Column With smell and touch, the dog knows whats real
By JEANNETTE BATZ
Loud, yappy barking. Gunshots. The
wail of a siren.
The TV is louder than usual, and the dog is lying right in front
of it. On her back, with her unfurred pink belly exposed just in case someone
agrees to rub it.
I glance over at her, worried that her hyperactive nervous system
will kick into gear. Another dog! Someone to play with? Someone in distress?
Gunshots: A SWAT team is invading the house! Siren: Must howl.
But her breathing stays slow and even. Her eyes are heavy-lidded,
halfway to a nap. She knows the difference between what is real and what is
not.
Im not sure I do anymore. Overbusy, I find myself
communicating with friends in short electronic bursts of e-mail, or calling and
tucking the handset into the crook of my neck so I can chat while I do the
dishes. I get a sort of sensory image of my friends presence in these
exchanges, but its something like the Betty Crocker composite, an amalgam
of all my memories of them, overlaid on what they wore the last time we
met.
Really met. In person. Where we could smell and touch each
other.
For Sophie, thats the only kind of meeting that counts. She
absorbs more information in one sniff than I can in 100 e-mails. And she has to
bump up against her friends, do spins and leap at them and nuzzle their
ears.
We could argue that shes just a dumb animal, incapable of
the complexities of abstract high-tech communication.
But she does know whats real.
At work, I often do interviews by phone, conversations with
experts in other cities, chats with people too busy to meet for coffee. They
prefer the phone, and sometimes I do, too. I can sit there in blue jeans,
sneakers propped up on my desk, and scribble down whats important, and
make faces when a remark strikes me as stupid or cruel or silly.
These are not good interviews.
First, Im deprived of all the sensory information one needs
to really convey who these people are -- how they gesture, what they are
wearing, when they lean forward to make a point, the times their nonchalance
doesnt match the tension in their face.
Second, Im able to distance myself. In person, I stay open,
absorb what seems stupid or cruel and wait for the next remark. I cant
smirk or snort or curse, not even if my subject is the Klans grand wizard
and what hes preaching is vile idiocy.
So I stay open.
On the phone, however, I can roll my eyes at my officemate, make
signs to someone whos walked in the door, scan other notes while I wait
for the point. In other words, I can split myself in two parts or three or
four.
I try not to. I try to huddle over my phone, ignore the rest of
the world, give undivided attention. But on the days when I fail, Im
really glad we dont have picture phones.
Maybe thats why they havent caught on the way they
were intended? Maybe weve all grown too comfortable with anonymity,
concealment, fragmentation.
Recently I interviewed a brilliant woman, one of the masterminds
of a computer game company, comfortable in both sense and cyberworlds. We began
conversing online with one of the players of one of her
role-playing games, a housewife in another state. In the world of the game,
this woman had married a male player, yet was already married in
real life, with small children. She played the game seven or eight hours a day,
even though she couldnt easily afford it. That virtual world, in which
her character had royal bearing, wealth and social grace, was so much more
exciting than her little suburban house.
The longer we talked online, the fuzzier the
boundaries grew. I found myself dictating questions awkwardly, forced to
differentiate whether I was asking her about her real self or her game self.
Shed focused down, until her entire world was contained in lines of type
on a computer screen, and her imagination could run anywhere it pleased with
that abbreviated data.
This is what I worry about.
It is easier, in so many ways, to maintain friendships, make
inquiries and exchange information with strangers online. You dont have
to manage so much information, so many sensory cues, so much about your own
presentation. You dont have to accommodate their idiosyncracies. You just
type.
The young woman in the game told me (or rather, she typed into a
screen I read) that playing had given her more social confidence. After all, if
she could slay dragons and accumulate vast piles of gold in this kingdom, she
had to be capable of walking into a party, right?
Er
right. Except that her new confidence was based on such
a thin slice of reality. Her marriage consisted of poetic
sentiments zapped to and from another state. She didnt have the pleasure
and satisfaction of touching him, although she could imagine it, and often did.
She didnt have to listen to her guy scrape his silverware against the
plate and burp. And she couldnt imagine that ever happening.
In other words, she could make her husband into
whatever she pleased. Project her assumptions, her fantasies. Impose her inner
reality on the world, instead of coping with larger realities the world threw
back at her.
So at what point do I do that to the friends I only e-mail? And
how often am I cutting myself off from the full, deep truths of the individuals
I interview by phone?
The dog does not share this problem. She gives and demands full
attention. If I pat her head and walk away to open the mail, she follows and
nudges me with her stuffed owl, and she wont put the owl down until she
has received full and loving acknowledgement.
Once weve greeted each other fully, I can go read or cook.
If friends come over, shes delighted. But she doesnt like it when I
talk on the phone. The minute I begin to make sounds of concluding the
conversation, she leaps up and trots toward me, relieved.
The biggest red flag of all, though, is when I sit down at the
computer. Its as if she knows that this beeping, humming machine usurps
far more energy than any book or friend, and she feels she must pester me until
I quit and return to a more physical reality.
Some days, Im glad she does. Because when I feel sad or
troubled, the computer does not comfort me. Instead, I bury my face in her soft
fur, and she drapes her paw around my neck. If Im really upset, she
stands in front of me and bends her head and presses it against me like a billy
goat, letting me know that she will stay with me until the trouble passes. When
I am sick, she curls up at the foot of the bed, and doesnt sigh like
shes making a sacrifice, or rifle through papers she needs to read. When
we play, she is fully present, not half-engrossed in a TV show and making
absent rejoinders.
If you offered her a computer game in which she could win a
virtual bone by killing virtual schnauzers, shed pass. She takes the
world as it comes.
Do I?
Jeannette Batz is a staff writer for The Riverfront
Times, an alternative newspaper in St. Louis. Her e-mail address is
jeannette.batz@rftstl.com
National Catholic Reporter, June 21,
2002
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