A Glad Bag of Ramen.

I distinctly remember the night in 3rd grade when I had to stick my hand in a large black trash bag to touch its slimy contents at some otherwise unmemorable church function. I was horrified and terrified by the oozing substance which met my nervous fingers. Instantly my stomach turned as my mind's eye went wild. Was I touching the bowels of a fish? Maybe just a batch of rotten food? Or, worst, perhaps the slippery matter was in fact gray matter - a human brain? Surely my Sunday school teacher hadn't put a person's brain in a Glad bag! Moments later, the lights were flipped on to reveal that the sickening substance which had struck such fear to my heart was nothing more than a handful of well-cooked spaghetti noodles. This supposedly ingenious learning tool was designed to enable children to face their fears. However, for me the experience only heightened my awareness of touch's ability to stimulate my sensitive imagination.

In her chapter on touch, Ackerman describes her adventures in the Touch Dome in San Francisco. Her trip through the Exploratorium seems comparable to my encounter with the trash bag of ramen. Blindly plunging through darkness, hands passing over normal objects that become hostile in the pitch black, and blundering into cubby holes... All of these elements seem terrifying while the lights are extinguished, but illumination decimates the preposterous anxieties. Ackerman observes that some of her fellow explorers experienced attacks of shrieks and claustrophobia as a result of the inability to see and identify the objects that they were touching.

We humans have a great dependence on touch, but we want it to be augmented by the other senses. We don't want to touch something unless we can see it. In A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle devises a species that does not have eyes and therefore uses touch to "see". These creatures are forced to use touch to identify everything in their world. They don't miss sight because they don't know the difference. To these beings the fear of reaching my hand in a trash bag would be a completely foreign notion. Our culture has developed a fear of touching anything out of the ordinary. The only people who touch weird things are the maniacs who go on Survivor. Although I have absolutely no desire to be one of those maniacs, I have recently made a step towards overcoming my skittishness about touch by kissing a giraffe while in Kenya.