Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (2014) by Philip Ball & the World We Cannot See
From Tolkien’s and Gyge’s magic rings, morals of Glaucon, cloaks of invisibility, invisible children, occult forces and sacred magic, theological thermodynamics, the invisible men of science fiction, natural camouflage, time bandits, the Holy Spirit, X-rays, and to the mythic and magical connotations of invisibility, Ball does wonders as he crosses time and space to bring readers a semi-full spectrum encompassing the historical and contemporary implications involving the “unseen” in our everyday lives.
Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (2014) by the polymath Philip Ball is a collection of essays that explores and seeks to illuminate the desires to understand and ultimately control the invisible forces all around us.
From Tolkien’s and Gyge’s magic rings, morals of Glaucon, cloaks of invisibility, invisible children, occult forces and sacred magic, theological thermodynamics, the invisible men of science fiction, natural camouflage, time bandits, the Holy Spirit, X-rays, and to the mythic and magical connotations of invisibility, Ball does wonders as he crosses time and space to bring readers a semi-full spectrum encompassing the historical and contemporary implications involving the “unseen” in our everyday lives.
Philip Ball, British Science Writer (b. 1962)
“For Plato, then,” writes Ball, “invisibility was not a wondrous power but a moral challenge—to which none of us is likely to prove equal. Invisibility corrupts; nothing good could come of it. In particular, invisibility will tempt us towards three things: power, sex and murder. This is the promise that lured people to seek invisibility throughout time, whether by magical spells or esoteric arts or devices and garments that confer the ability to vanish” (p 4).
Any reader who has crossed the pages and vanished into H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897) or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), one can attest to the fact of how invisibility, either an absence bearing no physical presence to the naked eye or a social mindset making a minority “unseen” as it were, power corrupts the individual’s morals which leads to shameless acts of sexual degradation and then to murder.
Either writers regarding invisibility as a choice topic are not very original, or Plato, as Ball asserts, has a keen understanding of how invisibility in any form challenges a person’s morals. One could even apply this principle to the unseen bankers and corporate heads of conglomerates across the world today.
“Invisibility, then,” explains Ball, “provides access to liminal places tinged with desire, allure and possibility. Such allegorical content means that magical invisibility in fiction should never function simply as a convenient power that advances the narrative. It should not be bought cheaply, nor used idly. That is why the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings supplies a more satisfying, more mythically valid emblem than the cloaks of invisibility in the Harry Potter series. The latter, made from the hair of a creature from the Far East that can make itself invisible, are trinkets, a piece of incidental, even mundane magic. But magic must not be incidental or mundane, for it pulls on a subtle web of forces and must therefore have consequences. Frodo Baggins’ ring will, in the end, steal souls and reduce the bearer to a pitiful, malevolent wraith. That is what invisibility, when depicted in its truthful symbolic guises, does to us: it transforms us and pulls us into another realm” (p 6).
What Ball is claiming is that if fiction, or even science in the real world, deals with forces of nature which far exceed our own human powers, there must be substantial consequences affecting the human condition. Now this can be a physical and spiritual change, as in Frodo and the One Ring, or the malevolent power behind the unseen forces can cause corruption in a far more comical sense. As in the following case of one Spaniard in 1582:
A Spaniard, having dealt with magical recipes and texts, “decided to use invisibility magic” in hopes of changing the course of history by murdering the Prince of Orange (p 14).
“Since [the Spaniard’s] spells could not make clothes invisible,” writes Ball, “he had to strip naked, in which state he arrived at the palace and strolled casually through the gates, unaware that he was perfectly visible to the guards. They followed the outlandish intruder until the purpose of his mission became plain, whereupon they seized him and flogged him” (p 14).
Of course there are various kinds and degrees of invisible forces out there in the universe and world around us, and these forces often remain constant and unseen. Magnetism is one such force. And so is love. Ball, coincidentally, sheds some light on these two magical powers:
“The word magnet derives from the region of Magnesia on the Aegean Sea, where lodestone can be found, but it might also share an etymological root with magic itself. In the Middle Ages the Latin word for diamond, adamas, came to also be used for magnets, and is said to be linked to the French aimant, love—for the attraction of iron and magnet was commonly viewed as a kind of love, or as natural magicians, would put it, sympathy” (p 19).
And unseen love being one of the most powerful forces of attraction in the human condition continues to mystify even the greatest of minds to date. How can anyone explain two lonely hearts living decades in longing to one day collide and forever be shaped and reshaped and united in an invisible poetry of emotions, magnetized and inseparable.
But Ball does not stop there. He goes on to consider the invisible forces of God and Economy.
“There was nothing particularly heterodox in this vision of God acting through a beneficent, invisible force,” Ball explains about Isaac Newton’s attempt to fully conceptualize gravity as a power or ether in the cosmos presented “in a frame of nature by the will of God” which could reveal “divine action in the world” (p 29).
Ball continues, “It was a commonplace of seventeenth-century theology that God exercised providential and active control over events on earth. That was the true provenance of Adam Smith’s famous Invisible Hand that purportedly maintains economic stability: as historian Peter Harrison has said, ‘almost certainly, when readers encountered the phrase in Smith, they would have understood it as referring to God’s unseen agency in political economy’—whether Smith intended it or not. Humans, like planets, were deemed to be led by God’s invisible hand to accomplish His ends” (p 29).
And Ball addresses how aspects of neoliberalism could be dated back to such religious beliefs in an “invisible hand”:
“It seems appropriate,” argues Ball, “that the neoliberal conviction in the ability of the unchecked market to bring about economic stability turns out to have its roots in an expression of religious faith” (p 29).
Ball even further challenges Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous motto “Gott is tott” and Karl Barth who strongly ascertained that “there are no such things as ghosts” (p 62-63).
Ball writes, “We can see, then, that Barth was wrong. It is not the idea of a Holy Ghost that has suffered in recent times, but that of God the Father—too embodied an entity to appeal to any but the most literalist of believers. God has now Himself become the Spirit: disembodied, omnipresent, a life force and a process congruent with a contemporary view of the ‘sacredness of the earth’. Those Baroque images of a radiant greybeard among the clouds now seem quaint if not absurd. God is not dead, he has just become invisible” (p 64).
An invisible God; what do you think about that?
But this is as religious as Ball gets in his collection of essays totaling 282 pages, but his writing at times soars off the page and leaves one breathless with the depth of scientific research and the lyrical resonance which leaves the reader haunted by ghostly images of its own. As in the following passage I shall end with:
“As we will see,” writes Ball, “work on cathode rays soon led to the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity. Because he used phosphors to reveal them, [Sir William] Crookes [1832-1919] befriended the French expert on phosphorescence Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel, whose son Henri discovered the ‘uranic rays’ emanating from uranium that the Curies christened radioactivity. These rays heralded a century of new extremes of light and dark, brighter than a thousand suns and stygian as the world’s end.
“Half a century later and on the other side of the world,” Ball explains, “they were destined to cast shadows burnt onto municipal stonework like the imprints on photographic plates, while the people whose shapes they recorded had, like their city, vanished” (p 115).
Invisible (2014) will make the reader question the attempts science makes to harness and manipulate invisible forces, which as Plato warned in the beginning, leads to far more devastating moral defects; but at the same time Ball remains objective and provides a glimpse of hope in how humanity can evolve and better equip itself with the patient control and harmony to become unified with these unseen forces—whether magical, spiritual, or scientific—and to use such knowledge wisely, rather than like magic books of old that “acquired the same talismanic function as a great deal of the academic literature today: to be read, learnt, cited, but never used” (p 27).
Philip Ball, British Science Writer (b. 1962)
I wish, I pray, I hypothesize that readers will not dive into Philip Ball’s invisible world as if it were a part of the black hole of academic writing, but rather consider the knowledge within as a chance to see the unseen in a new way.
He has a B.A. in English, an M.Ed. in Higher Education Leadership (honors), an M.A. in Literature (honors), and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Fiction. He was born in Texas in 1979.
“There is no better way for readers interested in Germany’s history and the dilemma and cultures of the two Berlins to absorb this information than in a novel such as this, which captures the microcosm of two individuals’ love, relationship, and options and expands them against the blossoming dilemmas of a nation divided.”
~ D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
“A Time to Forget in East Berlin is a dream-like interlude of love and passion in the paranoid and violent life of a Cold War spy. The meticulous research is evident on every page, and Fewston’s elegant prose, reminiscent of novels from a bygone era, enhances the sensation that this is a book firmly rooted in another time.”
“Fewston avoids familiar plot elements of espionage fiction, and he is excellent when it comes to emotional precision and form while crafting his varied cast of characters.”
“There’s a lot to absorb in this book of hefty psychological and philosophical observations and insights, but the reader who stays committed will be greatly rewarded.”
“Readers of TheCatcher in the Rye and similar stories will relish the astute, critical inspection of life that makes Little Hometown, America a compelling snapshot of contemporary American life and culture.”
“Fewston employs a literary device called a ‘frame narrative’ which may be less familiar to some, but allows for a picture-in-picture result (to use a photographic term). Snapshots of stories appear as parts of other stories, with the introductory story serving as a backdrop for a series of shorter stories that lead readers into each, dovetailing and connecting in intricate ways.”
“The American novelist CG FEWSTON tells a satisfying tale, bolstered by psychology and far-ranging philosophy, calling upon Joseph Campbell, J. D. Salinger, the King James Bible, and Othello.”
“In this way, the author lends intellectual heft to a family story, exploring the ‘purity’ of art, the ‘corrupting’ influences of publishing, the solitary artist, and the messy interconnectedness of human relationships.”
“Fewston’s lyrical, nostalgia-steeped story is told from the perspective of a 40-year-old man gazing back on events from his 1980s Texas childhood…. the narrator movingly conveys and interprets the greater meanings behind childhood memories.”
“The novel’s focus on formative childhood moments is familiar… the narrator’s lived experiences come across as wholly personal, deeply felt, and visceral.”
This is my good friend, Nicolasa (Nico) Murillo, CRC, who is a professional chef & a wellness mentor. I’ve known her since childhood & I’m honored to share her story with you. In life, we all have ups & downs, some far more extreme than others. Much like in Canada, in America, the legalization of marijuana has become a national movement, which includes safe & legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use & research for all.
“This is a wellness movement,” Nico explains. The wellness movement is focused on three specific areas: information, encouragement, & accountability.
In these stressful & unprecedented times, it makes good sense to promote & encourage the state or condition of being in good physical & mental health.
TEXANS FOR SAFE ACCESS ~ share the mission of their national organization, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), which is to ensure safe and legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use and research, for all Texans.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (2014) by the polymath Philip Ball is a collection of essays that explores and seeks to illuminate the desires to understand and ultimately control the invisible forces all around us.
From Tolkien’s and Gyge’s magic rings, morals of Glaucon, cloaks of invisibility, invisible children, occult forces and sacred magic, theological thermodynamics, the invisible men of science fiction, natural camouflage, time bandits, the Holy Spirit, X-rays, and to the mythic and magical connotations of invisibility, Ball does wonders as he crosses time and space to bring readers a semi-full spectrum encompassing the historical and contemporary implications involving the “unseen” in our everyday lives.
“For Plato, then,” writes Ball, “invisibility was not a wondrous power but a moral challenge—to which none of us is likely to prove equal. Invisibility corrupts; nothing good could come of it. In particular, invisibility will tempt us towards three things: power, sex and murder. This is the promise that lured people to seek invisibility throughout time, whether by magical spells or esoteric arts or devices and garments that confer the ability to vanish” (p 4).
Any reader who has crossed the pages and vanished into H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897) or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), one can attest to the fact of how invisibility, either an absence bearing no physical presence to the naked eye or a social mindset making a minority “unseen” as it were, power corrupts the individual’s morals which leads to shameless acts of sexual degradation and then to murder.
Either writers regarding invisibility as a choice topic are not very original, or Plato, as Ball asserts, has a keen understanding of how invisibility in any form challenges a person’s morals. One could even apply this principle to the unseen bankers and corporate heads of conglomerates across the world today.
“Invisibility, then,” explains Ball, “provides access to liminal places tinged with desire, allure and possibility. Such allegorical content means that magical invisibility in fiction should never function simply as a convenient power that advances the narrative. It should not be bought cheaply, nor used idly. That is why the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings supplies a more satisfying, more mythically valid emblem than the cloaks of invisibility in the Harry Potter series. The latter, made from the hair of a creature from the Far East that can make itself invisible, are trinkets, a piece of incidental, even mundane magic. But magic must not be incidental or mundane, for it pulls on a subtle web of forces and must therefore have consequences. Frodo Baggins’ ring will, in the end, steal souls and reduce the bearer to a pitiful, malevolent wraith. That is what invisibility, when depicted in its truthful symbolic guises, does to us: it transforms us and pulls us into another realm” (p 6).
What Ball is claiming is that if fiction, or even science in the real world, deals with forces of nature which far exceed our own human powers, there must be substantial consequences affecting the human condition. Now this can be a physical and spiritual change, as in Frodo and the One Ring, or the malevolent power behind the unseen forces can cause corruption in a far more comical sense. As in the following case of one Spaniard in 1582:
A Spaniard, having dealt with magical recipes and texts, “decided to use invisibility magic” in hopes of changing the course of history by murdering the Prince of Orange (p 14).
“Since [the Spaniard’s] spells could not make clothes invisible,” writes Ball, “he had to strip naked, in which state he arrived at the palace and strolled casually through the gates, unaware that he was perfectly visible to the guards. They followed the outlandish intruder until the purpose of his mission became plain, whereupon they seized him and flogged him” (p 14).
Of course there are various kinds and degrees of invisible forces out there in the universe and world around us, and these forces often remain constant and unseen. Magnetism is one such force. And so is love. Ball, coincidentally, sheds some light on these two magical powers:
“The word magnet derives from the region of Magnesia on the Aegean Sea, where lodestone can be found, but it might also share an etymological root with magic itself. In the Middle Ages the Latin word for diamond, adamas, came to also be used for magnets, and is said to be linked to the French aimant, love—for the attraction of iron and magnet was commonly viewed as a kind of love, or as natural magicians, would put it, sympathy” (p 19).
And unseen love being one of the most powerful forces of attraction in the human condition continues to mystify even the greatest of minds to date. How can anyone explain two lonely hearts living decades in longing to one day collide and forever be shaped and reshaped and united in an invisible poetry of emotions, magnetized and inseparable.
But Ball does not stop there. He goes on to consider the invisible forces of God and Economy.
“There was nothing particularly heterodox in this vision of God acting through a beneficent, invisible force,” Ball explains about Isaac Newton’s attempt to fully conceptualize gravity as a power or ether in the cosmos presented “in a frame of nature by the will of God” which could reveal “divine action in the world” (p 29).
Ball continues, “It was a commonplace of seventeenth-century theology that God exercised providential and active control over events on earth. That was the true provenance of Adam Smith’s famous Invisible Hand that purportedly maintains economic stability: as historian Peter Harrison has said, ‘almost certainly, when readers encountered the phrase in Smith, they would have understood it as referring to God’s unseen agency in political economy’—whether Smith intended it or not. Humans, like planets, were deemed to be led by God’s invisible hand to accomplish His ends” (p 29).
And Ball addresses how aspects of neoliberalism could be dated back to such religious beliefs in an “invisible hand”:
“It seems appropriate,” argues Ball, “that the neoliberal conviction in the ability of the unchecked market to bring about economic stability turns out to have its roots in an expression of religious faith” (p 29).
Ball even further challenges Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous motto “Gott is tott” and Karl Barth who strongly ascertained that “there are no such things as ghosts” (p 62-63).
Ball writes, “We can see, then, that Barth was wrong. It is not the idea of a Holy Ghost that has suffered in recent times, but that of God the Father—too embodied an entity to appeal to any but the most literalist of believers. God has now Himself become the Spirit: disembodied, omnipresent, a life force and a process congruent with a contemporary view of the ‘sacredness of the earth’. Those Baroque images of a radiant greybeard among the clouds now seem quaint if not absurd. God is not dead, he has just become invisible” (p 64).
An invisible God; what do you think about that?
But this is as religious as Ball gets in his collection of essays totaling 282 pages, but his writing at times soars off the page and leaves one breathless with the depth of scientific research and the lyrical resonance which leaves the reader haunted by ghostly images of its own. As in the following passage I shall end with:
“As we will see,” writes Ball, “work on cathode rays soon led to the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity. Because he used phosphors to reveal them, [Sir William] Crookes [1832-1919] befriended the French expert on phosphorescence Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel, whose son Henri discovered the ‘uranic rays’ emanating from uranium that the Curies christened radioactivity. These rays heralded a century of new extremes of light and dark, brighter than a thousand suns and stygian as the world’s end.
“Half a century later and on the other side of the world,” Ball explains, “they were destined to cast shadows burnt onto municipal stonework like the imprints on photographic plates, while the people whose shapes they recorded had, like their city, vanished” (p 115).
Invisible (2014) will make the reader question the attempts science makes to harness and manipulate invisible forces, which as Plato warned in the beginning, leads to far more devastating moral defects; but at the same time Ball remains objective and provides a glimpse of hope in how humanity can evolve and better equip itself with the patient control and harmony to become unified with these unseen forces—whether magical, spiritual, or scientific—and to use such knowledge wisely, rather than like magic books of old that “acquired the same talismanic function as a great deal of the academic literature today: to be read, learnt, cited, but never used” (p 27).
I wish, I pray, I hypothesize that readers will not dive into Philip Ball’s invisible world as if it were a part of the black hole of academic writing, but rather consider the knowledge within as a chance to see the unseen in a new way.
Keep reading and smiling…
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CG FEWSTON
The American novelist CG FEWSTON has been a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (Italy), a Visiting Fellow at Hong Kong’s CityU, & he’s a been member of the Hemingway Society, Americans for the Arts, PEN America, Club Med, & the Royal Society of Literature. He’s also a been Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) based in London.
He’s the author of several short stories and novels. His works include A Father’s Son (2005), The New America: A Collection (2007), The Mystic’s Smile ~ A Play in 3 Acts (2007), Vanity of Vanities (2011), A Time to Love in Tehran (2015), Little Hometown, America (2020); A Time to Forget in East Berlin (2022), and Conquergood & the Center of the Intelligible Mystery of Being (2023).
He has a B.A. in English, an M.Ed. in Higher Education Leadership (honors), an M.A. in Literature (honors), and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Fiction. He was born in Texas in 1979.
A TIME TO FORGET IN EAST BERLIN
BREW Book Excellence Award Winner
BREW Readers’ Choice Award Winner
“A spellbinding tale of love and espionage set under the looming shadow of the Berlin Wall in 1975… A mesmerising read full of charged eroticism.”
~ Ian Skewis, Associate Editor for Bloodhound Books, & author of best-selling novel A Murder of Crows (2017)
“An engrossing story of clandestine espionage… a testament to the lifestyle encountered in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War.”
~ Lone Star Literary Life Magazine
“There is no better way for readers interested in Germany’s history and the dilemma and cultures of the two Berlins to absorb this information than in a novel such as this, which captures the microcosm of two individuals’ love, relationship, and options and expands them against the blossoming dilemmas of a nation divided.”
~ D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
“A Time to Forget in East Berlin is a dream-like interlude of love and passion in the paranoid and violent life of a Cold War spy. The meticulous research is evident on every page, and Fewston’s elegant prose, reminiscent of novels from a bygone era, enhances the sensation that this is a book firmly rooted in another time.”
~ Matthew Harffy, prolific writer & best-selling historical fiction author of the “Bernicia Chronicles” series
“Vivid, nuanced, and poetic…”
“Fewston avoids familiar plot elements of espionage fiction, and he is excellent when it comes to emotional precision and form while crafting his varied cast of characters.”
“There’s a lot to absorb in this book of hefty psychological and philosophical observations and insights, but the reader who stays committed will be greatly rewarded.”
~ The Prairies Book Review
LITTLE HOMETOWN, AMERICA
“Readers of The Catcher in the Rye and similar stories will relish the astute, critical inspection of life that makes Little Hometown, America a compelling snapshot of contemporary American life and culture.”
“Fewston employs a literary device called a ‘frame narrative’ which may be less familiar to some, but allows for a picture-in-picture result (to use a photographic term). Snapshots of stories appear as parts of other stories, with the introductory story serving as a backdrop for a series of shorter stories that lead readers into each, dovetailing and connecting in intricate ways.”
~ D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
“The American novelist CG FEWSTON tells a satisfying tale, bolstered by psychology and far-ranging philosophy, calling upon Joseph Campbell, J. D. Salinger, the King James Bible, and Othello.”
“In this way, the author lends intellectual heft to a family story, exploring the ‘purity’ of art, the ‘corrupting’ influences of publishing, the solitary artist, and the messy interconnectedness of human relationships.”
~ Lone Star Literary Life Magazine
GOLD Winner in the 2020 Human Relations Indie Book Awards for Contemporary Realistic Fiction
FINALIST in the SOUTHWEST REGIONAL FICTION category of the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence 2020 Awards (NIEA)
“Fewston’s lyrical, nostalgia-steeped story is told from the perspective of a 40-year-old man gazing back on events from his 1980s Texas childhood…. the narrator movingly conveys and interprets the greater meanings behind childhood memories.”
“The novel’s focus on formative childhood moments is familiar… the narrator’s lived experiences come across as wholly personal, deeply felt, and visceral.”
~ The BookLife Prize
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American Novelist CG FEWSTON
This is my good friend, Nicolasa (Nico) Murillo, CRC, who is a professional chef & a wellness mentor. I’ve known her since childhood & I’m honored to share her story with you. In life, we all have ups & downs, some far more extreme than others. Much like in Canada, in America, the legalization of marijuana has become a national movement, which includes safe & legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use & research for all.
“This is a wellness movement,” Nico explains. The wellness movement is focused on three specific areas: information, encouragement, & accountability.
In these stressful & unprecedented times, it makes good sense to promote & encourage the state or condition of being in good physical & mental health.
To learn more you can visit: Americans For Safe Access & Texans for Safe Access, ASA (if you are in Texas).
The mission of Americans for Safe Access (ASA) is to ensure safe and legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use and research.
Link: https://www.safeaccessnow.org/
TEXANS FOR SAFE ACCESS ~ share the mission of their national organization, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), which is to ensure safe and legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use and research, for all Texans.
Link: https://txsafeaccess.org/about-1
Stay safe & stay happy. God bless.
Nico Murillo Bio ~ Americans & Texans for Safe Access ~ Medical Cannabis
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