{"id":133924,"date":"2019-02-25T11:00:08","date_gmt":"2019-02-25T16:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=133924"},"modified":"2019-02-25T14:59:34","modified_gmt":"2019-02-25T19:59:34","slug":"the-beauty-of-invisibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/02\/25\/the-beauty-of-invisibility\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beauty of Invisibility"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Modified from John Singer Sargent\u2019s Lady Agnew Of Lochnaw<\/em>, 1892<\/p><\/div>\n

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<\/em> 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<\/em>, 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\u2019s tracking her and why.<\/p>\n

In How to Disappear<\/em>, 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\u2019s stories (from imaginary friends to Harry Potter\u2019s invisibility cloak) and the Hulduf\u00f3lk, the invisible people who are thought to live inside Iceland\u2019s lava rocks. She visits a physics lab at the University of Rochester where scientists study \u201ctransformation optics,\u201d the practice of bending light waves around things to render them invisible. Another essay reconsiders Virginia Woolf\u2019s novel\u00a0Mrs. Dalloway<\/em>\u00a0to think through aging, and the invisibility of older women. Busch explores camouflage, anonymity and unsigned works of art, and police surveillance of minorities.\u00a0By drawing from natural science, children\u2019s literature, folklore, art history, and more, Busch takes the timely issue of privacy and makes it timeless.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Whenever I\u2019m at a party and people ask me to say something in Russian, my go-to is \u0423 \u043c\u0435\u043d\u044f \u0435\u0441\u0442\u044c \u043f\u0440\u0430\u0432\u043e \u0438\u043c\u0435\u0442\u044c \u0441\u0435\u043a\u0440\u0435\u0442\u044b<\/em>\u2014\u201cI have the right to have secrets.\u201d 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\u2019s exploration of the French term jardin secret<\/em>,\u00a0\u201csecret garden,\u201d a catchall phrase that can refer to any private passion that provides what Busch calls \u201ca psychic cloister\u201d from the demands of the outside world. \u201cImplicit in the jardin secret<\/em>,\u201d she writes \u201cis that small personal histories need not always be shared; that human experience and imagination are sometimes a matter of private intentions, actions, or rewards.\u201d While Busch insists a jardin secret<\/em> can include such innocent pleasures as \u201ca private collection of feathers, stones, books, or fans,\u201d I couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Why do we so often believe that secrecy must necessarily mask transgression? Busch unravels that association in How to Disappear<\/em>. 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<\/em>, an invisibility-granting symbol from ancient Iceland that had to be smeared on a person\u2019s forehead with a mixture of \u201cblood drawn from your finger and nipples, mixed with the blood and brains of a raven along with a piece of human stomach.\u201d Busch writes that our tendency \u201cto associate [invisibility] with wrongdoing, degeneracy, malice, even the work of the devil\u201d is not accidental. It is inscribed into many of our oldest myths, including the Ring of Gyges, retold famously by Kristin Scott Thomas\u2019s character in The English Patient<\/em>. 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 \u00a0\u201can otherwise ordinary and honorable person to commit transgressions and behave unjustly,\u201d has stubbornly stayed with us.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s gold earrings out of the window. \u201cAppropriate reprimands were made,\u201d she assures, \u201cbut I was curious: was this some experimentation with gravity?… Did I have a thief on my hands?\u201d Busch ultimately concludes that her son was simply marveling at something child psychologists refer to as \u201cobject permanence,\u201d the idea that \u201cobjects and people can continue to exist even though they may not be seen.\u201d Tracing the importance of invisibility in children\u2019s literature, particularly the \u201ccapes, raps, rings, shields, potions\u201d that confer the power to make a child protagonist go unseen, Busch reminds us that \u201clearning to manage disappearance is intrinsic to childhood play.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t see. Reading How to Disappear<\/em>, I wondered if we aren\u2019t, as a society, continuously in the process of learning object permanence. If we really believe that things continue to exist when they\u2019re not visible, then why must they always be geotagged, photographed, shared, \u0430nd optimally filtered?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

One of the most powerful aspects of How to Disappear<\/em> is Busch\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s die-cut panegyric to Bruno Schulz, Tree of Codes<\/em>, a book composed entirely of cutouts from the Polish author\u2019s short-story collection, The Street of Crocodiles<\/em>. I wondered why she didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 2017 piece, \u201cA Teenager With Promise,\u201d deletes all but those words from a New York Times<\/em> headline about Michael Brown.<\/p>\n

Visibility is, of course, a political issue. But Busch cautions us against thinking that our society\u2019s 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 \u00c9douard Glissant. Writing about the challenge postcolonial writers face in finding a global readership without losing local identity, Glissant famously declared, \u201cWe clamor for the right to opacity.\u201d 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\u00a0a theory of concealment, not quite the same as invisibility. Glissant wanted to be seen, not looked through.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I think Busch\u2019s interest in invisibility began, fittingly, with water eels. In her book The Last Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science<\/em>, 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. \u201cHow is it possible,\u201d she wonders, \u201cto hold something so utterly small and transparent in the palm of your hand and still know so little about it?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014it\u2019s one of the reasons I like him. Reading Busch, I often thought of the short story \u201cThe Lady with the Dog\u201d 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 \u201copen, seen and known by all\u201d and the other is carried out in secret. That secret life contains \u201ceverything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jennifer Wilson is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of\u00a0Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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