the invisible man

Farm fence, Morfa Mawddach, Gwynedd 2024

Old musicians never die, they say, they go out of tune. Others just fade away. Some people were always out of tune - with the times - or just on a different wavelength. I’m there somewhere in the mix.

It started as soon as I took early retirement. Trying on trousers in the fitting room of a well known shop, purveyors of garments and groceries, the staff member asked me to shout for assistance, and called me “dear”. A good twenty years older than I was, she was there again at the checkout with my jeans, aubergines and tangerines, asking if I wanted any help with the packing. 

That was sixteen years ago. The fading was barely noticeable at first. But early signs were there, in futile attempts to get served at a bar. In days of yore, “bar presence” was a thing. Since the Great Plague of 2020 and consequent “lockdowns”, customers began that most unBritish of behaviours (at least in pubs): orderly queuing. I rarely visit licensed premises now, but if at the front of the line with outstretched tenner, I am ignored in favour of someone younger. They hold out small black monoliths or smart watches, and as if in some neo-medieval barter, utter the secret passwords of the initiates, “Can I get?” or “Can I grab?”.

Meanwhile, out on the streets, a “new normal” of impatience has taken hold. Increasingly I find I am pushed out of the way on the pavement, to the extent that some even try to walk through me as if I’m not there. And behind the wheel, many think they can reach their destinations more quickly by pushing from the rear. I may be being unfair in both scenarios, if they are, in truth, incapable of noticing my presence. I'm not alone in finding I have become invisible. My partner found it too when she turned sixty, and the phenomenon seems to be reported mostly by women. 

It's not just a function of age. I've read somewhere that a member of the British royal family, and others of “the elite”, are so bound up in their bubbles of privilege, that they don't so much demean those deemed beneath them, as fail to even see them. The same is true of those “entitled” individuals who treat those working in health, hospitality or retail as automata.  I now know what he meant when my father complained about The Rodneys. Age, gender, race and class all play their part in making people disappear. All the “isms”. At least my fading from view gives me a deeper insight into the experience of invisibility in its diverse demographic.

To return to the trousers. When I was young, I noticed that men (usually men) of a certain age, would start wearing the same style of clothes in perpetuity. The Tweed jackets and flat caps are rarely seen today, neither are those trousers with waistbands so high they almost reached the armpits. My father had some.

Fading away may be a misnomer, it may just be a blending in, maturely merging with one’s surroundings. As if in a work of science fiction, have I just become attuned to a different quantum wavelength, quite literally invisible to others? Not intentionally misanthropic, but slightly outside harmonic resonance. 

Desafinado (“slightly out of tune”) is a song by Antônio Carlos Jobim (1958). Its slightly chromatic harmonies were written in response to critics who felt his bossa nova melodies were too “out of tune” for many singers. Most versions are performed gently, and become quieter and quieter in the repeat and fade at the end. With common usage in much of the popular genre, I was never sure if “repeat and fade” was just a lazy way to avoid writing a dramatic final cadence, or a continuity device that allowed radio DJs to talk over the music. Handing over the reins as it were. But Joseph Haydn had used such fading in his Farewell Symphony (1772).  And in “Neptune” from The Planets ( Gustav Holst 1914), the repeated chords of an offstage choir seemingly move away into the distance but never quite disappear, as the door from the auditorium is slowly closed. Music as metaphor for mortality.  

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LINKS

The upper classes actually do believe they’re better, more skilled than others, study finds (theladders.com)

‘You really do become invisible’: examining older adults’ right to the city in the United Kingdom | Ageing & Society | Cambridge Core

Society ‘disappears’ ageing women. So I harnessed that cloak of invisibility to do all sorts of ‘inappropriate’ things | Deborah Wood | The Guardian

Poet Claudia Rankine: ‘The invisibility of black women is astounding’ | Poetry | The Guardian

Desafinado - Wikipedia

The Repeat To Fade, I Say The Repeat To Fade (theafterword.co.uk)

Why do some songs fade out? The history behind it: Alan Cross - National | Globalnews.ca