the experience of an aura-reading synaesthete (part 1: writing)

i really don't expect that i'll be able to cover this in one post, especially as i'm still coming to understand it myself.

synesthesia: (n) a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color. (from dictionary.com)

so when i talk about "thick blue music" or my name being spoken "round, purple" or a certain word being "bright green" and "serrated," it's because that's really how i experience it. letters, words, and sounds all have associated colors, textures, and shapes.

writing, for me, especially poetry, is in large part an effort to put together words that complement each other, whose shapes fit together like pieces of a puzzle. but not a jigsaw puzzle; more often, it feels like one of those 3D puzzles with several different pieces that you have to lock together to make a cube or a sphere, but not made of wood, usually more like play-doh, or... ...or like two people lying together on a sofa under a blanket. (you just know when it fits.)

not all writing works like this. not all writing needs to. but it's part of why i like certain writers so much, and why textbooks are so hard to read. textbooks are usually very flat, very bland, very grey, or beige [like the carpet in the townhouse i grew up in, lazy saturday mornings eating cereal and watching cartoons, and nobody wants to do anything]. f. scott fitzgerald was brilliant. he had an incredible talent for putting words next to each other that most people wouldn't realize should go there. i don't even like his stories, so much, but the lyrical style of his writing floors me every time. ("lyrical," for the record, looks exactly like what it means/is meant to describe: blue and curving, lacquered, but like somebody didn't mix the paint all the way so there are streaks of other shades in random places.) in packing up my apartment this week i found a book of poetry by adrienne rich that i'd forgotten about--wow. rhyme and alliteration do things i don't think most people expect. straight prose almost seems like a waste of language: why express anything if you can't bother to make it beautiful?

sometimes, the color or the shape doesn't come from each individual word, but from a line, a stanza, or even a whole paragraph. words are like the shimmering highlights in the oil slick of a paragraph: they change the color in small pieces and contribute to the overall aesthetic. (the shape and texture of an oil slick rarely fit a piece of writing, but it was the best color analogy i could think of.) a short story writer, or even a novelist, needs to be able to put together larger chunks of a puzzle--it's like sculpting, or architecture, instead of painting. poetry is more likely to draw out the finer nuances, to occur on a smaller scale. a canvas more easily framed.


parts that need to follow: music, food, possibly movies, and auras (the reading of which i'm convinced is related, though some may dispute it).