"A Beginner’s Guide to Invisibility"

"just what is invisibility? Is it the condition of being transparent, so that all light passes through you undisturbed? Or of being cloaked in something all-concealing, like Harry Potter sneaking around Hogwarts? Or does it mean to be incorporeal, so that you exist but are made, like a thought, of nothing? Or does it simply mean to be overlooked? Is it always a property of whatever is unperceived, or can it be a limitation of the would-be perceiver? And why do we count as invisible the things that we do? Ghosts, gods, demons, superheroes, ether, X rays, amoebas, emotions, mathematical concepts, dark matter, Casper, Pete’s Dragon, the Cheshire Cat—what is all this stuff doing in the same category? And why have we ourselves expended so much imagination and energy in trying to join them?...

Ball briefly addresses this notion of invisibility as powerlessness, via Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”—but, as he acknowledges, that is an imperfect example. The invisibility experienced by Ellison’s nameless narrator is not simply a matter of being overlooked by society. It is, paradoxically, a consequence of conspicuousness; he is invisible because no one, black or white, can see beyond everything they project onto the color of his skin. Ball sums this up as “the price of nonconformity” and moves on, leaving unasked a broader question: how can invisibility function so well as both a fantasy of empowerment and a nightmare of powerlessness?...

The poet Claudia Rankine addressed this issue last year in “Citizen,” her award-winning prose-poetry investigation into the operations of racism in the United States. “For so long, you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person,” she wrote. But eventually, she continued, “you begin to understand yourself as rendered hyper-visible.”...

as David Hume noted, none of the causes controlling our world are visible under any conditions; we can see a fragment of the what of things, but nothing at all of the why. Gravity, electricity, magnetism, economic forces, the processes that sustain life as well as those that eventually end it—all this is invisible. We cannot even see the most important parts of our own selves: our thoughts, feelings, personalities, psyches, morals, minds, souls."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/sight-unseen-critic-at-large-kathryn-schulz

I love this reflection on visibility and the power of the invisible to shape the visible aspects of our lives.

FB: Unexpectedly beautiful thoughts on the meaning of invisibility "As a condition, a metaphor, a fantasy, and a technology, it helps us think about the composition of nature, the structure of society, and the deep weirdness of our human situation—about what it is like to be partly visible entities in a largely inscrutable universe. As such, the story of invisibility is not really about how to vanish at all. Curiously enough, it is a story about how we see ourselves...

The power of turning invisible, the nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Levi wrote, was, above all, “that of turning or paralyzing the attention, so that light arrives at the visual organ without exciting the regard of the soul.”"