The Invisibilites
A Journey of Transformation
I don’t know who I’m supposed to announce my intentions to. To you, my reader? Are you even there? Isn’t communication ultimately an invisible act between invisible people? If I announce that I am struggling to become a writer, will that mean anything to anyone? Will it mean anything to me? “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” It’s not entirely clear yet. All that is clear is the intention which, by its structure, its inner necessity, needs to be announced. I suppose this is where god comes in, that most invisible of all things. I can announce this intention to god: “I am becoming a writer, god, and what do you think of me now (if at all)?” But do invisible things think? Do you and I think? Or do we amorphousize and liminilize? Aren’t we more akin to mirages who think themselves real? And how do mirages communicate with one another? Even when there are words, the words are still liquid and perishable. Words are like winter moss gathered on cold wet stone. They’re bright and meaningful — present and glowing — for a time, and then they melt back into the temperamental system of things and transform. It’s true that we have words of old, we have old words. Words that have gathered dust and grown beards and who walk around using walking sticks. Words that keep falling asleep in the middle of the sentence they’re trying to utter. Or words that have all left the earth and who can’t hear our wailing and moaning, words that no longer feel our grief at their loss. Our grandwordparents, our word ancestors spread far and wide across the world secretly amorphousizing in libraries and schools, in bedrooms and under stairs where young invisibilites train the dual light of their lightbulb eyes on their homes (the white pages where words live), these eyes growing in wonder and leading them out of the invisible world into stability and reason and logic and material reality.
Words keep proliferating. Everyone everywhere is rapidly using words in so many different languages all over the internet (which is an infinity all its own — it both is, and contains those lost multiverses astrophysicists keep looking for beyond the stars, beyond the big bang). New words are proliferating in Amazon reviews, on YouTube comments, and on social media sites where people are giving each other a lot of good advice and also promoting a great deal of evil. These words are also invisible, as are the people peddling them. No one seems to be actually reading any of it (no one but god, apparently), everyone is too busy speaking, too busy scribbling their words on invisible walls, too busy seeking a solution to their invisibility problem. Apparently commerce is the solution to the invisibility conundrum. The words are for sale. What they are trying to represent is likewise for sale. The bearded-in-the-future words covered in dust are for sale. The moss that has turned to stone in the summer heat is for sale. “Please! Buy me,” it begs. “Love me, notice me, give me some attention so that I’m no longer alone and afraid and meaningless — I’m scared of being invisible.” So we all oblige one another’s fears. We click and like and share. We are conveyors of invisible fears. We distribute them, we spread the words around, we cook with them, and sleep with them, and let them grow in our bellies like little babies.
But we don’t examine the words. How can we when they are invisible? Maybe there’s a trick to it. Somehow, I can see a trick, a “hack” that can help us see the invisible words before we spread them around. We should look at them and see them, right? I mean, don’t you, my invisible reader, also believe that we should know what we are doing before do it? How do we know what it is that we’re spreading around and sharing with our “friends” if we haven’t taken a good look at the thing in question?
The hack is to take the two invisible things and put them in a pot and cook them on the stove with half a solution of water and half a solution of angel tears. If you have no angel tears, you can use unicorn saliva. The two invisible items — you yourself and the words you are reading — must cook in the pot for about three and a half years. Obviously being ultra-careful with the heat levels here is of paramount importance. After all, you don’t want to lose yourself (altogether) in there. You have to use a variety of heat sources to alternate the levels so that the mixture doesn’t burn but smoothly and steadily cooks over the one thousand two hundred seventy-seven and a half days it will take for this recipe to be ready.
But you will be so amazed at the results. You will pop out of that pot no longer invisible. Or rather, you will be beyond invisible, you will be see-through, like an impeccable sheet of pristine glass and you will twinkle when you smile and the little angels of the world, the children, will flock to you in droves and so will the lambs. They will inundate you with their clean, holy love because they will be able to sense that your trans-invisibility is a cloak you wear with dignity. You will no longer excrete fear and sad longing and that creepy lostness that is really just a childish form of egotism, but you will spread the words of clarity that rise up and fly around like a thousand joyful swallows in early May. And no one will know what happened to you in that pot on the stove. No one will suspect the agony you endured. No one will ask you to tell them stories about it. Only you will know what it meant, what it continues to mean. And you’ll speak of it sometimes when the little children are asleep and you are stroking their hair.
You’ll gently whisper those endless sorrows into the invisible wind.
