The Incognito Effect

Yesterday, I went on one of my normal romps, cycling many hours. Beautiful, around Jindo Island, located a couple hours from where I live in Mokpo, S. Korea, at the south west tip of the Korean Peninsula.

But this piece isn’t about my bike trip. Watch my YouTube video showing some of my stops, if you are interested at all.

This piece is about a theory of my own, from many years ago, a theory that I experienced in my bones, once again, yesterday, while heading back to civilization on my bike after over 200 hilly, wind ridden kilometers on my bike.

I call it the Incognito Effect.

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone. - Orson Welles.

You’ve done something amazing. Accomplished something astounding. Or you’ve been hit with some incredible luck or horrible piece of misfortune. You are a lone person and when you look around you, nobody recognizes what amazing or disasterous stuff has just happened to you. The banality and separateness of life hits you - the “incognito effect” hits you.

I first experienced this feeling of seperation, of disappointment when a young man in Teachers’ College. I was training for the Olympics (long story, never made it). I had just done 70 k super quick, on foot. To Mattawa and back, on hilly backroads in Northern Ontario where I was attending, to get my teaching degree. It was a gorgeous Sunday, like yesterday on my bike. I was zipping along, doing 5 minute miles back into the small city of North Bay, where I lived. Yet my elation was also sad because I couldn’t share it. Everyone who saw me, probably thought I was jogging, and just finishing a brief 5 K jog. I wanted to scream at the world, to the world - I exist! I exist!

I was taken over by the incognito effect. It’s a phenomena I’ve often thought about and it applies to our egos both in positive and negative situations. In essence, it reveals our absolute “aloneness” - in this most indifferent of universes. A failure of what we are as humans, a failure to be able physiologically to communicate with each other, connect, sense, understand intuitively each other.

I look at so many people when I’m in a city. I’m constantly asking questions like - Why is she sitting there alone? Who is he, just walking so blankly down thestreet? Why did that guy just sit down in the middle of the sidewalk?

And there are no answers. This telephone line has been cut, or maybe never even built. We live so isolated from each other, imprisoned in our own egos. Language does not suffice, it even gets in the way. Communication is insufficient, it exhausts us and culture wears us down - how dare we try to share with the world who we really are, what we’ve really done?

The incognito effect is most disasterous because it shows we have no way of recognizing the common thread of humanity within each of us. Maybe, we are all islands - Donne deal, he go it wrong. It leads us to be able to just walk by the needy on the street, to ignore the messages of death in real time on our TVs, to not sense the distress of the “other” as much as it does simply not allowing others to recognize, be aware of our own accomplishments, grandure and ability.

Long ago, I remember reading something by an obscure professor from Ryerson University in Toronto. Gerald Hannon. He later became famous or infamous, for writing about his part-time job as a male sex worker. The world shit on him for being “out there” and sharing his self and being. Shit, just google him and read he recently died. A fine writer and being. Another poor soul lost to society’s need for “hygiene”.

But anyway, he wrote a simple article about being out in the world and feeling so disconnected to everyone. He wanted all of us to have a beam of light shining from our guts, our stomachs, like a lighthouse, like a disco ball - that would warn others of our inner suffering, our isolation and estrangement. Good idea - but we don’t have one. And the result is mass killing, mass depression, addiction, our casual cruelty and millions of minor daily disasters. As well as the insignificant fact of one poor sod like me cycling into a city and many not aware of what I’ve accomplished.

I guess the takeaway might be …

I’ve often thought and believe in the ability of plants, blades of grass, flowers, trees - to communicate with each other. Science is finding out more on this. This guy, I chanced upon, shares some new research. It seems plants have much more empathy and recognition about what is happening in the greater crowd, than we do. Perhaps we are the exceptions of nature - other living things DO have a light shining and telling others, communicating to others their humanity and existence, their preciousness as “being”.

It’s not an easy topic to explore or to write about. Most of literature is an attempt to bridge this failure, to overcome the incognito effect. Social media a very poor faiure. It’s not easy to recognize or admit that we are alone, even with our loved ones, children, lovers, spouse - that inside, we are trapped. We lack the necessary apparatii to truly have revelation. Perhaps that’s where heaven steps in.

I have no answers. Poetry is my putrid attempt at jumping the puddles and keeping myself from drowning.

What about you - ever experience the incognito effect? From where does it usher? Is there a way around it or is it fundamental to the human condition.

Playing some music, then going to sleep. Solvent on my wounds. Thanks for reading, or maybe thank you not.