Throwing paint at the invisible man.

6 min readOct 18, 2022

One of the more powerful clusters in my childhood memories grew up around an episode of the 1960’s Jonny Quest cartoon called “The Invisible Monster”. In this thrilling installment, the protagonists dump paint onto an invisible monster of pure energy that’s terrorizing the intrepid explorers, thereby facilitating its subsequent destruction. You can read all about it in this article: The Invisible Monster.

For the purposes of illuminating the ideas that I’m attempting to relate here, the details of the episode in question do not matter. Neither do the problematic depictions of anyone who isn’t a white dude nor the stark light that the premise of the show itself casts onto the zeitgeist of the culture within which it arose.

The question at hand is: “How can I discover aspects of my existence that are invisible to me by dint of their essential characteristics and the place within the environment within which I developed and/or the functions that they fulfill in the maintenance and persistence of my identity?”

In the context of the study of the physical world, a similar conundrum has been met and overcome over and over again throughout human history. The story of one example as I have chosen to dramatise it, goes like this:

The detritus of a failed experiment is haphazardly piled up into a lab sink. In a fit of melodramatic self pity, the person responsible decides to procrastinate the washing up in favor of heading out to whine to friends the story of their existential unfitness to continue to exist. When eventually they return to the shameful sink, they happen to notice a patch of mold growing on the only bit of the single petri dish that wasn’t entirely submerged in hydrofluoric acid or whatever chemical nightmare they assigned to sterilize the lab glass. For whatever reason, this mundane yet mildly surprising exception to their expectations engaged their curiosity enough for them to embark on the journey of attempting to discover the answer to the question: “to what species exactly did that incongruous patch of mold happen to belong?”

All dramatisation aside, this story is an apt analogy for the process of self discovery that I’m going on about.

Metatron. Here shown in my favorite of his many forms

“You can’t notate Elvins swing”

This irresistible challenge was leveled at me sometime back in the late spring of 1993 or 94(?). The antagonist and I were both employed at a now extinct art supply store in a long ago demolished strip mall in Charlotte NC. It was our pleasure to play tapes of our favorite music for one another on a crappy little boom box precariously balanced up front in the window above the Brutalist laser printer. I met a few of my life long friends there and many of them were musicians. One of these, a young man who played bass clarinet in our nebulous free improv group, queued up a tape of mid 60’s Coletrane in the heroic little stereo, turned to me and said something like, “just listen to what he’s doing. Really. Just listen, you can’t notate Elvin’s swing” and proceeded to press the play button.

I won’t describe his exasperation, or detail the seemingly limitless patience that he brought to bear in the administration of our friendship, but I will point out (somewhat ironically I might add) that he was saying exactly the correct words to me at precisely the correct time in my life. These words also turned out to originate from within a seemingly comprehensive and frankly astonishing understanding of the deeply buried processes working beneath my personality.

The first little drops of color

This antagonist friend of mine is in possession of a substantial force of personality alongside an obvious and glittering intelligence, and a challenge like this is very hard to ignore coming from him. The world is lucky that his essential character has grown in part on pure and powerful compassion, the seeming awkwardness of which is clearly due to your lack of ever really seeing what it looks like when true compassion springs directly from clear observation before meeting someone like him. These qualities, coming along as part of the makeup of anyone less essentially “good” could wreak a lot of havoc in the world. Come to think of it, these are a set of qualities that most if not all of my friends share.

Anyhow, I had yet to realize that an invisible monster was rampaging through the jungle laboratory of my psyche, but this challenge that he presented provided a vehicle for the first signals that there was maybe something strange going on in there.

At that time, I was very much a follower of Descartes in the sense that I carried around the unconscious assumption that, “The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measures and numbers”. The precision which I imagined that I brought to bear on the “problem” of musical appreciation, study and performance was such a great source of pride for me that I was unable to perceive any music without compulsively ripping it into the tiniest contextually consistent chunks of which I was capable. Needless to say, the emotional color wheel of my musical experiences was limited to:

1. Triumph! when I managed to delude myself into believing that I understood.

2. Shame! when it became clear that I did not.

I wont go much deeper into myself at that time other than to say that this compulsion was a direct consequence of the fact that my entire being was focused on proving to myself and to literally everyone that my musical abilities were superior by far to those of literally anyone.

And the scales fell from my eyes…

So naturally, I did as the antagonist suggested. I just listened. And for a brief and infinitesimal instant, or maybe one beat, I experienced that which he was attempting to convey. In that interstitiality, self was entirely subsumed by a perception of what I can only assume was the Word Of God distilled as the ramification of three actions, each channeled through exquisitely shaped branches of the World Tree, gracefully cradled in the hand of Metatron, striking an infinite disc of an alloy forged of copper, tin and mithril lathed and hammered by the hands of Hephaestus himself.

…and I picked them right back up

As I regained self, I immediately began to analyze that liminality, convinced that understanding meant reduction to subdivisions seven or five.

As I write this, I wonder if he witnessed the shock that must have illuminated my face. If he did, I hope that it’s subsequent fading to shallow and deluded calculation wasn’t as frustrating to him as I imagine that it must have been.

Relevance Please?

This experience proved to be my incongruous patch of mold.
In the intervening years I have identified it as the beginning of a vital bit of my development. The details of that specific journey are as unimportant as the details of the adventures of young master Quest and his lovable non-aryan child-servant. No, the important bit here is how the Antagonist’s Challenge, its space-time reference frame, my reaction within that frame and the resulting experience left behind the memory of a unique experience which was not amenable to any of my habitual modes of thought.