This sentence in The Eyes of the Skin by Juhani Pallasmaa shakes me, challenges me:

“It is clear that only the distancing and detaching sense of vision is capable of a nihilistic attitude; it is impossible to think of a nihilistic sense of touch, for instance, because of the unavoidable nearness, intimacy, veracity and identification that the sense of touch carries.”

The insistent, instinctive caring of touch — not necessarily a caring of love and affection but of attention and engagement — is inescapable: and, the more I think upon the divide between the virtual and the real (the degrees of separation between designing in AutoCAD and building with one’s hands, say, or the vast gulf between a LinkedIn profile and a human being) the more agonizing it becomes to exist and engage only within the visual world.

When I shop, I touch every cool-looking piece of cloth, sit in chairs that make me go “huh!”, try on outfits of questionable levels of comfort, and sniff empty pepper grinders. I am no longer capable of ordering clothes and furniture online; I hunt for particular books at thriftstores and library sales for months before I purchase a copy online (often first borrowing one from the library to determine if I want to “own” a copy); the last two purchases I made on Amazon were items I couldn’t find in stores around me and needed within the week. It is why I still have yet to to make electronic music even though the thought and desire have been lingering in me for years — I must feel my soul pour its essence into vibrations within the object at my fingers, which then overflow into the air around me and nourish my soul in this sacred, glorious, cyclic dance of acoustics. I love LISP, but am drawn more strongly towards crafting jewelry and fixing cars (and even handsketching) than building software.

(This of course begs the question of engagement in the most abstract, ocular-driven medium one could possibly choose — writing itself. Braille fascinates me because one reads with their fingers; oral storytelling nudges my being into a frame of mind that no printed prose has ever guided me into; and the marriage of words and music, oh where do I begin with that glorious medium of communication? Words are one of the central lifelines of my existence, but writing for me is a dance between mind and life. Too long without writing (which is to say, about five hours if writing implements are within reach) and my mind growls for the pen; writing too much or too long (for over five hours a day or thereabouts) and my soul suffocates for the lack of sound and touch and taste and smell.)

I almost envy those content with the loss of tactility in twenty-first century lifestyles — those who have learned to love an avatar on a screen in addition to the person it represents, who spend their days within two-dimensional environments without aching to experience more, who have as their defaults digital shopping carts and Zoom meetings and controlled indoor environments. It is not a comparison of complexity versus simplicity, but of realness and its replacement with something else.

The dislocation of time, space, and form that a vision-biased, picture-driven world offers us many things: above all, it offers us a convenience of operation within the world, a sort of safety net that gives us space between the pain and consequence of direct engagement while offering what feels like an encounter that must be just as valuable and real as the original. The virtualization of relationships and work and entertainment, it appears, stems largely from this shift away from an embodied experience of people and being and doing, and towards an ocular-oriented experience of the world where seeing is knowing and understanding.

But it is all just an “almost” — you almost smell the fragrance, almost eat the dish, almost hug your friend. And “almost” never is.

It breeds a sort of depressing detachment, this looking at something from a distance (and there must be distance or else one cannot see). What we see does not really affect us — change the scenery, change the object, change the person, and we are still simply seeing things and taking them in.

This is where the nihilism creeps in; this is where asking the heavy why feel pointless; this is where faith dies. That is why, I think, we close our eyes when we pray. It is why we grasp at solid objects when our internal worlds are in turmoil. It is where the symbolic meaning of an action blurs into the actual experience of the human being.

Vision, light, observation. The ability to see is both powerful and useful. But still, its elevated position in the hierarchy of senses irks me.

Something is lost in pictures of things. That something is the thing itself.