Art Caged by Life

This fascinating article, “Even in a Virtual World, ‘Stuff’ Matters”, is a discussion of ways in which people who have become residents of “Second Life” have slavishly imitated the consumerism and personal vanities of real life (“RL” to the initiated) rather than creating a truly brave new world. The emphasis of the article is on the mass craving for conspicuous consumption, and for spending money on things which are necessary in RL but completely unnecessary in Second Life (“SL”). It's a good study in human nature.

In short, most people are as depressing and unimaginative in SL as in RL because they’ve ignored an opportunity to break the bonds of social customs and pressures, not to mention gravity. It’s like what a spiritualist said to me about people’s spirits in the afterlife: “If they’ve been nasty here, they’re not suddenly going to become nice on the Other Side.” I hope that if we do design our own Heavens I don't keep running into other people's malls and wig shops as I do in SL.

The first thing that struck me along that line, when I’d been in SL only a few days, was the fact that much SL architecture imitates RL architecture even though the laws of SL physics provide much more freedom than those of RL.

THIS COULD BE NEW JERSEY

Things will stay where they are placed, whether above, on, or under the surface of the SL earth. SL structures, therefore, do not need the supporting, load-bearing elements used in the real world. . . and yet most SL structures are redundantly burdened with all the foundations, pilings, columns, and braces which have challenged RL architects for centuries.


THESE WOULD HAVE DONE JUST FINE WITHOUT THE PILINGS

Likewise, a door or other object in SL can be made “phantom”, meaning that one can simply walk through it like a ghost, and yet all the paraphernalia of house doors that have to be opened and closed are encountered throughout SL. True, a phantom door can’t be locked, but most people don’t lock doors in SL anyway. Stairs are generally unnecessary in SL because one can simply float up, and yet stairways abound in SL even though they are often difficult to negotiate.


THIS ONE IS MORE ADAPTED TO ITS ENVIRONMENT, BUT STILL STUCK WITH SUPERFLUOUS SUPPORTS

Everyone can fly, soar, and hover in SL, and yet helicopters and other aircraft are not uncommon. The climate is (as far as I know) pleasant short-sleeve weather all the time, with never a drop of rain and no insects, and yet windows are covered with “glass”, and some of the clothing would make an Eskimo keel over onto the Arctic ice from heat prostration.

It’s hard to say whether people who enter SL and want things done in exactly the same way they are done in RL are simply victims of habit, and inability to think outside the box, or whether the socially conditioned worry about seeming “different” keeps them in bondage in both worlds.

When I told my neighbor in SL – who has created a lush, lavish South Seas paradise on the slopes leading up from the sea, complete with lava-bubbling volcano – my criticisms of obeying RL physics when designing SL buildings, he disagreed with me. I said I felt the way Frank Lloyd Wright had felt about the use of Greco-Roman columns which held nothing up. My neighbor said he didn’t feel comfortable unless a structure looked as it would look in RL. The hotel he built could be a Florida Ramada Inn. A residence which mostly hovered beyond the edge of a cliff would drive him crazy, even though the view would be superb and the design would be free of unsightly pilings and struts. He has an imaginative tropical bar built around the steep peak of a mountain, but all the braces are there “to hold it up”.

The bird, freed from its cage, refuses to fly.

The Cinemas of Past and Future

The only reality is in Now. Within the individual human stream of consciousness Past and future exist only in imagination. What we remember is only a mental fantasy, and what we plan and hope and fear will happen in the future remains forever in the imagined future. Even when we are able to foresee a future event through precognition, it makes its appearance as an imagined thing because as an event it is not yet Now.

The future is a theater in the mind, an cinema of the imagination. My attention, my consciousness, turns inward to watch the dramas in the darkened room of my skull instead of outward to focus on Now. It’s like spending a beautiful afternoon in a dim movie theater where many of the shows are scary or distressing. And when what was imagined as "the future” is actually happening, my attention is most likely absorbed in watching a movie about yet another imagined future.

As for what has been stored in memory, if you are lucky the cinema of the past will show a lot of nostalgic, feel-good movies and tales of triumphs and pleasures, but all too often the stored reels contain a jumble of regrets, resentments, and angry scenes. Unfortunately the distressing movies may clamor more regularly for attention than the happy ones.

I liked the movie theater analogy so much that I christened the decrepit and odiferous Lyric Theater (scornfully called “The Arm Pit”) in my home town as the cinema of the past, while the modern Florida Theater showed movies about my imagined future.

(In Gainesville, where I grew up, the Florida Theater showed first run “A” films. The secondary cinema, the State Theater showed a lot of reruns and also-rans, and was of value to me primarily because it showed a western movie, a “B” suspense movie, and serials like Flash Gordon on Saturday afternoons.)

In contrast to the “A” and “B” movies of the Florida and State theaters, the Lyric Theater covered the lower end of the alphabet. I can’t even recall what movies were shown there, but the atmosphere was so bad and the ancient seats so broken down and uncomfortable that no one went to the Lyric except out of extreme necessity. The Lyric Theater was therefore the perfect candidate for my “Theater of the Past”, where I viewed and reviewed endlessly all the things that had happened to me.

My mental trick was to say, “The Florida Theater and the Lyric Theater are closed.”

I have definitely torn down the Lyric Theater, and now on the vacant lot between a music store and a magazine store I see a fat telescope pointed at the stars. If I start to brood about the past I say to myself, “No, the Lyric Theater is gone.”

I manage to attend the Florida Theater a lot less often than I used to, reminding myself if I start to be concerned about the future that “it’s only a movie” and that the Florida Theater is no longer showing those movies.

To me these analogies brought into bright light the situation they represent. My Being is only in Now. Realized and awake, I can be in the Present and I can, at will, deliberately visualize a desired future situation and so encourage it to come into Now. This too turns attention from the Now, but at least it creates an enjoyable show with a happy ending.