I found an 82 page document today that was all the posts here from 2017. I seem to return at times and close things, remove things. 2017 I wrote heavily about language and linguistics, but also about the motivations behind why one would wish to be invisible.

That question came from Philip Ball’s book Invisible, in which he notes we speak more of means than motive, although motives for invisibility, he notes, seem to mostly have something to do with prurience or power.

Means and motive. I’d like to be able to teleport. Means is hard, motive is easy. I simply wish to be elsewhere, when I wish to be there and I find flying miserable, I am landlocked so no boats (which I love), and landlocked in a land with very limited trains or public transport.

I recently asked an eight year old if he could travel in time if he would go forwards or backwards. Forwards, he said, as there would be new and interesting things. Then he paused and said, or backwards if I can take technology with me. Then I can smash the cave people and rule the world. I asked why he wanted to smash cave people, but he just shrugged, and hopped onto the school bus I was walking him too, and headed off to school.

I am not so keen on time travel, or space travel. Perhaps time travel would be more interesting backwards if I were not female. Heading back in time as a woman seems dangerous. Though this could be a fallacy. I have recently been watching the original Columbo TV series. The episodes are from the early 70s. Women go with men, for example, Columbo, in his trench coat and with a non-police car and a badge, convinces a woman at a crime scene to let him take her home, to her house. Alone. He then makes her eggs, and nothing bad happens. In another instance, a woman agrees to dinner with a man she doesn’t know well, in his house, and he kills her. Columbo goes to many a woman’s house and has a conversation with her alone, wanders around her house poking into thing. I am very struck by this, because you would not see this on TV today, and also, I don’t think most women would invite a man in whom they do not know. When did fear and harm start, where half the population is afraid of the other half? Columbo is rather sweet and women are not treated as half-human. There are no denigrations or assumptions made. It reminds me in a way of the pre-code movies or Katharine Hepburn and the comfort and power women had in themselves. And not all movies had women seeking love or companionship. It is hard to tell where the shift was, in the screens or in the daily lives or in the realities. As the world here, the one in which I live, shifts and the state-sanctioned violence increases and the shootings and the harm, as the murders in the city I live in seem to increase (or is it news coverage), it becomes hard to remember to live without fear of humans.

When I take long solo travels in the world I am reminded how kind people are, how generous and interesting and caring. When I am home and the news catches me, or people speak of fear and assumptions, it is very hard to maintain. I live in a city where women go running alone at 5am and in the dark. I wish them to always be safe, and more women to have this opportunity, this comfort.

This, for me, would be a motive to be invisible. To wander wherever I wanted, always safe, always comfortable. But I would want to be able to blip into invisibility at will, as well, to have tea with strangers, to feel the textiles and, of course, eat snacks.