Invisibilities
In The Making of Home, quite early on in the book, Judith Flanders discusses spitting. And spittoons. Spitting was, until barely a hundred years ago, very common. Everyone spat, all the time. Outdoors, indoors, no matter. Samuel Pepys describes being spat on in the theatre but the woman was pretty so he didn't mind. Fair.
and here I sitting behind in a dark place, a lady spit backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me, but after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all.
Don't get that in Bridgerton, hey. Because spitting is almost entirely absent from the narrative. Flanders calls the spittoon 'invisible furniture' - there are adverts, catalogue entries, house inventories featuring spittoons but they don't get shown in paintings or stories.
Flanders talks about the Dutch Master portraits and house interiors. They show what we think of as 'typical' of the time for furniture, room arrangements, decorations, carpeting, and so on. Except it bears very little resemblance to what was actually in people's houses. Wills, inventories, and actual records show lots of cupboards and about five carpets per city. Carpets: aspirational. Cupboards: entirely ubiquitous, no point showing them.
There has been debate about how Mrs Dalloway gets about town as quickly as she does. Because the narrative is meticulous about timings it is possible to work this out. It's a whole essay in John Sutherland's Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? His conclusion is that she uses taxis. But it goes unmentioned in an otherwise meticulous narrative. Because of course she takes a cab. It must have been so blindingly obvious to Woolf that it would have been an insult to write it down.
This is what makes me believe the Roman dodecahedron is a completely banal, ordinary object. So banal and ordinary it's never referenced anywhere. Very probably something to do with women, because we definitely don't need to pay attention to them. That, or time travel.
The shrink-wrapping habits of paleoartists were called out by All Yesterdays by John Conway, C.M. Kösemen, Darren Naish, and Scott Hartman. The book shows what happens to cats when we forget there's fat on an animal - nightmare fuel, is what. And have we ever thought about T rexes having naps? Apex predators spend a lot of time lounging around, why wouldn't they?
Which all makes me think about what is invisible to me? The infrastructure, the unpaid labours, the social constructs, the unspoken rules.
Often in my journal I'll write 'listened to music' then I look back and wish I'd said what. 'Brush teeth' isn't on my daily to do list. But I do, usually three times (a habit formed wearing braces as a teenager). But the documentary evidence of my life doesn't reflect this. Apart from maybe receipts, because I get through a lot of toothbrushes.
Historians say absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. It's just invisible. Too ubiquitous to mention. Who needs to hear about a spittoon - everyone knew they were there. Who wants to see a cupboard in a painting of someone's house - we've all got them. Show us the fun stuff! The fancy carpets and the dinosaurs ripping each other apart. Invisible furniture, invisible taxis, invisible fat on dinosaurs, invisible routines, invisible rules.