A Symposium on Invisibility

Editor's Note: As is always true in the case of our symposia, these contributions were written simultaneously and independently in response to the assigned topic. Any overlaps, parallels, or violent disagreements are therefore purely serendipitous.

FOR REASONS of interest to nobody, when I was a child I had a burning desire to go to Vermont. This ambition was fulfilled when I and the Midwestern suburb in which I was growing up had had quite enough of each other, and at age sixteen I was sent off to a boarding school in the foothills of the Green Mountains.

I came to love Vermont as deeply as I've ever loved a place, and I often miss the magical and ennobling air as fiercely as I'd longed to breathe it, but early on I had some bad days: What's with all these hills, I wondered, what's that about? They completely block the view!

The view of what? someone might say. Because there are a lot of people who enjoy making the point that we who have lived in the Midwest are, unlike themselves, idiots. “Flat,” they say haughtily, and—as if it were the same thing—“monotonous” (despite the conspicuous splendor of radiant daily skies, the exuberant seasonal expressions along the continuum between silver winter and gold summer, the infinite, mesmerizing vicissitudes of moody Lake Michigan).

A repressive, constricting, intolerant, and obtusely complacent culture prevailed during the period of my upbringing. It promised the reward of significant material comforts to the rapidly expanding (and now defunct) middle class, but only in ruthless exchange for fealty to ideals of personal “success” (status) and national empire: its lieutenants trod a narrow path and kept a straight face. And in the ambient and concealed menace of that period—the thuggery costumed as propriety—the farther you could see, the better.

From the bleak confinement of one's pretty suburban bedroom, one could watch out the window for lightning storms and twisters traveling along a hundred miles away, the smoldering night scarlet of industrial Indiana, dawn hoisting itself up over the curve of the earth. In that great expanse you could see impulses just thinking about taking form, trembling on the brink of existence. Ambush was one hundred percent out of the question.

I have a friend who believes—contrary to Newton's assertion that things don't move unless you push them—that our astoundingly complex universe is always in motion, riotously flinging around its subatomic particles or whatever bits of stuff into random agglomerations which manifest as “things.” Well, I can't remember exactly what he said, but words to that effect, which, in substance, totally validate my long-held suspicion that the universe contains an infinite field of potential—even latent—manifestations.

But while the world is beyond impressive at generating “things,” it's inevitable that most of its embryonic propositions never quite make it into corporeality, or even into visibility, or even into some paler, more partial, more provisional form of perceptibility as second-tier entities, such as ghosts, which by most accounts are sort of translucent.

Something one tends to forget about the word “invisible” is its stipulation that there's something there that's invisible—something that will be seen when the fog burns off, or that could be seen right now if it were just slightly more manifest; something that right now is affecting how life will go in the next few seconds or centuries, something that explains one's own baffling, compulsive behavior; something just as “real” as what you might drop, or stub your toe on.

It stands to reason, then, that there are certain people who devote themselves to monitoring these phenomena. And of course I'm referring here to people (like me) who write what's called fiction.

Don't think it's an easy job. Obviously reality is designed not to be seen; if reality were designed to be seen, the planet wouldn't be run by irrational maniacs. But what is essential here is that we fiction writers are not in the business of surveillance. It's not our objective to curtail the inventive powers of reality; we're strictly in the business of observation and reflection. And we don't want our own inventive powers curtailed either, by any obstacles (such as frustration, terror, self-consciousness) that are designed to help reality block prying eyes. To put it crudely, freedom is a two-way street, as is freedom's most