Earth was my salvation.
What do you mean, Dad?
Before immersive virtual reality, before the big tablet googles hanging on your face, the motion-tracking sensors on the walls, the hand-held controllers, do you know how awful house incarceration was? There you were, stalking your rooms, looking out your windows, desperate to break out, longing to be somewhere else, if only for a moment, to breath other air. Pages and screens were flat and confining like slabs in a prison wall, unarguable, implacable; your body boxed.
Administratively, it was a cheap troublemaker management tool. An electric fence, a set of internet blocks and filters, a monitored delivery service, and they had you sequestered for as long as they wanted, and humanely.
I used to go crazy in stir. Nowhere to go. The same furniture, the same windows and views out on the same neighborhood. The sun rose and the sun sank, and I had gone nowhere, nowhere.
Reading, watching movies, writing, thinking--I gorged and was sick of it. Workouts? After a while, they seemed utterly, awfully pointless, in addition to screamingly boring. So I'd throw things or shout, and feel I was letting myself become what they wanted me to be.
Do you remember Google Earth?
That long ago, huh?
How clunky and low-def it was. You could almost see the algorithms at work netting in the shapes. I'll tell you, though, it was my escape hatch, and I don't think I would have survived otherwise, mentally that is.
What could you do with something that primitive?
I first got the idea when in a frenzy of aimlessness, I started trying to make the earth spin like a top. I looked for my house, and zeroing in on it, imagined myself under that roof, sweltering in idle solitude.
Then, on a whim, I swished over to Kamchatka, the long fat-tail peninsula hanging from the end of Siberia. As a boy, I'd been taken by its exotic remoteness because, limited as I was to only the books in my local library, there were only scraps of information available, mere encyclopedia entries, dry, uninspired fact-cakes with square mileage, population, chief exports and so on.
Now I was able to skim over the peninsula, follow the contours of the coast, track the courses of the rivers, plot the positions of the volcanic peaks that had made it such a glamorous place. And then--silly, I know--when I tilted the image, I seemed to be seeing the landscape from flying carpet angle. I zoomed around Klyuchevskaya Sopka, a beautiful conical volcano, highest at 4750 m in the peninsula, going closer to get a sense of the cindery slopes and imagine myself climbing up to the steaming top. Looking over the shoulder of adjacent pyramidal peaks, I could dive in to see where what trail I would take to get close to the base for an ascent. Pulling back and circling, I could see the peak from another angle, over a snow-filled caldera. Beyond, looking north, over mile upon mile of forest, other peaks in the spinal range of mountains.
I made sketch after sketch of the massif from different angles, just as I had done when actually outdoors and climbing. On my wall, my watercolors seems like trophies of an actual journey. Just images they were, and of obvious artifice, cartoonish even, but somehow exhilarating.
Oslo. I'd ever been there. I 'strolled' along the side of the fjord, looked down on red-roofed houses. And, what's that? A camping area at Ekeberg with a ferris wheel across the street, maybe temporary as such summer fairs often are, but I could imagine myself strolling across the field in the evening. Downtown much more confusing, much easier to get lost, which was delightful. How lost could I get in my house. I hung out at the Toyen T stop, at a park where, on the solstice, strollers must be walking until midnight. As I zoomed around, the images of the tall rectangular blocks assembled before my eyes. If I hovered, peering over the fringe of my carpet, everything was composed. I could see where people live, could see the streets down which they walked, could see the docks where they moored their fishing boats. I felt like a free person in another place.
Oslo? Nobody sets any VR tours there. Probably because it's so boring.
What was missing? Lots. Clouds, cars zipping by, shadows. But the topography of the terrain, the structures, all there to be seen. My imagination could roam around sculptural objects that photographs only presented a single view of.
Or for a change, an Indian ocean archipelago, the Maldives. No relief, virtually at sea level, only shapes, rings of dots, each with a name. As if in a boat, I cruised from atoll to atoll set in clear blue water. Over the islands, on the horizon beyond, the coast of Kerala.
Maldives, aren't they underwater now? I think there's a VR sunken city adventure that may be the Maldives--or some other drowned place.
Perhaps they never learned of the secret cartographic escape I made from their clutches day after day. Maybe they didn't care. Now I'm released and can circulate freely, can get up from this porch right now and go anywhere I want, I don't feel I possess the whole globe as fully as I did then, desperately etching it into my memory just to stay sane.
Well, Dad, I don't understand, but I'm glad it worked for you. Got to go inside now and meet my buddies. I think we're fighting an evil civilization on Mars. Hope you're here when I get back.
What do you mean, Dad?
Before immersive virtual reality, before the big tablet googles hanging on your face, the motion-tracking sensors on the walls, the hand-held controllers, do you know how awful house incarceration was? There you were, stalking your rooms, looking out your windows, desperate to break out, longing to be somewhere else, if only for a moment, to breath other air. Pages and screens were flat and confining like slabs in a prison wall, unarguable, implacable; your body boxed.
Administratively, it was a cheap troublemaker management tool. An electric fence, a set of internet blocks and filters, a monitored delivery service, and they had you sequestered for as long as they wanted, and humanely.
I used to go crazy in stir. Nowhere to go. The same furniture, the same windows and views out on the same neighborhood. The sun rose and the sun sank, and I had gone nowhere, nowhere.
Reading, watching movies, writing, thinking--I gorged and was sick of it. Workouts? After a while, they seemed utterly, awfully pointless, in addition to screamingly boring. So I'd throw things or shout, and feel I was letting myself become what they wanted me to be.
Do you remember Google Earth?
That long ago, huh?
How clunky and low-def it was. You could almost see the algorithms at work netting in the shapes. I'll tell you, though, it was my escape hatch, and I don't think I would have survived otherwise, mentally that is.
What could you do with something that primitive?
I first got the idea when in a frenzy of aimlessness, I started trying to make the earth spin like a top. I looked for my house, and zeroing in on it, imagined myself under that roof, sweltering in idle solitude.
Then, on a whim, I swished over to Kamchatka, the long fat-tail peninsula hanging from the end of Siberia. As a boy, I'd been taken by its exotic remoteness because, limited as I was to only the books in my local library, there were only scraps of information available, mere encyclopedia entries, dry, uninspired fact-cakes with square mileage, population, chief exports and so on.
Now I was able to skim over the peninsula, follow the contours of the coast, track the courses of the rivers, plot the positions of the volcanic peaks that had made it such a glamorous place. And then--silly, I know--when I tilted the image, I seemed to be seeing the landscape from flying carpet angle. I zoomed around Klyuchevskaya Sopka, a beautiful conical volcano, highest at 4750 m in the peninsula, going closer to get a sense of the cindery slopes and imagine myself climbing up to the steaming top. Looking over the shoulder of adjacent pyramidal peaks, I could dive in to see where what trail I would take to get close to the base for an ascent. Pulling back and circling, I could see the peak from another angle, over a snow-filled caldera. Beyond, looking north, over mile upon mile of forest, other peaks in the spinal range of mountains.
I made sketch after sketch of the massif from different angles, just as I had done when actually outdoors and climbing. On my wall, my watercolors seems like trophies of an actual journey. Just images they were, and of obvious artifice, cartoonish even, but somehow exhilarating.
Oslo. I'd ever been there. I 'strolled' along the side of the fjord, looked down on red-roofed houses. And, what's that? A camping area at Ekeberg with a ferris wheel across the street, maybe temporary as such summer fairs often are, but I could imagine myself strolling across the field in the evening. Downtown much more confusing, much easier to get lost, which was delightful. How lost could I get in my house. I hung out at the Toyen T stop, at a park where, on the solstice, strollers must be walking until midnight. As I zoomed around, the images of the tall rectangular blocks assembled before my eyes. If I hovered, peering over the fringe of my carpet, everything was composed. I could see where people live, could see the streets down which they walked, could see the docks where they moored their fishing boats. I felt like a free person in another place.
Oslo? Nobody sets any VR tours there. Probably because it's so boring.
What was missing? Lots. Clouds, cars zipping by, shadows. But the topography of the terrain, the structures, all there to be seen. My imagination could roam around sculptural objects that photographs only presented a single view of.
Or for a change, an Indian ocean archipelago, the Maldives. No relief, virtually at sea level, only shapes, rings of dots, each with a name. As if in a boat, I cruised from atoll to atoll set in clear blue water. Over the islands, on the horizon beyond, the coast of Kerala.
Maldives, aren't they underwater now? I think there's a VR sunken city adventure that may be the Maldives--or some other drowned place.
Perhaps they never learned of the secret cartographic escape I made from their clutches day after day. Maybe they didn't care. Now I'm released and can circulate freely, can get up from this porch right now and go anywhere I want, I don't feel I possess the whole globe as fully as I did then, desperately etching it into my memory just to stay sane.
Well, Dad, I don't understand, but I'm glad it worked for you. Got to go inside now and meet my buddies. I think we're fighting an evil civilization on Mars. Hope you're here when I get back.
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