Like many people I have been fascinated by the idea of invisibility since I was little. But not with the classic, transparent-as-the-air kind of invisibility. There are different ways of being invisible, and my fascination was not so much with literal invisibility, but with camouflage -- by that I mean disguising the body to resemble either something else or the general background so that it is unnoticeable, not merely covering up or hiding. Camouflage done to perfection is effectively equivalent to invisibility -- and I suspect a lot of people share my fascination with the subject. Why do I find camouflage-invisibility more intriguing than transparency-invisibility? I suppose one reason is that it seems so tantalizingly attainable in real life, because we see other creatures do it, like leaf insects, walking sticks, octopodes and cuttlefish, even The Thing (I refer to the mimetic monster from the John W. Campbell Jr. story and the John Carpenter movie it inspired, not the stone-man from the Fantastic Four). And of course, those wonderful photos of Veruschka disappearing, her body painted to exactly replace the background it is obscuring.
But I suspect another, perhaps more important reason is that the idea of hiding in plain sight is way more adventuresome -- deliciously thrilling if it's us doing it; spooky and creepy if it's someone -- or something -- else doing it to us. Donald Wollheim captured the essence of the latter concept so well in the short story 'Mimic', which is about the idea that weird, camouflaged creatures live openly in our midst; even though we encounter them all the time, we don't look too closely at them because some resemble 'fringe people' we'd rather stay away from anyhow; others mimic the appearance of common objects (BTW, if you've only seen the movie version (bearing the same title), run out to the library and check out the story it's based on -- the movie is just another standard monster flick, with none of the strangeness and originality of the story). Like, "Say, has that rock always been there?", or "Funny, I never noticed the Johnsons' house has two chimneys..?"(cue eerie music).
I once read that there are ant-mimicking insects that actually live among ants, protected from their (other) enemies by the ant colony (I wonder if there are other benefits -- do they also feed on the ants? now, that would be a true nightmare). They are not absolutely perfect copies of ants; larger size is one difference that cannot be so easily hidden, but I suppose if the difference is not too great it can be distracted away by a good imitation of chemical signals. And the ones that are very much larger than the ants -- and this one I find profoundly disturbing for some reason -- are actually shaped to resemble two ants, one following close behind the other! Imagine there was a creature that was camouflaged to look like two humans spooning -- but only the front head was real; the other was a mockup, with spots for eyes and a wrinkle for a mouth. If ants could think, that's how the ant-mimic would be for them
A tangential anecdote: a long time ago once, I was walking up Westwood Boulevard toward the UCLA campus. It was near the medical center, so perhaps the man I saw coming toward me was an outpatient there, but anyway I have to say he was unfortunately saddled with -- forgive me! -- the most grotesque facial deformity I have ever seen; his face was so extremely wide that it looked as if during fetal development the head had started to grow and divide into two heads, then stopped part-way. And it looked not like an image of a normal face that was stretched equally overall to twice the width -- I think that would actually have been less weird-looking -- but more like a human version of a hammerhead shark's head, because each of his eyes was normal-sized and located close to the correct spot for its side of the face, leaving a wide swath of vagueness between. I can't even imagine the kind of burden he must have had to live with, especially as a child.
Yet another, and perhaps more serious, reason is that being present yet unnoticed would allow us to flow through life's cracks without the onerous trauma of having to deal with other people. For those who are painfully shy or awkward, the ability to vanish into the background would be like an armor over their sensitive thin skin. I know I have on occasion wished I could disappear like a flounder on a chessboard. It's easy to say that this probably is not the most healthy, constructive way to resolve a social-adjustment problem, but what a boon such an ability would have been to that deformed man! And who is to say what is the best or the 'correct' way to adjust? We tend to heroicize those who confront hardships and enemies directly and emerge triumphant (we often do this even if we are in principle in an adversarial relationship with them -- for example, look at Genghis Khan and the ambiguously heroic image he enjoys in the west, despite the fact that had he lived to achieve his objective, much of the population of Eastern Europe would certainly have been decimated, and the rest would have been enslaved or at least subjugated), but is the man who conquers his enemies, suffering through toil and pain in the process, necessarily superior to the man who cleverly manages to avoid difficulties and live and die in comfort? As long as their effects on others' lives remain comparable, who is to say which is the morally superior way? What would Machiavelli say?
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