Afterword

AT AGE sixteen, I devoured the words of “The Man Who Lived Underground” in a sort of fever dream.

I cheered as Fred Daniels plastered his cave with dollar bills, hung up expensive rings and watches on the money-papered walls, and littered the dirt floor of his abode with diamonds, abandoning all notion of the capital value of these things in favor of a purely aesthetic, sensual one. They shone with fierce significance, illuminating how much unnecessary power we grant them over our lives.

I smiled with sympathy as he eavesdropped on the black church singers; like Daniels, I was at once drawn to them and frustrated by their apparent abdication of their own power.

And I felt dread as the messianic impulse took root within Daniels to return aboveground and tell the world of his discoveries, in a bid to set us free. He had shed the shackles imposed by society: so could we.

My awe for my grandfather’s craft had reached its peak. In these pages, he had poetically distilled the rewarding and dangerous condition of Otherness (dwelling on the periphery of society), a theme at work in almost all of his writing, but represented here with unparalleled raw and flowing creativity.

Otherness. All members of oppressed minorities hold an innate understanding of it. The pain and violence of being othered can engender insights and freedoms of a kind not easily shared with those who have never left the bosom of comfortable belonging. Standing outside, looking in, the Other sees our relationship to the world in ways those not estranged from society simply cannot.

I did not think my appreciation for this story could grow further . . . until it did.

It would take me another thirty years to connect the dots between “The Man Who Lived Underground” and Plato’s allegory of the cave, and so come to better understand why this story, more than any other of my grandfather’s, had taken hold of me and not let go.

Plato’s cave allegory tells us of a group of people who live in . . . a cave. They are shackled in such a way that they can gaze only at the wall at the back of the cave. A fire behind them projects shadows of puppets on the wall—shadows they mistake for reality, ignorant as they are of what is casting them.

Not much of a life, you might say. Perhaps one of the cave-dwellers agrees. He frees himself from his position in front of the wall, and realizes there is more to phenomena than mere shadows. Then, freed from the cave itself, this person beholds, with some pain, another light infinitely brighter than the fire of the cave: the blinding light of the sun, which illuminates a much wider world.

The disturbing power of Plato’s allegory is revealed when he explains to us what might become of such a person who then returns to the cave.

Just as he was initially blinded by the sunlight outside, when the man returns, he becomes blind within the darkness of the cave and cannot function well there. Seduced by his own broader horizons and deepened perspective, he feels compelled to bring his fellow cave-dwellers into the sunlight. The cave-dwellers see him blinded and less capable than before he left, and conclude that regardless of what he says, the man’s experiences outside the cave have damaged him. They resist all efforts to be convinced of the benefits of a larger reality. It is, after all, literally beyond their power of imagination, and apparently has harmed the only person claiming to have seen it.