How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

152 Pages·2019·1.27 MB·English

by  Akiko Busch

ALSO BY AKIKO BUSCH
The Incidental Steward
Patience
Nine Ways to Cross a River
The Uncommon Life of Common Objects
Geography of Home

PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © 2019 by Akiko Busch
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Busch, Akiko, author.
Title: How to disappear : notes on invisibility in a time of transparency / Akiko Busch.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029070 (print) | LCCN 2018036687 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101980439 (ebook) | ISBN
9781101980415 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Invisibility—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC QC406 (ebook) | LCC QC406.B87 2019 (print) | DDC 304.2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029070
Version_1
For Colin, Julia, Conor
Clouds gather visibility, and then disperse into invisibility. All appearances are of the nature of
clouds.
—JOHN BERGER
CONTENTS
Also by Akiko Busch
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
ONE The Invisible Friend
TWO Orlando’s Ring
THREE Across the Natural World
FOUR Invisiphilia
FIVE Invisible Ink
SIX At the Identity Spa
SEVEN The Anonymity Proposal
EIGHT Rereading Mrs. Dalloway
NINE The Vanishing Self
TEN The Geography of Invisibility
ELEVEN With Wonder
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
The more invisible something is, the more certain it’s been around.
—JOSEPH BRODSKY
Ipull myself up to the makeshift platform in the lower branches of the
white oak. It has been wrenched awry after years of neglect, and the
rungs leading to the damp, rotting platform have been pulled out of place.
The whole geometry of the thing has gone askew, conforming more to the
chaos of the woods now than to whatever plan a hunter had years ago
when he leveled the boards and nailed them into position. Still, this
small, mossy podium is not an uncomfortable place to take in this forest
of oak, maple, beech, hickory, ash and to see what I can of the forest, and
what I cannot.
It’s unusually warm for early March. In New York’s Hudson Valley,
winter often finds a way to linger late into this month, but in 2016, the
peepers from the wetlands nearby have already started their rhapsodic
chirping. On this particular afternoon, the forest floor is damp, with the
only bits of color the green moss and silvery lichen, a scattering of wild
chive sprouting up in the bed of dry leaves, and the last few red
winterberries. The tree canopy remains wide-open, afternoon light
flooding the hillside. On my way up to the ridge, I surprise a ring-necked
pheasant and two eastern bluebirds, whose low warble picks up at the
sound of my steps. I hear raspy, distant cawing from a handful of raucous
crows but doubt they are reacting to my presence. Crows are capable of
recognizing human faces, but I am not familiar to them. It has been
months since I’ve visited this ridge.
An eastern gray squirrel momentarily stops scuttling along an upper
branch of a maple tree a few yards away. With eyes on either side of its
head which have a highly focused wide-angle vision, it can see me without
moving. But the squirrel has only moderate color vision, and a yellow
pigment in its lenses naturally reduces glare. Smell and light are as vital
to how it perceives the exterior world. Its perception of me has as much
to do with my scent and shadow as with my actual form. Its nest, one of
the messy arrangements of leaves, twigs, and bark assembled in the
upper reaches of this forest, will be fully camouflaged once the leaves
have come in.
After thirty minutes or so, a slight rustle alerts me to a doe, the color
of dust and bark, twenty feet away. She stops midstep and stares toward
me, tilting her head. My own invisibility is a matter of silence and
immobility. She nibbles on a tuft of grass emerging through the leaf litter
and then steps quietly through the woods, past the platform, and down
the ridge into the hollow, where she happens upon a pheasant. It
screeches and flaps its wings, and the doe bounds up the opposite hill.
Deer are unable to make the color distinctions that we make. They have
discerning nighttime vision and can see light in the blue, violet, and
ultraviolet range, the last of which is not visible to us. But they are unable
to detect reds and oranges. Sound and movement, rather than shape and
color, are what alert them to human presence. I don’t know what she
sees, but I assume it is a handful of indistinct shapes in a range of violet
hues.
Birds not only perceive gradations of color we miss, but extra color
cones in their retinas allow them to perceive other hues that we are
unable even to imagine. Snakes are equipped with pit organs on either
side of their heads to detect the warmth of what is around them; capable
of infrared sight, they navigate the world by reading the heat signatures
of the prey that may be nearby. By discerning ultraviolet light, bees see
patterns of flowers invisible to us and use them to locate nectar. They
process color as much as five times faster than humans, seeing the way
colors change with angle and perceiving iridescence where we do not. The
black-eyed Susans outside my kitchen door have discs of hues on their
petals I cannot see, and when I take in the radiance in a field of
sunflowers in July, it is bright with patterns that remain out of my view.
The range of visible light apparent to us is only a small part of the
electromagnetic spectrum. The entire world is shining with things we
cannot see.
A place actually called a blind seems like a good spot to begin thinking
about being unseen and the conditions under which we become visible.
To the doe, it is not my vaguely concealed form or my brown sweater, but
my stillness that keeps me out of view. For the crows, it is my
unfamiliarity, and for the gray squirrel, my shadow. My own vision is
limited to an arc of 120 degrees, most of that peripheral, and I know this
invisibility conference includes insects, amphibians, rodents, and birds
that entirely escape my notice. What is the difference between being
invisible and just landing in a blind spot?
In the woods no more than an hour, I am struck anew by invisibility,
and its improvisational choreography, as a necessary condition of life. I
am reminded of the grace of reticence, the power of discretion, and the
possibility of being utterly private and autonomous yet deeply aware of
and receptive to the world. If I am enchanted by staying out of sight, it is
because such behavior seems so rare in our own species. In recent years,
we have been more preoccupied than ever by the question of how to stay
in view.
Yet we humans have our own diverse ways of being seen or unseen.
We have our own metrics of invisibility, and our vision is a matter that
goes beyond the electromagnetic spectrum. We make ourselves known or
not, and familiarity, color blindness, and peripheral vision are the least of
it. We have devised a vast catalog of inventive strategies—physical,
psychological, technological—for how we maneuver our way in and out of
one another’s sight lines. They can be captivating, enchanting, deceptive,
manipulative, hopeful, despairing, gracious, isolating, logical, illogical,
strange, and altogether mysterious. This age of increasing transparency is
time to consider them anew.
Visibility has become the common currency of our time, and the twin
circumstances of social media and the surveillance economy have
redefined the way we live. In his landmark 1979 book, The Culture of
Narcissism, Christopher Lasch noted that “success in our society has to
be ratified by publicity.” Forty years later, our cult of transparency shows
his prescience, as do the enabling new technologies. It has become
routine to assume that the rewards of life are public and that our lives can
be measured by how we are seen rather than what we do.
The exposure begins at home, a place once considered private. In the
nursery, internet-connected baby monitors equipped with high-
resolution lenses, built-in microphones, and motion sensors may serve
security, but they also reconfigure the relationships between parent,