The art of disappearing.

There are very few Radiohead songs that I love more than  “How to Disappear Completely.”  It’s intensely beautiful and eerie.  Disappearing completely—ceasing to be me—is one of the greatest pleasures I know.

As a teenager and a young man, I was—as the French say—mal dans ma peau.  Uncomfortable, or unhappy, in my skin.  Like, if I could just get out of my skin and not be me—maybe get into someone else’s skin and be that person, or maybe just disappear altogether, become invisible—I would be so much happier.   I did what a lot of children, teens, and adults in their early twenties do to get out of their skin: I lived in a world of books and wrote poetry.

When I was a senior in high school, I discovered acting.  Not the acting of every day life, which I already knew, but acting in a theatrical production.  The school’s annual play that year was a particularly hammy melodrama, and I played the hero.  How hammy?  In one scene I swept the heroine off her feet and carried her off stage.  I can’t remember what motivated me to audition for the play.  I suspect it had to do with the extraordinary amount of coaxing and encouragement I was receiving from a number of teachers who feared I was hell-bent on self-destruction and were determined to save me.

There was no way a kid as insecure—as mal dans ma peau—as I could have walked out on that stage, in front of at least two hundred people, and delivered my lines, if I’d felt I was still in my own skin.  Acting gave me the opportunity of discovering the happiness and security of disappearing.  I only acted in one more play—an MFA student’s production of Strindberg’s The Father, at the University of Minnesota, when I was a sophomore.  

For a number of reasons, I chose an academic career, became a professor of French and comparative literature, and experienced a fair amount of success and a huge amount of unhappiness, until I started writing fiction and left academe.  Once again I started disappearing in my work.  I’d like to disappear completely in all of my characters.

I wrote most of this post this morning at my partner’s house, while she was preparing breakfast.  On the way home in the car, I listened to an interview with Anthony Hopkins on NPR.  Hopkins talked about how, when he was a teenager, he loved to disappear in the act of creating art and composing music.  What a coincidence!  Over the next several decades he developed the art of disappearing in his theatrical roles and attained, I suspect, great happiness.  The Birmingham Symphony Orchestra recently recorded the music that he composed in those early years of disappearing and released it on an album entitled Composer.  We need a phrase to describe this kind of accomplishment—perhaps, the return of the disappeared (analogous—but in a positive way—to the return of the repressed). 

When I got home, I listened online to the interview with Hopkins and the excerpts from Composer, and then listened to Radiohead’s “How to disappear completely.”   And I started writing again, disappearing in my novel-in-progress, “Every Tom, Dick and Harry.”

Brian