It is fitting that Akiko Busch's new book should take as its opening image a Hudson Valley deer hunter's decrepit tree stand. For one thing, as Busch notes, it is “actually called a blind,” making it “a good spot to begin thinking about being unseen and the conditions under which we become visible.” For another, it is in the woods, lost in reveries of Jeremiah Johnson–style solitude and self-sufficiency, that one contends with a powerful impulse to vanish from human society and its watchful eyes. In the woods, even the most docile man becomes a flight risk.
I was disappointed, then — I say this only half-jokingly — to learn that Busch's book is not an instruction manual. It is not about how to disappear in the fake-your-own-death, go-off-the-grid, become-a-hermit sense.
Rather, How to Disappear is a reflection, a charmingly discursive one, on the nature and pleasures of invisibility. One thing Busch cannot be accused of is literal-mindedness. The subjects covered herein range widely, and some are only loosely related to the urgent issues of surveillance and privacy, transparency and its enabler, exhibitionism. The reader who hopes to learn why we have collectively — and at times enthusiastically — ceded so much of our privacy may not come away satisfied, though he will at least have much to ponder about how and why to get it back.
Busch's first two chapters are about invisible friends and invisibility as a superpower, respectively. To lead with these topics is an elegant way of returning the reader to childhood, when one has such an ambivalent relationship with being seen. The child abhors loneliness but cherishes privacy, secrets, locked diaries, hiding spots. He must, for safety's sake, be fairly well supervised; he simultaneously must learn to negotiate the challenges of being alone. The twin fantasies of never being alone and of disappearing at will are indispensable tools for the child and, frankly, for the adult he will become.
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