In
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film, The Lady Vanishes, a young woman on a train
becomes disturbed by the sudden disappearance of a kindly older woman, a
governess and music teacher. The latter, a spinster, is introduced to the
viewer when she writes the letters of her name in the condensation on one of
the train’s glass windowpanes, only to have them evaporate almost instantly.
Within minutes, she is gone, and the other passengers, steward, and conductor
claim to have never seen her. Asked to describe her, the young woman can only
say she was “middle-aged and ordinary,” before admitting, “I can’t remember.”
Later in the film, the older woman is reduced to “a hallucination, a subjective
image, a character in a novel subconsciously remembered,” and even “nothing but
lumps of raw flesh,” all before she is revealed as a British spy, the movie’s
ultimate heroine in the final scene.
Today,
women appear—or disappear—in any manner of guises. In the photographer Patty
Carroll’s series Anonymous Women, it is household artifacts and
traditions—upholstery fabric, curtains, telephones, slabs of bacon, leaves of
lettuce, a braided loaf of bread, rolls of wallpaper, pillows, and plates—into
which each model disappears, swallowed whole by the python of domesticity. In
Whitney Otto’s novel Now You See Her, the vanishing woman works in an office,
present but unseen. Her cat is indifferent when she trips over it, and when she
presses her palm to her forehead, it is “only to notice her hand fading away
with the motion, from fingertips to forearm.” In the more recent film Hello, My
Name Is Doris, Sally Field plays an older woman who develops a crush on a
younger man with whom she shares an office; at the beginning of the story, he
adjusts her crooked glasses. As the film critic Manohla Dargis wrote in The New
York Times, the young man’s spontaneous gesture of kindness is transformative:
Wrinkles, apparently, “have a way of making women disappear one crease at a
time,” and when she is noticed momentarily by a younger man, such recognition
evidently “makes her visible, most importantly to herself.”
The
invisible woman might be the actor no longer offered roles after her 40th
birthday, the 50-year-old woman who can’t land a job interview, or the widow
who finds her dinner invitations declining with the absence of her husband. She
is the woman who finds that she is no longer the object of the male gaze—youth
faded, childbearing years behind her, social value diminished. Referring to her
anticipated disappearance on her upcoming 50th birthday, the writer Ayelet
Waldman said to an interviewer, “I have a big personality, and I have a certain
level of professional competence, and I’m used to being taken seriously
professionally. And suddenly, it’s like I just vanished from the room. And I
have to yell so much louder to be seen. … I just want to walk down the street
and have someone notice that I exist.”
Her
words evoke another woman walking, unseen, down the street nearly a century
ago. As Clarissa Dalloway shops in London for flowers on a June morning,
Virginia Woolf speculates about her protagonist’s transitory identity. Mrs.
Dalloway, considering her place among the people she knows, finds that “often
now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body,
with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest
sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown.” She recalls that she is
known now simply by her husband’s name, and a few sentences later, she
considers how sometimes it is simply by their gloves and shoes that women are
identified. She knows nothing, she thinks, no language, no history, and hardly
reads books except memoirs. She realizes then that “her only gift was knowing
people almost by instinct.”
One’s
identity, Woolf seems to say, is transient, and perhaps all the more so with
age. As women become older, they entertain a wider set of choices about when
and how they are seen. This vanishing can occur more rapidly or be felt more
acutely. Clarissa Dalloway’s sense of fleeting self was described more
explicitly decades later by the writer Francine du Plessix Gray in her essay
“The Third Age.” If the gaze of others wanes, Gray suggests, one might choose
to “acquire instead a deepened inward gaze, or intensify our observation of
others, or evolve alternative means of attention-getting which transcend
sexuality and depend, as the mentors of my youth taught me, upon presence,
authority, and voice.”
Gray may
be talking about the difference between being a subject and an object. It is a
cliché to point out that ours is a culture in which men routinely objectify
women, but according to Alison Carper, a psychologist who practices in New
York, if a woman is complicit in this practice—that is, in viewing herself as
an object—she cannot help but be acutely aware when that object loses its
desirability. “As humans, we all need to be recognized,” Carper adds, “but as
we grow older, the manner of recognition we search for can change. A subject is
someone who experiences her own agency, who is aware of how she can and does
have an impact on others and how she is, ultimately, the author of her own
life. She is aware of the responsibility this carries.” A woman without fully
developed interiority might continue to objectify herself.
Clarissa
Dalloway is clearly a subject. She realizes that her body is simply something
that she wears, and then, a sentence later, finds that it is really nothing,
nothing at all. Woolf suggests a correlation between invisibility and the
ability to know people by instinct when she identifies both these qualities in
Clarissa within a single paragraph. Since she published Mrs. Dalloway in the
mid-1920s, more prosaic studies of human nature have come to similar
conclusions. A reduced sense of visibility does not necessarily constrain
experience. Associated with greater empathy and compassion, invisibility
directs us toward a more humanitarian view of the larger world. This diminished
status can, in fact, sustain and inform—rather than limit—our lives. Going
unrecognized can, paradoxically, help us recognize our place in the larger
scheme of things.
It is a
theme Woolf returns to again and again, as when Clarissa Dalloway considers the
“odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the
street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or barns.” Clarissa recognizes
that our lives can be measured by what we have done to touch the lives of
others; she is attuned to how human associations can be formed with complete
strangers. And to the enduring value—indeed, power—of such alliances.
Her
modern counterpart might be Mystique, the shape-shifting mutant from the X-Men
series, played most recently by Jennifer Lawrence. She has no physical self
beyond her blue body and instead morphs into the forms of others, among them an
assassin, a German secret agent, a professor, a young girl, a senator’s wife, a
fashion model, and a member of the U.S. Department of Defense. Her power is her
indistinct appearance; it is what enables her to assume other identities.
But
another likely counterpart to Clarissa Dalloway might be the famous 1960s model
Vera Lehndorff, popularly known then as Veruschka. Toward the conclusion of her
career, she collaborated with the German artist Holger Trülzsch, painting her
body in patterns, colors, and textures to match different backgrounds. “When I
started to paint myself,” Lehndorff writes,
“the color and I were one:
there was no “between.” … This experience of coherence between us and the world
around us is one of well-being; it produces a sense of affinity with whatever
it is with which we come into contact.”
There is
Lehndorff, lying on gray sand or receding into a dark doorway or leaning
against a white wall. In the last, her body has been stippled white up to her
shoulders, but her head seems to have been dyed a bright azure to match the sky
behind it. It is an image of the female body going from object to air, from
material to immaterial, from thing to nothing. It is camouflage that has
nothing to do with escaping prey, avoiding danger, or finding food or a mate,
and everything to do with finding a coherence.
All this
may speak to a revised etiquette of invisibility. Opacity itself can work as a
connective tissue. If humans do leave a mark, it is just some quick and
temporary elusive imprint, nothing more than a fugitive logo or insignia. And
it’s probably not the worst thing for any of us to imagine identity as an
arrangement of letters written for a few moments on the clouded window of a
train that is speeding out of view.
This
article has been adapted from Akiko Busch’s book, How to Disappear: Notes on
Invisibility in a Time of Transparency.
The
Invisibility of Older Women. By Akiko Busch. The Atlantic, February 27, 2019.
Akiko
Busch’s latest book is How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of
Transparency, from which this essay is adapted.
A yellow
tang is loitering to my left. A school of iridescent purple reef fish shines
into view. A royal-blue queen angelfish glides out of sight. Despite our
proximity, I am beyond the notice of a massive southern stingray sweeping along
the seafloor, the drape of its thin pectoral fins following and folding over
the ripples of the sand bed. The striped parrotfish are oblivious to me, while
the yellowtail damselfish and flurry of silversides couldn’t be less
interested. The school of tiny iridescent purple gobies flutters past with
utter detachment.
We all
know that sensation of life slowing down, of being suspended in time, of being
outside the rhythm of ordinary life, but underwater, that is the way things
really are. We may all be occupying the same turquoise chamber, but the sense
of remove is vast; my amphibian self is alert to both the immeasurable
distance from and profound connection to the water world around me. Submerged,
I have become a refugee from the visible world.
It’s an
excursion that has value at a time when the twin circumstances of the
surveillance economy and social media have made visibility our common currency.
In the process, these have changed the way we see ourselves, often allowing us
to believe that our lives can be measured by how we are seen rather than by
what we do. But when identity is derived from projecting an image in the public
realm, something is lost, some core of identity diminished, some sense of
authority and interiority sacrificed. And it occurs to me that it is time to
re-evaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote
to continuous exposure, to reconsider the value of going unseen and overlooked.
Which is
why I have signed up for this tutorial in disappearance 40 feet beneath the
surface of the deep blue Caribbean Sea. It is a place where we carry ourselves
differently. We are there and not. It is not just the shift in gravitational
pull, but that the fluid environment is intrinsically more familiar to us. If
the composition of our own beings is 60-per-cent liquid, it only makes sense
that it is easy to be absorbed, or at least feel absorbed, by the surrounding
waters. We recognize the particles in which we are submerged, as though the blood
in our own veins has found it possible to flow in congruence with the currents
streaming around us. It is not quite a molecular kinship, but close.
Underwater, we have a different relationship with our surroundings.
Water
magnifies and distorts our perceptions. We are unable to smell. We are unable
to speak, and that stills us in some essential way. The human voice is absent,
replaced by the sound of breathing, a gentle repetition that induces a further
calm. Other sounds are more muffled. Our ears are designed to function in air,
and underwater, it is difficult for us to recognize the direction from which
sound is coming or to untangle its vibrations. We can hear, but not very well.
Yet, the
sense of touch comes alive. The water temperature is in the high 70s, and
different sets of skin receptors allow me to read its gentle coolness, its
motion, texture, vibration and pressure. Touch is said to be 10 times stronger
than verbal or emotional contact, and when I move, it is gradual, leisurely,
multidirectional, as though my body has dematerialized in some intrinsic way,
conforming to the currents as best it can. The aquatic world offers
invisibility that is less about being unseen and more about a dilution of self
and the sensation of assimilation and adaptation. As odd as it seems, I might
even say that being underwater confers a sense of solidarity.
The
mammalian dive reflex transforms one’s sense of being. When the body is
submerged, the human heart rate slows anywhere from 10 to 20 per cent. Blood
circulation slows as well, redirecting flow to the vital organs. With heartbeat
and circulation reset, our nervous systems are also recalibrated, and the sense
of physical suspension has a psychic corollary. It is why people speak of
feeling tranquil, meditative when they are in deep water. It is why human
beings in a condition of emotional upset or trauma are sometimes advised to
immerse their faces in a bowl of cold water. And why free divers who go into
water up to 200 metres for minutes at a time on a single breath speak of
feeling serene; without the rhythm of breathing, their sense of time is even
further diminished.
That
sense of languor extends to one’s thoughts and impressions. Observations come
and go unhurried. A plume of anemone waves quietly in the current. A
three-foot webbed lavender sea fan flutters almost imperceptibly. A turquoise
parrotfish drifts by me. An army of small fairy basslets, violet with brilliant
yellow tails, streams beneath me. But each of these organisms has a strategy. The
yellow trumpet fish shifts vertically to assume the structure of the stalks of
coral surrounding it; or it may align itself with a larger fish shadowing its
feeding spot. The rosy hues of the channel crab echo the bejewelled pink
patches of crustose algae on which it rests. The delicate brown rosettes on the
skin of a flounder are nearly indistinguishable from the pebbly surface of the
seafloor.
The
ballet of marine biota is full of purpose, function and reason, as well as
predation, consumption, reproduction and all the familiar activities of
everyday life. The speckled patterning of the moray eel is in sync with the
colour and texture of the encrusted coral crevices it inhabits. The
multicoloured mottled surface of a scorpion fish is indistinguishable from the
algae in which it has taken up residence. The dots on the spotted butterfly
fish are directional decoys, existing to confuse predators as to where,
exactly, their eyes are. Parrotfish secrete a membrane of mucus at night to
conceal their odour from nocturnal predators. The blue tang floating to my left
is looking for algae to feed on; the spotted butterfly fish is foraging for
tiny invertebrates; the threads of fire coral will sting me if I happen to
brush up against them; and the yellow-bearded fireworm resting on the floor of
the reef is equipped with bristles that will inject me with a painful toxin if
I happen to touch it. For all their gaudy displays, each of these is a master
of the inconspicuous. Invisibility in the aquatic realm is ordinary, powerful
and above all, essential to survival.
Not long
afterward, I encounter an immense hawksbill sea turtle scuttling along the
sand, grazing on the algae and seagrass in its path, its three-foot carapace
and massive spotted legs advancing with an elephantine poise. It makes sense
that we take such pleasure in the state of weightlessness. A friend of mine
who is a diver speaks of the way she loses herself in increments when
submerged, and this little deficit of self suddenly seems key. Perhaps it comes
not just from the sensory novelty, that thrill of zero gravity, but from some
sensation of having a spirit self, some innate knowledge that it can be a good
thing to lose the materiality of everyday life.
The
aquatic world is as surreal as anything imagined by Salvador Dali. But the
invisible man he painted in 1929, with golden hair made of clouds, legs
fashioned by waterfalls, and a torso constructed of architectural ruins, was
painted during what the artist called his paranoia phase, and reflects a horror
of being consumed by one’s surroundings. The artist’s sense of identity was
under siege, dissolving, on the verge of being devoured by his environment. It
is too bad Dali never made any diving trips in a tropical sea. Or knew anything
about the mammalian dive reflex.
Perhaps
he would have been more receptive to finding accommodation by the world around
him. What would he have made of a basket star that wraps itself in strands of
coral? Or a star-shaped sponge? Or one that looks like an orange elephant ear?
Or others in the shape of balls and barrels, tubes, vases, ropes? Or worms that
present themselves as silvery feather dusters? Or coral that comes in the shape
of pencils, leaves, lettuce, knobs, corkscrews, antlers, fingers, candelabra,
wires and strings, dinner plates and doorknobs, cacti and cups, brains and
buttons, feathers and fans? Would he have persisted in his paranoia? If he had
observed such a carnival 40 feet beneath the surface, his invisiphobia might
likely have become invisiphilia.
This is
not about vanishing so much as some vital rearrangement of weight, substance
and space. It is possible for us to associate the limitlessness of the vast
blue abyss with freedom. We are affiliated with our surroundings, experiencing
inclusion and placement in a wider world. It is not only our sense of space
that is under revision here, but also our humanity. The overview effect is the
term used in space exploration to define that cognitive shift that astronauts
experience when they see the Earth from outer space. Viewing the blue marble
from orbit, they re-evaluate life on earth, reconsidering the significance of
regional and national boundaries and our status within them, inevitably
reassessing the importance we give ourselves; not surprisingly, when
photographs of the Earth as viewed from outer space were first taken in the
late 1940s, they signalled a shift in human consciousness.
Immersion
in the deep sea seems to offer some corollary, an underview effect perhaps.
Although it is a view from beneath rather than from above, from water rather than
from space, and an experience of absorption and connection rather than of
distance and detachment, it, too, enables us to recalibrate our place in
things.
That
re-evaluation may be relevant now more than ever. Not because we necessarily
should be more discreet, unobtrusive, inconspicuous – though all of these would
likely do us good – but because the Earth is warming. There will be nine
billion of us soon. We will have no choice but to reassess our place in things.
And part of this may have to do with how we reconsider our identity; how we
imagine some reduction in scale; how we consider a different way of being in
this world; and how we learn to become constituents in a broader landscape. Our
deeply held values about individuality may even become passé. We are, each one
of us, less important than we think.
A
yellowtail snapper drifts past. A blue parrotfish skims by beneath me. My
presence means nothing to them.
The
value of going unseen. By Akiko Busch. The Globe and Mail, March 1, 2019.
In our
increasingly networked and image-saturated lives, the notion of disappearing
has never been both more enchanting. A lifelong student and observer of the
natural world, Akiko Busch, set out to explore her own uneasiness with this
arrangement. Her new book, “How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time
of Transparency.”
Joe
Donahue talks on The Book Show with Akiko Busch. WAMC, March
4, 2019.
Caroline
Donahue talks with Akiko Busch on How to
Disappear.
Akiko
Busch wanted to look at how invisibility could be a superpower. These days, so much of our time is spent
worrying about how to be more visible as writers. Do we have enough presence on
social media? Will a publisher accept our book if we send it to them, or will
enough readers find our books if we publish them ourselves? In the midst of
this intense quest for visibility and transparency in a world that is
increasingly connected, Akiko Busch sought to look at how invisibility is a
power as well when it is employed by choice.
In her beautiful book, she explores examples of invisibility in nature,
her own home, and family, and as far away as Iceland, where their legends
include invisible people who live alongside the visible ones, and who are just
a bit better than the rest of us. This book opens us up to the magic of not
being seen when we want to hide, and was a total sigh of relief to read and
discuss since we writers love to be hermits, don't we?
The Secret Library Podcast, April 4, 2019.
Akiko
Busch is a writer and a swimmer. She teaches environmental writing at
Bennington College and seems to live as off the grid as one can in 2019. Much
of her writing feels drawn from understated encounters with nature and the
pastoral sublime, such as observing water eels in a brook or chopping
vegetables in a Hudson Valley home. Her 2009 book The Uncommon Life of Common
Objects has an entire chapter devoted to vegetable-peelers. So when her new
essay collection, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of
Transparency, touches on things like Barbie dolls that can connect to WiFi and
smart refrigerators, the reader begins to worry that no one, not even Aniko
Busch, can order a new vegetable-peeler online without worrying who’s tracking
her and why.
In How
to Disappear, Busch contemplates how government surveillance, smart technology,
and our own desire to be seen have all contributed to a perhaps irrevocable
loss of personal privacy. She does this circuitously, eschewing the alarmist
and Luddite tropes that encumber many studies of our technology-dependent
culture. Instead, Busch meanders across a broad cultural landscape to locate
the source of our beliefs, fears, and desires about invisibility. She looks at
the role of invisibility in children’s stories (from imaginary friends to Harry
Potter’s invisibility cloak) and the Huldufólk, the invisible people who are
thought to live inside Iceland’s lava rocks. She visits a physics lab at the
University of Rochester where scientists study “transformation optics,” the
practice of bending light waves around things to render them invisible. Another
essay reconsiders Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway to think through aging,
and the invisibility of older women. Busch explores camouflage, anonymity and
unsigned works of art, and police surveillance of minorities. By drawing from
natural science, children’s literature, folklore, art history, and more, Busch
takes the timely issue of privacy and makes it timeless.
Whenever
I’m at a party and people ask me to say something in Russian, my go-to is У
меня есть право иметь секреты—“I have the right to have secrets.” It both
satisfies the desire people have to hear their stereotypes about Russia
confirmed and makes it sound like I lead an interesting life. I was reminded of
that sentence when I read Busch’s exploration of the French term jardin secret,
“secret garden,” a catchall phrase that can refer to any private passion that
provides what Busch calls “a psychic cloister” from the demands of the outside
world. “Implicit in the jardin secret,” she writes “is that small personal
histories need not always be shared; that human experience and imagination are
sometimes a matter of private intentions, actions, or rewards.” While Busch
insists a jardin secret can include such innocent pleasures as “a private
collection of feathers, stones, books, or fans,” I couldn’t help but feel like
they must be sensuous things, these secret gardens, pleasures more guilty than
innocent. I certainly feel that way about my imaginary Russian secrets.
Why do
we so often believe that secrecy must necessarily mask transgression? Busch
unravels that association in How to Disappear. The laborious, sometimes caustic
recipes for invisibility ink and potion included in the book (some from
mythology, some from military history) themselves suggest something nefarious.
Take for instance the hulinhjalmur, an invisibility-granting symbol from
ancient Iceland that had to be smeared on a person’s forehead with a mixture of
“blood drawn from your finger and nipples, mixed with the blood and brains of a
raven along with a piece of human stomach.” Busch writes that our tendency “to
associate [invisibility] with wrongdoing, degeneracy, malice, even the work of
the devil” is not accidental. It is inscribed into many of our oldest myths,
including the Ring of Gyges, retold famously by Kristin Scott Thomas’s character
in The English Patient. Gyges, a simple shepherd who discovers a ring that
confers invisibility, uses his newfound power to kill the king, marry his wife,
and take the throne for himself. This idea, that invisibility can lead “an otherwise ordinary and honorable person
to commit transgressions and behave unjustly,” has stubbornly stayed with us.
Ironically,
we engage most wholeheartedly in invisibility when we are supposedly at our
most innocent, as children. In the opening chapter, Busch recounts a story of
her two-year-old son throwing his grandmother’s gold earrings out of the
window. “Appropriate reprimands were made,” she assures, “but I was curious: was
this some experimentation with gravity?… Did I have a thief on my hands?” Busch
ultimately concludes that her son was simply marveling at something child
psychologists refer to as “object permanence,” the idea that “objects and
people can continue to exist even though they may not be seen.” Tracing the
importance of invisibility in children’s literature, particularly the “capes,
raps, rings, shields, potions” that confer the power to make a child
protagonist go unseen, Busch reminds us that “learning to manage disappearance
is intrinsic to childhood play.”
In
essence, Busch argues that growing up is part and parcel with the independence
groomed through secret adventures, hideaways in the forest or on urban
rooftops, and imaginary confidants that adults can’t see. Reading How to
Disappear, I wondered if we aren’t, as a society, continuously in the process
of learning object permanence. If we really believe that things continue to
exist when they’re not visible, then why must they always be geotagged, photographed,
shared, аnd optimally filtered?
One of
the most powerful aspects of How to Disappear is Busch’s exploration of the
ways that artists experiment with invisibility, erasure, and vanishing as sites
of creative force and even political resistance. There is Irina Ratushinskaya,
the Soviet dissident writer who, while imprisoned in a labor camp, wrote poems
on bars of soap using the end of a matchstick. She washed the verses off after
she committed them to memory. In recounting Ratushinskaya’s story, Busch
disentangles the erasure of art from the legacy of censorship, mounting a case
for invisibility as protest. She writes about Jonathan Safran Foer’s die-cut
panegyric to Bruno Schulz, Tree of Codes, a book composed entirely of cutouts
from the Polish author’s short-story collection, The Street of Crocodiles. I
wondered why she didn’t mention the work of Alexandra Bell, whose
Counternarratives series, made up of redacted news articles, uses strategic
erasure to expose racial bias in media coverage. Bell’s 2017 piece, “A Teenager
With Promise,” deletes all but those words from a New York Times headline about
Michael Brown.
Visibility
is, of course, a political issue. But Busch cautions us against thinking that
our society’s most marginalized communities are necessarily invisible, as they
are often thought to be; in many ways, she attests, they are hypervisible and
surveilled, and I would add, tokenized, held up to the spotlight as signs of
progress when practically none has been made. In teasing through this idea, I
was reminded of the Martiniquan writer Édouard Glissant. Writing about the
challenge postcolonial writers face in finding a global readership without
losing local identity, Glissant famously declared, “We clamor for the right to
opacity.” Rather than call for representation, Glissant believed in the
political potency of inscrutability, of resisting attempts to dilute black art
until it was comprehensible to white audiences. Opacity is a theory of
concealment, not quite the same as invisibility. Glissant wanted to be seen,
not looked through.
I think
Busch’s interest in invisibility began, fittingly, with water eels. In her book
The Last Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science, she observes a glass eel in a
stream; the aptly named animal is perfectly see-through. Its insides, including
its heart and its dinner, can be seen with the naked eye if you look closely
enough. Busch remarks, with amazement, that something could be transparent and
still a complete mystery; it would seem to challenge our most basic assumptions
about the relationship between being seen and being understood. “How is it
possible,” she wonders, “to hold something so utterly small and transparent in
the palm of your hand and still know so little about it?” Indeed, maybe what we
are all searching for is a way to move through our new world like a glass eel,
on full view and yet, somehow, still mysterious.
I have
never been mysterious, sadly. And so, I have always been attracted to people
who can manage duplicity, who can disappear into the night and never tell
anyone where they went. A friend once stole my car keys and did just that—it’s
one of the reasons I like him. Reading Busch, I often thought of the short
story “The Lady with the Dog” by Anton Chekhov. The main character, Gurov, is
having an affair with a woman he met on vacation in Yalta. Having returned home
to Moscow, he finds himself living a double life. One life is “open, seen and
known by all” and the other is carried out in secret. That secret life contains
“everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that
made the kernel of his life.” Perhaps there can be a sincerity to invisibility.
Perhaps we can, like Gurov and the water eel, lead two lives, one visible and
one just for us.
The
Beauty of Invisibility. By Jennifer Wilson. The Paris Review, February 25,
2019.
Transcendentalist
writers will tell you that a quiet walk through a forest can upend your
universe. It happened recently to Akiko Busch, author of How to Disappear:
Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, a survival manifesto for the
social media age disguised as a collection of personal essays.
Observing
creatures in the wetlands of Hudson Valley, New York, where she lives, Busch
writes:
‘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.”
In 11
chapters, Busch offers a litany of exit strategies—a field guide she calls
it—from today’s hyper-connected world. She argues for the utility of “going
dark” as a counterpoint to our neurosis with tracking, checking in, and
geotagging. Maybe not broadcasting our every joy and disappointment can be
refreshing, if not transformational, she suggests.
I
observed this kind of restraint at a business lunch in Yoshino, Japan. With
every course, my companions—mostly dads—whipped out their mobile phones and
contorted their bodies to capture those all-too familiar overhead plate
close-ups. In amusement, I commented that it was nice to see that Instagram
foodie habits were alive and well in rural Japan. But the pictures were
actually not for social media, they clarified. It turns out the snapshots of
salmon spaghetti and red bean parfaits were for themselves—private mementos of
a good meal and the good company that day.
Busch’s
book isn’t kindling for neo-Luddites. She doesn’t hate the internet, despite
what some critics suggest. A close reading of her lyrical prose reveals that
she’s simply calling for balance. “It is not retreating from the digital world
but about finding some genuine alternative to a life of perpetual display,” she
explains.
In
parts, How to Disappear can feel dense with one too many examples. Within a few
pages, Busch flits from homespun recipes for invisible ink, her father’s
redacted CIA file, a MoMA exhibit about dust, the invention of the Signal app,
Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning, and an online ghost poetry
experiment—invisibility is an elastic concept after all. Busch begins chapters
with a charming personal anecdote that you wish she’d continue with rather than
check off other examples. But perhaps her choice to not make the book so
autobiographical is a demonstration of how an essayist writing in the first
person can seize the privilege of being opaque—or partially invisible—to the
reader.
In
parts, How to Disappear can feel dense with one too many examples. Within a few
pages, Busch flits from homespun recipes for invisible ink, her father’s
redacted CIA file, a MoMA exhibit about dust, the invention of the Signal app,
Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning, and an online ghost poetry
experiment—invisibility is an elastic concept after all. Busch begins chapters
with a charming personal anecdote that you wish she’d continue with rather than
check off other examples. But perhaps her choice to not make the book so
autobiographical is a demonstration of how an essayist writing in the first
person can seize the privilege of being opaque—or partially invisible—to the
reader.
In
praise of invisibility in the age of ceaseless self-promotion. By Anne Quito. Quartzy , March 31, 2019
When I
was learning to swim, a powerful yet diminutive athlete—my 5-foot mother—gave
me a tip: “Everything that actually matters, John, happens beneath the
surface.” At the time, I thought this was nonsense. I wanted to be seen. My
splashing and thrashing were visible signs of my speed. My mother just shook
her head: They were signs of something, but definitely not speed.
Akiko
Busch’s “How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency”
serves as a gentle reminder of the wisdom of this advice and a way to broaden
the scope of the suggestion: Stop splashing and thrashing; stop confusing what
is most obvious or distracting for what is genuinely important. Almost
everything that actually matters in life happens beneath the surface. Ms.
Busch, who has rightly been compared to Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey, has
dedicated nearly 30 years to sounding this message, one that our age seems
intent on ignoring.
Ms.
Busch’s “Nine Ways to Cross a River” (2007), a graceful meditation on
open-water swimming, explored the power of quiet solitude. The book, like most
understated virtues, came and went largely without notice. Three years later,
her “Patience: Taking Time in an Age of Acceleration” stood against the rushing
flow of modern life and was summarily swept away. “How to Disappear” runs
against modernity’s most basic urge—our desperate desire to be seen—and
therefore risks a similar fate. But it is precisely Ms. Busch’s subtle
contrarianism that deserves our sustained attention.
Her
intent is to “compile a field guide to invisibility,” but she rightly
acknowledges the concept’s potential shortcomings. As Ralph Ellison noted in
his 1952 novel “Invisible Man,” being unseen is often a result of social
marginalization and oppression; in this case, being invisible amounts to not
being, or counting, at all. Invisibility, Ms. Busch writes, “can be pejorative,
referring to subterfuge, dishonesty, psychic emptiness, a vanishing act, an
extinction.” Nonetheless, she insists, “transgression, paranoia, and social
disparagement are the most obvious and least interesting things about
invisibility.” “Least interesting” goes too far, but her point stands:
Disappearing has its advantages.
In the
natural world—in a lake or a river or a tree blind—“the human imperative to be
seen is shown to be less practical than we think,” she writes. “It is the place
where inconspicuousness is power rather than weakness.” The pre-Socratic
philosopher Heraclitus once said that “Nature loves to hide,” but this isn’t
quite right. Nature loves to hide from us when we insist on being seen. Try
being invisible. Try hiding yourself, Ms. Busch suggests, and nature may not be
so elusive. “How to Disappear” is, at least in part, a description of how the
world might reappear to us if we weren’t so hellbent on overwhelming it.
Here and
elsewhere in “How to Disappear” are traces of Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow
Leopard” (1978), an account of trying to catch sight of an invisible animal
presence, a tale, Ms. Busch explains, that “offer[s] an alluring alternative to
the self-branding so familiar today. . . a reprieve from reflexive fixations on
self and image.”
Ms.
Busch doesn’t harp on the idea that we live in a culture of self-branding and,
primarily because she doesn’t have to. We already know it: This is the age of
social networking, personal data mining and biometrics, all of which assemble
and disassemble identities faster than we can say “hello” or “goodbye.” We
complain about these violations of privacy as if they were inclement weather,
inevitable misfortunes that we are now born to suffer. For the most part,
however, these complaints are but banal talking points posted to Facebook, the
site of our willing and constant exposure. Very few of us stop posting, sharing
or “liking” long enough to consider the virtue of disappearing.
Ms.
Busch understands the temptation to make everything garishly public. The
willingness to expose ourselves stems from the more basic and powerful drive to
be recognized. If one wants to “be somebody,” the first step is to be known by
as many people as possible. This rarely involves genuine engagement with others
but rather a calculated and obsessive campaign of self-promotion. To be clear,
there is nothing inherently wrong with craving recognition, except that it
tends to short-circuit all other forms of self-reliance or self-actualization.
There are, in fact, other forms.
The late
Victorians had a word for self-possession: They called it “reserve,” the
willingness to withdraw, to save, to make something of ourselves inaccessible
and therefore precious. If anything is important about a human life, perhaps it
is what we keep undercover and then share, sparingly and authentically, with
others. This is not exposure. It is revelation, and it means very little in the
absence of reserve.
Without
reserve or, in Ms. Busch’s words, invisibility, we may be left with painfully
little, just a “general disquiet that comes with relinquishing—unreservedly and
unconditionally—the personal information that is key to retaining a sense of
identity,” Ms. Busch explains. “When private experience is indiscriminately
offered for public consumption, ideas of a interior self are easily devalued.”
“Narcissus
appears in each culture and each generation in his own particular guise,” Ms.
Busch writes. This may be true, but today the pool is so clear, so broad, so
tempting that it’s almost impossible not to be transfixed by the reflection.
“How to Disappear” resists this temptation. “We are, each one of us,” Ms. Busch
reminds us, “less important than we think.” To accept this diminishment of the
self is the first step, but also the ultimate insight, of disappearing.
On the
surface, “How to Disappear” is a palliative for the alienation that modern
overexposure begets. Ms. Busch would like to save us from ourselves, from the
lonely fate that afflicts Narcissus, his eyes forever locked on the only person
he has ever truly loved—himself. But in its deeper moments, the book touches on
an abiding, but easily forgotten, truth: Disappearing, the act of losing our
selves, is a precondition of selflessness. Ms. Busch’s deeper concern is to
save not Narcissus but rather the wider world his selfishness affects.
‘How to
Disappear’ Review: The Unseen Virtues. By John Kaag, The Wall Street Journal,
February 22, 2019.
