for the love of flesh

As Second Life continues to spread its meta domination of the seemingly infinite expanse of cyberspace and the limited confines our everyday lives, I remember how much I love the physical.

Matt and I recently found a beautiful third floor 2-bedroom apartment at a corner house in Garden Court near Malcolm X/Black Oak Park. Original hardwood floors. Huge windows. Large rooms. Lots of light. A home for us, atleast until rent gets too expensive. I feel like it will be a place where I will love living and being (with Matt of course).


It is good to feel the chill of morning air as I slip out of my warm cozy bed. It is good to walk my slippery way across the icy sidewalks. It is good to feel warmth returning to my ears after biking around in the cold. It is good to be able to sense the varieties of feeling that our bodies are designed to experience.

It is good to touch and feel. It is good to remember that our bodies are good, that our enlightenment and salvation does not exist in some ethereal airy region of the netherworld, but in a tangible, concrete, redeemed existence of what is physical. (We know that we have become gnostics, when we think that prayer is a more spiritual act than sex.)


The simulation of Second Life does hold its appeal to me—the idea that you can be things you would never be, go to places that you’d never go to, fly around and survey the landscape from the comfort of your own home—the illusion that you are not limited by your physical body or your physical situation.

But I am not just whoever I want to fashion myself to be. I do not believe I can create my own identity according to my preferences. There is something more essential inside. There is something more true that I am becoming. I am real. I am made out of flesh. I can touch and be touched. I have a body. And there is something so intangibly beautiful about the pleasures and the vicissitudes of what is tangible. Maybe I’m missing out by not starting a second life, but I am counting on there being enough in this life to keep me busy and satisfied.