"Wearing perfectly matched colors and patterns, the imitators become unseeable. Inspired by chameleons and tropical flounder, advanced camouflage technologies take such mimicry one step further by changing the match minute by minute. They project images of an ever-shifting background onto a person or thing. The face-off between pursuer and pursued then depends on senses beyond sight." |
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“No one likes to feel invisible,” declare numerous bloggers. Yet in a reader survey run by Gransnet, a website for the gray-haired set, 17 percent of respondents said they liked feeling invisible. Surveys of the general population would probably yield a comparable percentage. Seventeen out of a hundred is far from no one! Throughout history, scientists, spies, and ordinary folks have scampered, studied, schemed, and stumbled in pursuit of invisibility. * |
Photo by David Dintsh
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Like most kids, I enjoyed tales of magical powers. Flying around unseen was my favorite. Imagine being able to slip into some exotic castle through a keyhole like a plume of colorless smoke or into a no-children-allowed entertainment hall. Or being able to watch anyone, yet no one being able to watch you. Even without the flying, the superpower of unseenness captivated me, and I never outgrew the fascination.
At age 12, that fantasy came down to earth when I read Harriet the Spy. In the novel, spunky New Yorker Harriet M. Welsch peered into neighbors’ windows or snuck into their dumbwaiter. She jotted down wry observations in a notebook, demonstrating the piquant thrill of original thinking. Although Harriet faltered when classmates snatched and read her notebook, her model as someone who explored her surroundings while hidden from other people stuck with me. It fit my quiet, curious personality.
At age 12, that fantasy came down to earth when I read Harriet the Spy. In the novel, spunky New Yorker Harriet M. Welsch peered into neighbors’ windows or snuck into their dumbwaiter. She jotted down wry observations in a notebook, demonstrating the piquant thrill of original thinking. Although Harriet faltered when classmates snatched and read her notebook, her model as someone who explored her surroundings while hidden from other people stuck with me. It fit my quiet, curious personality.
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Starting around 2008, physicists began making exciting progress in developing so-called “invisibility cloaks.” By redirecting certain wavelengths of light, they make it bend around an object, the way water flows around a rock in a stream. At least from certain angles, the object then appears to vanish. When perfected, the technology will enable vehicles, buildings, equipment, soldiers, or spies to become hidden from sight yet otherwise operable. Some predict that this research will eventually result in a garment one can don to become invisible, the way Harry Potter used a magic cloak to sneak around his school undetected.
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Prize-winning British author Katharine Rundell boasts hidden-watching exploits even more sly and courageous than Harriet M. Welsch’s, both in real life and in her books for children. For fun, Rundell climbs on roofs. In her novel Rooftoppers, a supposed orphan girl named Sophie searches for her mother with the help of a gang of urchins who walk tightropes and jump the roofs of Victorian-era Paris. “I've been on the rooftops of about half the Oxford colleges, and a few beautiful buildings in London,” Rundell says. “I love being invisible. Being up high, there's a kind of freedom in it. I feel very at home and very free where no one can see me.”
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As a teen and young adult, I encountered pressure to shape myself for the gaze of others, particularly males. But boyfriends, like brainy Steve in high school and black-turtle-necked Quinn in graduate school, connected well with the inner me, not some dolled-up version designed to be admired. In that era, my sister tried to persuade me to wear makeup and upgrade my wardrobe. “You dress like you don’t want anyone to notice you,” she said. So what, I thought. The right people see me fine.
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In 2014, engineers at Surrey NanoSystems announced the development of Vantablack, a coating hailed as the “world’s darkest material.” By absorbing 99.965% of light, it makes objects resemble a void. Under dim conditions, something coated in Vantablack blends into the darkness, but otherwise the outline of the coated object can still be seen. In 2019, a BMW X6 painted in Vantablack for publicity purposes caused a huge stir. Obviously, such a car – “basically a shadow” in the words of Car and Driver – couldn’t safely ride public roads. For now, you’ll find Vantablack mainly in deep space, blocking out light from the sun so rocket-borne cameras can photograph distant stars and galaxies.
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Anthropologist and midwife Alison Bastien says that when she worked as an interpreter for the deaf for seven years, “I learned to be energetically invisible and neutral. ‘You are just the telephone receiver,’ the trainers told us. ‘Messages just pass through you. They are not from you or for you or about you.’” Bastien refers to this as a form of being “invisible in plain sight.” To non-deaf members of an audience, she became a non-person, like an architectural column, even though her hands, body, and mouth remained in constant motion.
Invisible in plain sight also applies to a photographer I watched once in my twenties. Though heavyset, he padded lightly around the edges of the business gathering, clicking his camera, which blocked his face. Dressed all in black, he attracted no attention except from me. A kindred spirit! When he relaxed out of picture-taking mode, heading off to take a break, I couldn’t resist complimenting him for being so unobtrusive. Wordlessly he shook me off, as if I’d broken a spell.
Invisible in plain sight also applies to a photographer I watched once in my twenties. Though heavyset, he padded lightly around the edges of the business gathering, clicking his camera, which blocked his face. Dressed all in black, he attracted no attention except from me. A kindred spirit! When he relaxed out of picture-taking mode, heading off to take a break, I couldn’t resist complimenting him for being so unobtrusive. Wordlessly he shook me off, as if I’d broken a spell.
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Screen goddess Marilyn Monroe had the ability to turn her glamour off or on in an instant. Her friend and one-time housemate Amy Greene recalls walking the streets of New York once with her while no one paid any attention whatsoever to the world-famous actress, though she wore no disguise. Then Monroe said the equivalent of “Watch this,” and presto change-o, everyone looked. “She turned something on within herself that was almost like magic,” Greene recalled. “And suddenly cars were slowing and people were turning their heads and stopping to stare.”
I learned about Monroe’s invisibility trick from my woo-woo friend Claire. A talented poet, actor, and director, she had studied at the feet of countless human-potential gurus and shamans. In my thirties, she taught me to experience the difference between my energy withdrawn into an inner nub and expanded far beyond my skin. I would unhook an interior latch, letting a silky, spectral aura billow around me on all sides and spread. “Is my energy big now?” I asked Claire. “Huge,” she replied. Or “Not yet.”
I learned about Monroe’s invisibility trick from my woo-woo friend Claire. A talented poet, actor, and director, she had studied at the feet of countless human-potential gurus and shamans. In my thirties, she taught me to experience the difference between my energy withdrawn into an inner nub and expanded far beyond my skin. I would unhook an interior latch, letting a silky, spectral aura billow around me on all sides and spread. “Is my energy big now?” I asked Claire. “Huge,” she replied. Or “Not yet.”
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For millennia, hunters have worn camouflage makeup and clothes to fade into a forest, desert, or jungle. Wearing perfectly matched colors and patterns, the imitators become unseeable. Inspired by chameleons and tropical flounder, advanced camouflage technologies take such mimicry one step further by changing the match minute by minute. They project images of an ever-shifting background onto a person or thing. The face-off between pursuer and pursued then depends on senses beyond sight. Military contractors have also created fabrics that adjust lickety-split to the temperature of their environment, thereby foiling an enemy’s heat-detecting imagery. Soldiers become both there and not-there.
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When I’m walking alone in my woodsy neighborhood, I can feel my energy fill space to the edges of the road and up to the sky. I bask in plenitude. With no one else around, I am maximally me. But I also feel invisible when I travel where no one knows me. There I exist as a see-through observer, taking in impressions and leaving no trace. Anonymous in crowds, I become a happy no one.
This benign mode of existence has enemies. From the outside, connection with oneself may look like disconnection from others. One afternoon I was strolling, meditatively cocooned in my thoughts, when a pickup truck rumbled to a stop opposite me. The window wound down, and a youngish man I didn’t recognize barked, “Why are you so unfriendly?” Later I realized this was a neighbor whose wife walked two big, scary dogs. Obviously, I’m not camouflaged enough. Total strangers too have confronted me that way, taking my polite reticence personally.
Pushback also comes when people have tendentious views about what’s normal. In a writing workshop, I shared an essay recounting my solitary raptures and my chagrin about being watched by neighbors who themselves lived way back from the road. Everyone who commented wanted to know what trauma made me antisocial and ultrasensitive. “We’re inherently social beings,” one person objected. “Unless something goes wrong, we’re all wired to engage with others,” another proclaimed. Aargh! My fellow 17 percenters were absent, and the 83 percent believed violence, abuse, or calamity must have caused my preference for living unobserved. In today’s world, that majority turns harmless delights and differences into psychiatric syndromes.
This benign mode of existence has enemies. From the outside, connection with oneself may look like disconnection from others. One afternoon I was strolling, meditatively cocooned in my thoughts, when a pickup truck rumbled to a stop opposite me. The window wound down, and a youngish man I didn’t recognize barked, “Why are you so unfriendly?” Later I realized this was a neighbor whose wife walked two big, scary dogs. Obviously, I’m not camouflaged enough. Total strangers too have confronted me that way, taking my polite reticence personally.
Pushback also comes when people have tendentious views about what’s normal. In a writing workshop, I shared an essay recounting my solitary raptures and my chagrin about being watched by neighbors who themselves lived way back from the road. Everyone who commented wanted to know what trauma made me antisocial and ultrasensitive. “We’re inherently social beings,” one person objected. “Unless something goes wrong, we’re all wired to engage with others,” another proclaimed. Aargh! My fellow 17 percenters were absent, and the 83 percent believed violence, abuse, or calamity must have caused my preference for living unobserved. In today’s world, that majority turns harmless delights and differences into psychiatric syndromes.
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Novelist Robert Crais nailed the distinction between those who look within for meaning, peace, and comfort and those who feel alive only with social interchange. In The Watchman, private investigator Joe Pike, as introverted as they come, has agreed to protect a rich young woman from criminals bent on keeping her from testifying in a court case. With her life at stake, the girl breaks away from her bodyguard to spend a few hours in a local club, dancing with half her clothes off atop the bar. “You want to be seen; me, I want to be invisible,” Pike says after he tracks her down. “If no one sees you, you don’t exist, so you find ways to be seen.”
Emily Dickinson took Pike’s part when she whispered to fellow Nobodies in her famous two-stanza poem: Let’s celebrate not being an all-too-public Frog. She whispered because invisibilitarians snuggle into cozy corners, unacknowledged by the blusterers on stage who imagine their own inclinations as universal.
Yet without high-tech wizardry, we joyous skulkers thrive. Being unseen takes many forms – in dumbwaiters, on rooftops, gloriously alone in nature or hidden in plain sight. It’s our blissed-out, blessed baseline of well-being.
Emily Dickinson took Pike’s part when she whispered to fellow Nobodies in her famous two-stanza poem: Let’s celebrate not being an all-too-public Frog. She whispered because invisibilitarians snuggle into cozy corners, unacknowledged by the blusterers on stage who imagine their own inclinations as universal.
Yet without high-tech wizardry, we joyous skulkers thrive. Being unseen takes many forms – in dumbwaiters, on rooftops, gloriously alone in nature or hidden in plain sight. It’s our blissed-out, blessed baseline of well-being.
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The author of essays in The New York Times Magazine, Ms., Next Avenue, and NPR, Marcia Yudkin advocates for introverts through her newsletter, Introvert UpThink. Literary magazines that have published her work include The Manifest Station, Halfway Down the Stairs, Stillpoint Arts Quarterly, Tiny Molecules, and Kitchen Table Quarterly. She lives in Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960).
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