A couple years ago I went on a few dates with a guy that made VR films. I sat in his dining room and he put the headset on me, and was suddenly in a new reality. I was with him, but I wasn’t. A few months later, he moved across the country and I wasn’t with him, but I wanted to be. It’s hard to describe the dissonance I felt, but I think many people will know what I’m talking about.
In the Words of Walt Whitman
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
-An excerpt from Walt Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric
Walt Whitman was a man. It would be generous to say he was eccentric; He was all around cooky. As a member of the transcendentalist movement the 1830s, he rejected society as he knew it. He believed in and embodied several teachings transcendentalist philosophy: that divinity pervades all nature and humanity.
Why am I talking about a hipster from the 1830s in a conversation about virtual reality? Stay with me.
Pay Attention
What does it mean to be present in the moment? To the pragmatists, it could mean to pay attention; to the hippies, it could be to feel one with everything; to the slackers, it could mean to show up.
I cannot understate how much of the intimacy in my life is virtual. I’ve nurtured friendships on social media, I’ve been in romantic relationships over skype. In today’s world, there is a new conversation about intimacy and technology. According to this article by International Society for Presence Research,
“Presence is maximized when a technology user’s perceptions fail to accurately acknowledge any role of the technology in the experience.”
But, how could this be possible?
All things please the soul
I’ve had a lot of time to consider how I could be fully present behind my screen. For years of my life, my relationships online were all I had. When I consider this, mind always returns to stanza 4 of Walt Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric:
I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.
There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.
Walt Whitman is describing the point at which the soul and the body meets. I believe that his words speak to something deep in our nature. The anticipation, the anxiety, the release of being near one another… it speaks to the soul itself.
Virtual Society
So, where does this leave us? What would Whitman say now?
There is a new demand for online sex parties, virtual reality platforms, and grandmas joining Facebook. Will it be enough?
I think back to the times when I could suspend my disbelief enough to forget the screen and miles between us: all this times it was suddenly 5 am and we were still on skype, all the times we just talked and talked because that’s all we could do.
As real as it all felt in the moment, I will never shake Whitman’s words.
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!
Still here
If the body is the soul and the soul is the body, then there is something sorely missing from my virtual world and relationships.
As mentioned in the New York Times Article, Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality?, psychologist, Philip Johnson-Laird, Argues that people don’t use logical rules to construct their perception; instead, we manipulate models of the world in our minds. It is these visions in our imagination that dictate to rules of our environment:
Following that logic, I can imagine what would happen if I shook your hand, brushed you with my elbow, or reached through the stupid computer screen to touch you.
To imagine that you are close to me is enough.
To pretend to be in your company is enough.
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.
- Is it enough to pretend to be with other people?
- Is there some part of human nature that requires physical contact?
- Are the body and the soul one and the same?
- How would Whitman react to these times? (I think he would probably run naked in the woods)
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