Invisible, unvisible, and the uncanny

Suddenly can’t find your phone, even though you have it in your hand and were scrolling through something? Had been hunting high and low for your glasses, and then found them perched on your head? You can’t find your driving key, and then it stares back at you from the not-so-deep recesses of your pocket? We all have faced these moments. The things that can’t be seen are deemed invisible. But the usual, ordinary things that suddenly vanish because of ‘over-familiarity’ – these are things that become ‘unvisible‘.

The fundamental difference between invisibility and unvisibility is that in the case of the latter, the object is ‘hiding’ in plain sight. Unlike the former that can’t be seen by all and sundry – H G Wells’ Invisible Man, microscopic life all around us, an ‘all-pervasive higher’ entity, Santa Claus, etc – the unvisible momentarily disappears to just one person, the person looking for it. Sigmund Freud, in his 1919 essay, ‘Das Unheimliche’ (The Uncanny), describes the opposite phenomenon as ‘strangeness located in the ordinary’. It could be a doll that has been always on display suddenly taking on a sinister air. It could be a word that due to being used too often, momentarily looks unrecognisable. It could also be obvious things like litter on roads or poor people on streets who are usually ‘unvisible’ suddenly becoming palpable.