I was awakened around two the other morning by a truly blood-curdling scream across the alley.  It was a young man with what sounded like real terror in his voice screaming: "WHO ARE YOU??? OH MY GOD, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???"

In the disorientation of being jolted awake at all hours like that, my mind raced to find an explanation that would call for nothing more on my part than mere annoyance.  I mean, no one wants to wake up to, say, a woman screaming bloody murder in their back alley, which actually happens here with some regularity, and for it to be something serious, which, thankfully, it generally isn't.  (But ladies, what's up with the screaming for sport?) 

The buildings across the alley are all either owned by Berklee College of Music or the Boston Conservatory, or rented to students from those two schools.  And kids will be kids.  On the good nights it's like a drunken version of the 2010 Glee Tour, on bad nights you get blood curdling screams for shits and giggles. 

So, as I said, my mind raced to make sense of the screams (the quicker the better so I could get back to my current dream lover, former footballer and current fashionista Hidetoshi Nakata, who I was giving a post World Cup victory massage).  Was a home invasion in progress across the way?  Was this a kinky sex-game gone awry (I'm always forgetting my safe word myself, so I know what that's like).  Was someone having night terrors? 

I got up and looked out the window, and to my utter shock, saw three men in the apartment across the alley in front of an enormous flat screen TV... playing a video game.

In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream.  Unfortunately your neighbors aren't so lucky.

The rest of the night was punctuated at irregular intervals by the same young man's blood—curdling screams.  Now, I grew up in a house of sports fanatics who would hoot and howl at top volume when watching a game on TV.  It haunts me to this day.  But you could usually tell, as with little children, the real screaming from the sport screaming.  I can't stress enough that the other night across the alley there was no edge of irony, and no one laughed when the young man screamed — these were high volume howls of real sheer terror. 

Somebody was taking his video games very seriously, indeed.

I don't know.  I know one or two gamers.  They get pretty heated if you criticize their habit, as people with habits do.  And if you persist, wondering aloud what the point of it is, they'll invariably tell you it's great for "hand-eye coordination".  Now, in my mind, unless you're doing single-cell nanosurgery with your bare hands, you really don't need that level of hand-eye coordination. 

But whatever. 

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade.  If you want to retreat to a sound-proof box gaming your life away, I say go for it.  Forget "ipod" as a clever metaphor, I'm all for building actual pods for people who seem to spend all their time in an invisible bubble bumping into those of us in the real world unfortunate enough to be in their path. Heck, make 'em stackable. Hook the pod people up to a feeding tube on one end and a catheter on the other, plug 'em into a pocket pussy, slap on the VR goggles, lock the door, throw away the key.  Scream to your little heart's content. 

I don't object to the flight from reality, as long as you don't come flying at me, especially not when I'm getting down to business with my dream dieux du stade.  OK, dreams are the original virtual reality, I'll grant you that.  And you know what? I find sleepwalkers irritating, too.  One reality at a time, please, people.  

Yesterday I was reading (yet another portal to a virtual reality — and yes, reading while perambulating is also supremely annoying) — so, I was in my garden under the wisteria reading Robert Pogue Harrison's wonderful Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.  And I came to the chapter entitled "On the Lost Art of Seeing,"* where he makes this astonishing claim: "[E]ven though there are plenty of gardens in the world, we live in an essentially gardenless era."

It all comes down to the art of seeing, see.  And "nothing is less cultivated these days in Western societies," Harrison says (and I'd have to agree) "than the art of seeing.... There exists in our era a tragic discrepancy between the staggering richness of the visible world and the extreme poverty of our capacity to perceive it."
  
From his experience as a university professor, he says "I have the impression that a great many [young people] no longer see the world at all, except peripherally and crudely."  But he doesn't blame them.  "[I]t is not a question of generational deficiency but of epochal transformations in the framework in and through which the world reveals itself.  The basic inability to see a garden in its full-bodied presence is the consequence of a historical metamorphosis of our mode of vision, which is bound up in our mode of being."

For as our mode of being changes, so too does our way of seeing.  The faculty of human vision is not neutral.  It is as subject to the laws of historicity as are our life-worlds, our institutions, and our mentality.  In that regard human vision is fundamentally different from animal eyesight.... In human beings the loss of eyesight does not necessarily entail a loss of vision.  Vision sees cognitively and synthetically; it apprehends things in organized dispositions and meaningful totalities.  This is another way of saying that human vision is above all a way of seeing.

He concludes: "human vision in the present age sees primarily images rather than appearances.... The difference between appearance and image is that the former intimates while the latter merely indicates." 

See, a garden is "charged with latency....  Nothing is seen that is not there; rather what is there reveals itself in any number of appearances and guises." 

The best example is the Oku stone of the Zen garden, which is not visible at all.  To quote Michel Tournier, it is "the final, intimate, secret touch which animates the whole composition, it can fulfill its mission while remaining unperceived, like the soul of a violin".

The Oku stone is "the underside of appearance," the "lethic depths ... accessible to our inner gaze but not necessarily to our eyesight."

What is required at the very least is a willingness to linger and a readiness for thought that our present frenzy finds abhorrent.  There is not enough serenity in the age for gardens to become fully visible to us.  That is why one could say that we live in a  gardenless age.

Not to worry. I fully expect to see virtual gardens popping up, the point of which is to choose the most profitable annuals for the fastest gaming level-ups. 

Extra points for unearthing the Oku stone.
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*The eloquent and erudite John Berger always comes up in this context, with his seminal 1972 BBC companion book Ways of Seeing.  But while Berger, who is in his eighties, has continued to contribute deep insights into our art and humanity, he has not written extensively (or really much at all, that I know of) on the radical shift in our perception of the world virtual reality and video games represent.