Picktures and Pieces 4: I See It Feelingly, or the World According to Prag

“The World According to Prag, or I See It Feelingly”

This cryptic banner hangs over a pretty sorry carwash in Carbondale. I suppose Wal-Mart couldn’t corner the smiley-face market. Imagine the royalties if it could be done. Pondering the sign, and the carwashes, I started thinking about the idea of something being “touchless,” as though that were some sort of advantage, not to have to touch things. It’s not just that I don’t mind touching my car, but touching anything seems like the essence of intimacy.

It reminded me of two stories, sort of mirror images of each other. One was from John Irving, The World According to Garp, when the protagonist explains to his mom about a man who has magic gloves. In the movie version, Garp says:

“Mom, it's very simple. He can do wonders when he's wearing his magic gloves. If his wife is sad, he touches her with his gloves, she's happy. If his children are crying, he touches them, and they smile. But he can't feel them! He yearns to feel. He can even hold off death with his magic gloves, but he can't feel life. So, he takes off the gloves, and he dies. But, he finally feels life as he's flying into the arms of death.”

The other story is Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” about a scientist from Padua in its glory days who raises his daughter Beatrice confined among poisonous plants. She develops a resistance and gradually becomes poisonous to others, so that no one can touch her. Naturally a young man falls in love with Beatrice and in attempting to cure her condition, he kills her instead with the antidote. Of course it raises the question whether it would have been better to live without touching one another.

What occurred to me was the nice complementarity. Beatrice is poisonous to the world, while the world is poisonous to Garp’s hero. Both make the same choice, but not quite the same. Beatrice chooses to be touched while the man with the magic gloves chooses to touch. It makes me wonder. If I had to choose only one, forsaking the other, would I choose to be able to touch without feeling it myself, or to be able to feel the touch of others without being able to touch them? What would you choose? And what does the choice reveal.

I think I know what I would choose. I would choose to be able to feel and not initiate touch, but I would be sad all the time. This may mean that selfishness runs deep in my case, or at least deeper than the desire to please others, but maybe not. I leave it to you to consider your own case, but a few more observations before I let the subject go.

I think we habitually forget that touching and feeling are different and complementary things –feeling is sort of the gift we get for touching. But we know they are different, we just don’t notice. Once in while an arm will “go to sleep,” and we can touch without feeling. Or maybe we go to the art gallery and we have to feel without touching. (Here is some of the work of Vicki Walsh who specifically creates it to be touched, although she makes you question whether you would really want to feel it.)

But there is something more going on. When we see something, we touch it through the "medium" of photons. When we hear something, we touch it through the "medium" of sound waves. In the end, even touching something in the regular sense isn’t without a "medium." The electromagnetic fields that surround our bodies encounter those of other so-called "objects" in the practical mode of “solidity.” The electromagnetic and thermodynamic (entropic) systems encounter one another in adorable complexity. But the real issue is not physical or metaphysical, it is moral.

In light of that, I considered Shakespeare’s character, the Earl of Gloucester, in King Lear. He is an arrogant man but not a bad man. Like Lear, Gloucester cannot distinguish the good from the bad in his offspring. But he pays for that lack of insight with his eyesight, after which, humbled and dependent, he tells his good son that when it comes to the world, “I see it feelingly.” (Act IV, Scene 6) Aristotle said that “contact and assertion are truth . . . and ignorance is non-contact.” (1051b 24-25) The Greek here for “contact” is thigein which literally means to touch or reach.

Wanting a touchless car wash amounts to wanting the experience of being clean without the experience of cleaning. But would you choose having feelings without touching? That's analogous, isn't it? It’s like amputating everything about the truth that makes it true. I have friends and neighbors watching a convention this week. I’m not watching it. I see it feelingly. It’s poisonous to this country. Their magic gloves bring you touchless carwashes in about the same way they brought you wars you didn’t have to feel, poor people you don’t have to feed, and sick people you don’t have to tend. But in truth, nothing is quite that clean, America least of all. I don't want the version of my country that was made only to look at; I want the one I can touch, and having touched, can feel.