Hunger for the Real

Listening to the same melody, different people envisioned different pictures of reality—the one they desired or the one they lacked. Some heard the music of rain and imagined it tapping on their windows, flowing down gutters, washing the world, erasing dirt and hostility, creating a new, clean, kind, and beautiful world—without wars, poverty, or epidemics. Without drought. And they saw this rain so vividly that they reached out to it, anticipating the sensation of drops falling on their palms.

Others imagined a different reality: they saw cutlets frying in a pan of sizzling oil. They saw the cutlets so clearly that they salivated in anticipation of dinner. For them, cutlets symbolized a world without hunger. A world in which they wanted to live, surrounded by care. And to be satiated.

A third group envisioned a picture of themselves in a shower, under a stream of warm water. And with them in the shower was a loved one, and to the sound of the water, they made love. These people most of all wanted to live in a world without ruin, to have a roof over their heads, to love and be loved.

But there was another category of people: they created music that simulated in the minds of those who listened to it the reality they dreamed of. The reality in which they wanted to live. These neuro-composers exploited the feelings, dreams, and emotions of people living in poverty, experiencing violence and hunger, suffering from epidemics and wars, drought, and a sick environment—a dying nature.

But the neuro-composers themselves also lived in the reality they saw under the sounds of digitized reality. It was a dead reality that could only create digital images and synthetic products—the virtual fruits of the digital reality.

In their reality, there was no love, but there was virtual sex. And even if it was real (in their perception), partners were replaced by androids.

And although the sight of their food excited all possible senses and receptors, the food itself had no real taste or smell. They only vainly tried to imagine the tastes and smells of food, deceiving their senses.

The safety of their fragile world was simulated by iron domes and other impenetrable shells. But they too were an illusion, their images generated by computer games with augmented reality.

But the paradox was that all these people lived in the same real world, in the same countries. They walked (if they could) along the streets of the same cities. The image of their real life (as they imagined it) differed little, regardless of social status.

The only difference was the music they listened to. The music that generated their reality. The very reality whose frames and boundaries were blurred so much that they could no longer distinguish reality from its sisters—virtual and augmented.