Stories of sights unseen

Once upon a time, this signpost was a tree: that was back when there were no signposts and only trees. There were no buildings or traffic lights or cars, and every road was not a road but was simply land covered in either grass or dirt, and thus was every inch of land in Rhode Island: grass, dirt, trees, rocks, sand, or swamp.

Meanwhile, approximately 790 kilometers directly south, an Italian named Cristoforo Colombo and his ships sailed in approach of an island in the Caribbean Sea. Some men and women native to the island stood on the beach, as do people today, leisurely gazing out at the pleasant ocean, but these native persons did not see the approaching ships at all.

Why? Because these natives had never seen an European ship before. They had no visual or cognitive frame of reference with which to say — in their own language, of course — “Oh look, some ships.”

So the ships were invisible to the natives. Mind you, the ships themselves were not invisible: they were invisible only to the natives, who had never before seen the like.

Indeed, the natives did not truly see the ships as we would understand seeing things until men disembarked from the ships into smaller boats, rowing to shore. The natives had seen men before and small watercraft, too; they knew what those looked like. But when the men pulled their boats past the breaking waves onto the wet sand and strode forward, the natives saw that these men were wearing strange and seemingly unnecessary covering on their bodies, so they didn’t fully understand that these men were human beings like they were.

To put the situation in a more relatable, contemporary context: Today, we like to imagine what it would be like to look up in the sky, in daylight or at night, to see a flying saucer or a UFO or an alien ship of some kind. We think we know what that would be like because we have seen alien ships in the movies and on television — but really, it’s unclear that anyone on earth knows what a “ship” from another galaxy looks like. We have no visual or cognitive frame of reference for it, so to us, such a ship would be invisible.

Why, you might turn around right now and look up into the sky over your shoulder and while you may think you see nothing there, there is in fact something there — but because you have never seen anything like it before, you don’t know what to look for.

It’s not invisible: it’s invisible to you.

This story was included in the public art project Once Upon a Sign, curated by Mark and Heather Binder for PVD Fest, a four-day festival of the arts in Providence, Rhode Island (June 6–9, 2019). This story, along with several other stories and poems, was posted around downtown Providence on lampposts and fences.