I’m doubly-insulated from the January world outside. In my home, in my Oculus. One world surrounds me and some selected space with walls- sculpts an interior of which I am a part. Space of wood floors, tracked-in-leaves, wall-hangings, central heating, my discarded jacket, my mess. The other world surrounds only my eyes (with walls of a smaller, smoother sort) but sequesters me all the same. Cordons me off, again. Me and some selected space- space of code, pixels, polygons, imaginary landscape, flat ground and infinite sky. Where am I, where I smile at the finely rendered virtual beach scene, where my feet cush the familiar spring of the blue rug I hate, where I feel none of the January weather.
Oculus: an eye-like opening, a window.
These worlds are insular. Boundary-making worlds. Built-up scaffolding of independence from the worlds external to them. Oculus, you’ve done everything you can to close my eyes to other worlds. You demand my attention. I’m mingled with you, becoming-with you, seeing through you, heavier because of you. The border between my skin and the world is renegotiated. It’s a more humid boundary than I’m used to. Stillness in the air between my contacts and the bulging glass lenses fused to Oculus’s plastic face. What is my mind doing here, in the space between these two sets of lenses?
Lens: a warping meniscus between the world and an eye.
I create this space between lenses by donning a VR headset, a choice to set my eyes within the hug of its body. An exchange happens here. A composite organism made. This space shuffles, mutates one of my most trusted organs of sensation. Extending, amputating, reorganizing, stimulating, deceiving, fucking with.
I feel the bleed-through of my body from one world to another. I mingle in both, attention shifting as my senses negotiate inputs. Shock me in, vibrant blue-light of beach paradise, shock me out, the ting ting of the dog’s tag as she scratches itself on her favorite chair. I turn up the sound on the beach, the waves get louder and seagulls fly close.
Here, a beachy idyll of quick-houred days who have a fluorescent sun of their own. I’ve watched it rise and set in the span of a few hours. It was glorious and wickedly flamboyant. New paces in this world. New rhythms to these natures, waves of ceaselessly mundane undulations. Time, further folded by Oculus into useless hours on this restless planet. Vivid and bright, sweet and revolting, licorice tasting, I go on. I’m deep in an interior. I’ve got love for a new place, trenchant and outwitting, the color of neon lemons, and suddenly, now, filled with a strum strum spate rain under which my skin stays dry. I revel swinishly in each eyeful. It is the dreamt world, honorable and good.
How am I worlding, here in my living room, rejecting its stimulus, siphoning myself off from it. Unanswering, unseeing, disengaged. I’ve found myself a new world. The way so many of us escape into screens, lured by the luminosity.
Yet sometimes I brace, and weigh myself, the mass of my action, seeking refuge in the familiar touch of a table or wall. Sometimes recoiling at their too-close presence. I thought I was over there. I trip on the edge of the rug. I toil at your surface, strata my strata. Still grounded on this distant soil from which me and Oculus both grew. We drift together atop this world through plastics, corrosive and unhealing. So delicious, these alien tempo days.
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