; to process and to write. Many are the projects that have awakened my intellect but I resist for it is not yet my time. I have been (re)reading Tolstoy's What Is Art? alongside Borges' On Writing, C.S. Lewis' On Stories, Quevedo's El Buscon and Miles' God: A Biography.

Collectively, they are shaping a new tale which brings me to my mental knees. I am haunted with Bloom's anxious reminder but also defiant of Lopate's essai. Immediately, two tales like ethereal texts unfold before my eyes; the first pays for its existence in the second:

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. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me

[...]

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? --Ralph Ellison

I'm a sick man...a mean man. There's nothing attractive about me. I think there's something wrong with my liver. But, actually, I don't understand a damn thing about my sickness; I'm not even too sure what it is that's ailing me. I'm not under treatment and never have been, although I have great resepect for medicine and doctors. Moreover, I'm morbidly superstitious--enough at least, to respect medicine [...] But still, it's out of spite that I refuse to ask for the doctor's help. So my liver hurts? Good, let it hurt even more!

[...]

We even find it painful to be men--real men of flesh and blood, with our own private bodies; we're ashamed of it, and we long to turn ourselves into something hypothetical called the average man. We're still-born, and for a long time we've been brought into the world by parents who are dead themselves; and we like it better and better.  We're developing a taste for it, so to speak. Soon we'll invent a way to be begotten by ideas altogether. But that's enough, I've had enough of writing these Notes from Underground. --Fyodor Dostoevsky

At the end of Invisible Man I wept bitterly on the entitled white steps of the Blanchard House on the Phillips Academy--Andover campus at 8:46 a.m. (Massachusetts time).

At the end of Notes from Underground I felt the urge to laugh. As Du Bois would have asserted: it is the cool logic of the Club. And there's the rub, no.