I remember one day–I’ll never forget–I was about four years old and I was playing one day and I saw the cellar door open, just a crack. Now my folks had always warned me “Emo, whatever you do, don’t go near the cellar door!” But I had to see what was on the other side, if it killed me; and I went to the cellar door, and I pushed it and walked through and I saw strange wonderful things, things I had never seen before … like trees, grass, clouds, flowers, the sun–that was nice! (Emo Philips, 1990)
I’m taking a couple of weeks vacation from SL. Yes, that’s right: I’ve pushed open the cellar door and am now rediscovering Real Life, the world of trees, grass, clouds, flowers, and what, here in rainy Britain, counts as sporadic glimpses of sun.
I’ve been a fan of Emo Philips’ surreal brand of humour since I first saw him in, I guess, the early 1990s. His narratives will, with a wonderful economy of words, mischievously paint recognisable scenarios, elicit the concomitant expectations in the mind of the listener, that will then be almost brutally subverted by an abrupt and sometimes shocking dénouement. We initially visualise–are quietly lulled into visualising–the four year old child on the outside of the cellar, reminded perhaps of the curiosity we might ourselves have had as children as to what might have lain behind a locked door; so almost archetypal is that image generically, the stuff of childhood stories (remember Alice’s curiosity?), that little need be said to conjure in our minds anticipations of the fantastical things one might discover beyond the door. The shocking end of the narrative unsettles us not merely by its unexpectedness but, more grotesquely, in compelling us without warning to confront the horrific thought of a child condemned to a cellar throughout the earliest years of his life.
More disquieting than that–and one perhaps best appreciates this by listening to the giggly whiny innocence in Emo’s extraordinary voice in live performance–one understands that confinement to a cellar had been so normalised for the child, knowing no other life, that life beyond the cellar is seen as a curious novelty, not as a natural right he has been denied.
Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, El ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel), just as deliciously surreal, tells the disquieting tale of dinner guests at a wealthy home finding themselves inexplicably unable to leave the house at the end of the party. Days pass–seemingly interminable days of anxiety, hunger, panic, death, suicide–before a young foreign guest, Letitia, finds she is able to break the spell and to then lead the surviving guests back out of the building.
It is the insanity (whatever that turns out to mean clinically) of Second Life that we can find ourselves, though at any time free to leave, immured there by our own addiction to the environment, ‘trapped in a perfect world’, as I read in an avatar’s profile:
Inside the snow globe on my father’s desk, there was a penguin wearing a scarf. The penguin was alone in there and I worried for him, but my father said “Don’t worry, ******, he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a perfect world.”
(From a Second Life avatar profile, adapted from Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones)
The fact of the matter is that so many Second Life users are ‘trapped’ in what is nevertheless no more ‘a perfect world’ than is Emo’s cellar or Buñuel’s house party. Outside in the real world there are flowers, trees, birds, the sun and moon and stars, our families, our generously tolerant friends; and yet curiously we’ll eschew the magnificent richness of the real world for the sensorially impoverished world of Second Life. Why, I wonder, should that be?
I had a chat with my very dear friend Slinki on Sunday, my final day in SL for a while. I should perhaps point out to those who’ve not read other posts to this blog that Slinki, quite apart from being one of the sexiest women I have ever had the delicious pleasure of flirting with in SL (gggrrrraaaooo!!! down, boy!), is a real-life psychologist with a brilliantly incisive and insightful mind, with whom I’ve had such discussions in the past.
[2011/07/17 03:11] Khoisan Fisher: but I’m finding that my own addiction is now turning sour, and I’m now almost repelled at the thought of immersing myself in SL.
[2011/07/17 03:11] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: and you know what, that is fantastic|!!!
[2011/07/17 03:11] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: live your real life if you can
[2011/07/17 03:11] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: use your senses
[2011/07/17 03:11] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: take the break!!
[2011/07/17 03:11] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: its better out than in
[2011/07/17 03:11] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: this is a wound which never heals
[2011/07/17 03:11] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: a promise which never delivers
[2011/07/17 03:11] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: we are ghosts here
[2011/07/17 03:12] Khoisan Fisher: woo … more spontaneous poetry from your eloquent lips 😉
[2011/07/17 03:12] Khoisan Fisher: And you are, of course, absolutely right
[2011/07/17 03:12] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: sadly as ever, born of pain and experience…
[2011/07/17 03:12] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: you are missing nothing here really
[2011/07/17 03:12] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: we stay here hoping to be full
[2011/07/17 03:13] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: but it never fills us, nourishes
[2011/07/17 03:13] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: just holds out that deceptive illusory promise
[2011/07/17 03:13] SlinkiJay Sugarplum: and soothes us by distracting us from rl and its angsts
On another occasion, reflecting on Second Life as a vehicle, comparable in significant ways to a religion, for pursuing “an elusive quest” for meaning, Slinki asks “What is it we so seek that we will offer our very souls in its pursuit?”
Addictive immersion in Second Life, I’m inclined to believe, is quite unlike addictions to alcohol, drugs, gambling, or smoking, a spiritual rather than a physical or purely psychological dependency. So I want to throw out to you, Dear Reader, the following questions and I much look forward to reading your own views in the comments to this piece: what is this elusive Mephistophelean quest? and, on your own experience, what is it that makes Second Life appear a viable, if perhaps ultimately an illusory, vehicle for the pursuit of that quest? What is that alchemy of the soul that, even if it were never a motive for first creating an account, we come to be persuaded may be satisfied through Second Life?
Oh, and by the way, if you’re interested, no, I’m not much missing SL 🙂
The Unlimited Dream Company 
I think “alchemy of the soul” is it. Or just “alchemy”, because really alchemy has never been about lead and gold literally, but always as a metaphor for transforming oneself into something more. (and in extremist cases, the attempt of turning oneself into a god).
The removal of the body from the soul has been a goal of monotheistic and Eastern religions for millennia. It’s something we’ve achieved only in our dreams, and the irony with lucid dreaming is that it requires an awareness of one’s dream, and at that point, awareness of one’s self and becomes difficult to escape the body again, simply alter the environment. We’ve been able to slowly change our bodies – learn new skills like knitting and bowling and shooting rifles, or develop muscles accustomed to various physical sports and activities. We’ve been able to meditate and think and ponder the universe – or nothingness. But it’s not until the last decade that the general public has had an outlet to fully explore escaping one’s body.
When one is immersed in a computer program or game, one loses direct sensory awareness of one’s body, unless there’s a shock to the system like a loud noise or someone touching you on the shoulder. When an external proxy avatar is added, we naturally associate with them, in the same way we would at a movie theater with the protagonist, or at a pub focusing on a musician / singer. A step further is that users can customize their avatars and explore different bodies while immersed. It makes a tremendous impact. It can make people feel stronger, or sexier, or more confident, or simply hide a physical world handicap.
How does this relate to alchemy? We rely on external verification from other people, through our interactions with them, to provide feedback as to our identity. While others’ opinions don’t dictate our identity, per se, it is the only evidence which we have to weight to consider who we are. I say this because we are social creatures. Even in solitude, people quickly personify their environment to provide sanity (think Tom Hanks and Wilson in Castaway). Now, if we have a totally different body, and perhaps we may even role-play that differently, we experience a different feedback loop from outsiders. And while a meticulous role-player may stay acutely aware of this and compensate by distancing themselves emotionally from a role that they play, there’s still some leakage – it’s inevitable because immersion is just so easy. So if the most careful roleplayer who is likely *trying* not to let this feedback bleed into their core identity will have bleed-over, then the majority of people, who are just in a virtual world having fun and not necessarily introspecting at all times, are constantly being bombarded with feedback about themselves based on a different body.
It’s funny to me – who would have thought mind-body dualism would be able to have grounds for a resurgence based on virtual world technology? (Actually, I would wager some sci-fi authors did. Now to figure out whom…)
I believe there are actually two SLs. There is the Second Life that exists in computers and there is the Second Life of my primary’s recollection. My Flickr page includes a snapshot of Jamie Marlin and I taking a trip on a rowboat. My primary can fetch that day from memory. The memory includes the unstable feeling of the boat as the waves passed beneath it; the resistance of the water against the oar and the rough texture of its wood when I was rowing; the breeze on my face; the warmth of Jamie’s skin when we walked hand-in-hand. And I don’t mean this sensations are included because my primary makes an almighty effort to imagine these details. I mean they are just THERE, included with hardly any effort at all. Bizzarre as it may seem, what does take a lot of effort is to recall the day as it REALLY was (from my primary’s perspective). You know, sitting at a laptop looking at not-particularly realistic computer images.
I had a go at explaining why ‘how it REALLY was’ so easily evades recollection in my article ‘V-Sex and the Invisible Gorilla’. As for all that extra detail that could not possibly have been part of the actual SL experience, well, memory is never really a play-back recording of an event that actually took place. Rather than store everything we perceive, memory consists of taking what we have seen or heard and associates it with what we already know. In other words, every memory is linked to other memories in a web-like association. Activate one memory and you activate others. When my primary recalls that day in SL when Jamie and I took a trip on a rowboat, it activates associated memories of rowing boats, hand holding, ocean breezes, etc, which (in what is known as ‘confabulation’) become incorporated into the memory of that day. As Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (the psychologists who conducted the ‘Invisible Gorilla’ experiment) said, “We cannot easily distinguish between what we recall verbatim and what we construct based on association and knowledge.”
So while it may seem bizarre that the ‘SL of the computer’ could ever rival real life, ‘SL of my recollection’ perhaps comes a little closer? Still, I think something else is required to account for SL’s draw and I am inclined to think that something is ‘novelty’. Yes, in principle, real life has an infinity of novel experiences but for many people routines impose strict limits on what novelty can be experienced. For many, daily life in real life is primarily routine. Getting up at the same time to take the same journey to work to do the same job involving the same tasks as the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that…But SL, you never know what you will do. The other day I stepped outside my home to find a launch pad that was not there yesterday. I pulled a lever and up came a rocket which I sat on, rode into the sky and then fell back to Earth surrounded by parachuting kittens. I can tell you that I did not expect to ride a rocket and be surrounded by parachuting kittens, but I do anticipate some kind of novel experience when I am in SL and usually I am not disappointed.
Some interesting observations there, Extropia.
I wonder whether there may be multiple SLs (though that statement might well divert me into a longer essay on ‘possible worlds’ that I’d rather leave for another post). There are perhaps at least three, however: the two you mention, and the third residing in the recollections of one’s avatar. (I bet you never thought you’d ever see me concede that!)
Only twice, to my knowledge, have I dreamed of SL, both occasions towards the end of last year at a time when, unexpectedly and uncharacteristically, SL was close to becoming an immersive experience for me. The narrative content of the dreams is uninteresting; what is of interest, to my mind, is that the action devolved wholly within what was quite clearly Second Life. Moreover it was also quite clearly Khoisan Fisher and not Christopher Hutchison (whatever distinction may be made between the two) who was engaged in the unfolding narrative, the dramatis personae with whom he was playing out the narrative also palpably avatars rather than their primaries.
Thus what I found extraordinary was that Khoisan dreamed. It had been Khoisan who talked, thought, acted, feared, loved, smiled, felt that range of emotions that one would normally expect to be the unique privilege of the flesh-and-blood primary; and I had awoken with what were arguably Khoisan’s memories, not Christopher’s (who has only ever sat at his keyboard, incapable of entering SL).
You are absolutely right. More than that perhaps (since novelty is unlikely to be a daily experience for any one of us in SL) is that “no one has to do the laundry”: it has the quality of an eternal holiday. I’d discussed this last year with an old friend, specifically with regard to SL romance:
The ‘holiday romance’ character of SL might certainly go some way towards accounting for why SL relationships might be idealised in the way that RL relationships often are not. But, generalising out from that, the no-laundry, no-housework, character of SL invests it with an appeal lacking in the ineluctable daily grind of one’s primary life.