jennfrank.

seeing is believing

The teen had taken over the TV. He was watching first-person action-cam footage of dirt bike jumps.

“Wow, this really makes me want to play a video game about racing dirt bikes,” I teased him. Then I went silent. I frowned.

Later, while throwing Aerobies with the tyke outside, I’d gone silent again. I guess she’d asked me a question, but I didn’t hear her.

“Sorry,” I said to her, “I was just thinking.” I was thinking about how I’d never broken a bone before. Too scared to risk life and limb for anything, I’d been thinking to myself darkly, willing to accept a simulation of an experience instead. I’d been thinking about my aversion to injury. I’d been thinking about my real-life fear of rollercoasters, contrasted with my enjoyment of VR rollercoasters1.

I’d been thinking about the time I’d misspoken to my grandfather, a pilot. I’d made the wild, spurious claim that Microsoft Flight Simulator was “just like flying a real plane,” and I was remembering how angry my grandfather had gotten: angrier than I’ve ever seen any man get. I think I was 11 or 122.

That night, the teen’s best friend had broached some topics, asking probing questions about the darkness of the heart of man that felt a bit uncanny. I’d answered his questions in what I’d hoped was an age-appropriate way3.

“I’ve never broken a bone,” he suddenly blurted, apropos of nothing.

“Do you know,” I said to the teen, “I was thinking about that earlier today, in the backyard when we were throwing Aerobies. I’ve never broken a bone either. I think I’ve been playing video games instead.”

The next night, on FaceTime, I’d said something about my face blindness. My best gal in LA, my artist friend, had gasped. “C has that, too!” she exclaimed.

“I know,” I said, cackling. “I saw them come into the bar and start to ask about me. I waved them over, like this.” I demonstrated on-camera. Then I explained further: “We’d both given ourselves haircuts since the last time we saw each other.” C’s was more recognizable than mine. I think my hair just looks like hair. Sometimes it falls differently, depending on how I woke up.

My LA friend rolled her eyes at the thought of two of her own best friends attempting to find each other in a crowded public space. “How do you even function,” she groaned.

“So!” I said to her. “I’m actually very good at… portrait drawings,” I said, a little embarrassed, since my famous artist friend is obviously better at portraits than I am. “And I do think that has something to do with face blindness,” I said.

“Because you see individual features, rather than the whole,” my artist friend suggested.

“Exactly,” I said. I sighed. “And I’m trying to fix this about myself. I’m trying to learn how to see the whole.” I tapped my face. “Because my face blindness does mean I’m easily taken in by a decoy.” Like prey in the wild4, mistaking a hollow wooden duck for a real duck.

“Appearances are deceiving,” I continued. “I think one of the greatest philosophical drops to ever enter the popular consciousness is, is it cake? You think you have this practical, useful item. No! It’s cake. You think you have a functional relationship. One day, you cut into it. It’s cake. You cut into everything else to check. It’s all cake5.”

I talked to her about my lifelong predilection for interpersonal shallowness—an attraction to whatever is obvious, superficial, easy. “Easy is a trap,” I sighed.

She glared at me. “I don’t think I’m an easy friend,” she said.

“No you are not,” I agreed, trying to be straight-faced and failing. “No, and that’s what makes your friendship so satisfying.”

  1. My best friend has zero vestibular tolerance for VR, gets too dizzy and too nauseated to stay confined in a headset. A lot of other people encounter this, too, but her senses are extreme: she can sniff out the ghost of cigarette smoke days after the houseguest already left. I constantly remind her that this is a great thing, to have a body that works as intended and which doesn’t like to be ignored. The cognitive info isn’t matching up with the proprioceptive or interoceptive data! Her body physically rejects the lies. (Apparently—TIL!!—when we experience this type and degree of vestibular nausea, it’s because our bodies believe we’ve been exposed to a neurotoxin.)

    “You know,” I told her one day, “there’s an entire field of research and scholarship around reducing VR motion sickness”—all kinds of hot design tips, too, like blurring the FOV so that everything is perpetually framed in a sort of vaseline vignette—“but I think debilitating motion sickness is great! I think it’s great that your body will not accept a false reality as true. There’s no need to correct this. There’s nothing wrong with you.”↩

  2. My grandfather attempted to articulate, angrily, the ineffable feeling of force and gravity and weight, the pull of g-forces. He died not very long after that conversation: a spontaneous aortic dissection, a death that might’ve been hurried along by the long-term effects of fighter-jet g-forces on cardiovascular tissues.↩

  3. Meanwhile, I have the exact same sense of humor as a 13-year-old boy. The teen had been telling me about understanding enough Russian to catch other people talking about him. I told him I could speak German, but only when abandoned alone in the Austrian countryside. (It turns out ‘immersion’ works!)

    “Okay,” the teen boy said, “what does dubistgutgenug mean?”

    “What?” I said. He repeated it. My ear couldn’t grab onto anything. I was experiencing farfegnugen all over again.

    “You… are…” I said. He repeated the phrase one more time for me. “Genug,” I said. “You are enough. Kenough. You are Kenough?”

    “Good enough,” he said. “Gut genug.”

    I frowned. “Oh,” I said, “gut genug. Sure. Genau.”

    He beamed. “So you do speak German!” he said triumphantly.

    “Well no,” I said, wincing, like evidently not.

    He was pulling out his Android phone. “It’s from a song,” he explained. He tapped his screen and then played the very recognizable refrain, singing along with it in a matching falsetto. I started wheezing. Tears flew to my eyes.

    “Oh my god,” I coughed, “of course I’ve heard this song on social media, I just didn’t realize he was actually singing anything. It just sounds like doot-doot-doot-doot-doooot.” I was cryingggg. I sang it in a falsetto, too, tears pouring out of my eyes, I was laughing so hard.↩

  4. I was walking the husky one morning last week. I noticed a dove perched on an electrical wire above us. The dove inspected the dog and me as we approached. I cooed at the dove. The dove, in turn, looked very interested, which made me laugh. The abruptness with which I’d switched from cooing to laughing startled the bird. The dove flew away shrieking. Have you ever actually heard what it’s like when doves cry? It’s the same sound an agitated squirrel makes.

    As we circled the block, I glanced over at a different bird, one that was standing with unearned confidence in someone’s front yard, doing his whole bird thing.

    “Hi!” I greeted the bird as we passed him.

    This bird, too, had a full-on panic attack. He flew away screaming in a way I’d never heard a bird scream before. I’d never witnessed anything like it. “I fear I shattered his mind,” I told my friends later that day. My friends were laughing. “It’s a country bird! Not a city bird,” I continued. “I think, up until that moment, the bird truly believed he was invisible to humans. So he’s just been confidently going about his day, thinking no one can see him. Oh my God! I’ve been in terrible danger this whole time!”

    Or maybe I had it exactly backward, I mused now, and perhaps the bird had never noticed a human before. We have actual blind spots in our vision, and our brains constantly fill in the missing info, just like A.I. can automagically, believably, fill the missing part of a Photoshop scene. Like, that’s exactly how our own brains’ neural networks function. But we also have cognitive blindness, such that our brains discard information—including actual visual information from our material environments—in order to ‘complete a picture’. If humans aren’t important enough to be on a bird’s perceptual radar, the bird might be editing us out: what if I were the first human the bird could ever remember seeing.

    In any case, I could understand the bird’s panic: it all comes down to the horror of being perceived. Here I lapsed into talking about Barbie to my friends: about how unwavering eye contact gives the object agency, turns exploitation into an agreement, a pure transaction. Eye contact is confrontational because it confuses or conflates subject vs object, “I” vs “me,” predator vs prey. It’s a potential leveling of the playing field.

    My friend Cara was thoughtful. She told me I need to watch John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, as this matter is exactly what Berger handles. (Also, she felt I would get a lot out of watching a Scotsman shouting passionately, just in general.) I protested. I no longer subscribe to ad-free YouTube, I explained.

    For the rest of the afternoon I’d attempted to purchase the epub of the book based on the TV series directly from Penguin. Even though there is no such thing as a region-locked ebook, the website would not let me.↩

  5. I remember visiting Walt Disney World’s Galaxy’s Edge for the first time. I had gone into it blind. It looked so perfect, the artifice was so good, I kept sobbing. I looked deranged. I kept groping the fabricated stucco walls, touching them with my hands in astonishment, pushing on them, knocking on them to listen for where they were substantial and where they were hollow. Cake walls. All around me, cake.↩