Ronnaesthesia

[dolorosa_12]

I've been insanely busy recently, as our registration pieces (10,000 words of thesis+annotated bibliography+detailed thesis outline/plan+training report) are due early next week and I've been editing like a demon. I've been incredibly stressed about the whole thing, mainly because I have no self-confidence and don't trust myself to write well. Basically, my mood swings depending on how recently I've met with my supervisor, who is very good at calming me down as well as gently nudging me in the right direction. Well, yesterday, we met up and she told me she was pleased with my work (she also said that I 'write beautifully', which made me extremely happy), so I'm basking in glory, and will probably continue to do so for at least...well, two days.

But that's not really why I'm posting. I've been having a lot of rambly thoughts about about my own idiosyncratic form of pseudo-synaesthesia. I don't hear colours or smell numbers or anything like that, but I do feel words, if that makes any sense.


This doesn't happen with everything I read, but some stuff - the writing of Ursula Le Guin, the poetry of Jo Walton (see recent example here), Pratchett's Death (and only this character), Massive Attack and Van She lyrics, the heartbreakingly beautiful one-shots of some fanfic writers (it only works with one-shots or drabble series, for some reason; I've yet to find this same quality in novel-length fic, even by these same writers), the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, certain arcs in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics (I'm thinking here of 'The Sound of Her Wings' in particular) - has this quality. I can't quite articulate what it is, but I feel/perceive it when I read it.

It's entirely to do with the way these writers put words together. It's a strange juxtaposition of simplicity and profundity; they're often using very simple language, and there's a silence, a stillness, at the heart of their words that has the effect of a resounding thunderclap. Their stories are calm, like a desert at night, a desert at night with ruined buildings half-buried in the sand. I'm not explaining myself properly because it's a way of perceiving these stories/poems that is so internalised and introverted that it's almost beyond language.

Just looking at the above examples, it seems that this type of reaction seems to occur most often in stories dealing with death (Pratchett's Death, Gaiman's Death, Earthsea, many of the fanfics), although I'm not really sure why.

Hmm, I can't really explain this at all, but it's been hovering at the back of my brain for a while (after a recent fanfic-reading binge) and I simply had to write about it just so I could get it out of my mind.

I don't have many links for you today, besides this one from Justine Larbalestier about long-running series and their appeal, and this one from Kristin Cashore about 'home' in the Buffyverse. They're both pretty interesting.

ETA: get_medieval has just begun the commentary repost of my favourite arc. This comic is awesome, and if you don't believe me, read the TV Tropes page. It's aliens+medieval France, and I adore it.

Comments

Ronnaesthesia

[cereswunderkind.livejournal.com]

So many words. So many ways to combine them. So many effects to create. So many ways to get it right and so many more to get it wrong...

/me sighs.

Re: Ronnaesthesia

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

You do get it right! Some of your shorter stories actually have this quality, which is one of the reasons why I love them. When you (and other writers of this type) get it right, it's like a footstep in an endless desert, and I mean that in a good way.

Ronnaesthesia

[cereswunderkind.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that you find this effect in short rather than long fiction. Is it, I wonder, because it's hard for the author to sustain this effect for an extended period, or is it down to the reader, who has to surface to take breath, as it were?

Or is it like a song, which gets into a groove and a key and carries you with it; but then the key or rhythm changes and the spell is broken, and it's musically necessary, but you so wish it weren't?

Re: Ronnaesthesia

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

I think it's definitely related to the medium. Short fiction - especially the drabble-length stuff I mentioned above - is basically concentrated emotion (or one concentrated thought, sometimes). I think this tight focus makes this effect easier to sustain.

Oddly enough, I tend to prefer novel-length stuff on the whole. *is just a mass of contradictions*

Very Interesting

[(Anonymous)]

For quite some time I've thought the forms of synaesthesia science has documented and studied may be just scratching at the surface of some really interesting cognitive phenomena.

The simplistic model of five senses which send data to your conscious mind is patently wrong. For a start there are senses other than the traditional five, like balance; but more to the point our brains do a lot of processing on sensory information before the part we call conscious gets a hold of it. So for example we don't "sense" light, in that what we experience doesn't primarily consist of pixels; we sense objects, and motion, and colours, and facial expressions, and other visual activity our brains consider significant.

We're aware of some straight forward cases of blending, where some people have the same experience under the stimuli of a orange shades as they do under low frequency notes, for example - but if you consider we might have a couple of dozen or more "senses", many of which may be more abstract than the traditional ones, it wouldn't be surprising if experiences like yours are quite common.

Re: Very Interesting

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry, that was Jordan, by the way.

Re: Very Interesting

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, that's really interesting.

I'm hesitant to call what I'm describing above synaesthesia, since it could equally just be termed 'imagination', but I thought the synaesthesia analogy would work best in my stumbling attempts to articulate exactly what it is that I perceive.

Re: Very Interesting

[(Anonymous)]

Wow yeah, I think that might be right, because for instance we associate different colours with different emotions and so on... When I make presentations at work I try to colour the graphs in ways that make sense to me- fitting the colours to the words. I don't think I have any form of synaesthesia, and it doesn't always work to try to do that, but I think that the concept is there, and probably shared by a large number of people....

Sorry, a bit rambly.

But interested by your experience, Ronni, and your examples, Jordan.


-Catie

Re: Very Interesting

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely, although I think in some cases the colours have cultural associations rather than purely psychological ones. For example, white is the colour of death in many Asian countries, and the idea of wearing white on your wedding day would be very, very not on. (I think they then wear red at weddings, which has associations in the West that meant until modern times it wasn't considered appropriate for weddings.)

Also, in Irish, the word for 'green', 'grey' and 'blue' is the same (glas), and the question is whether the Irish perceived any differences between those (as we would say) three colours.

It's so interesting to think about...

[soapyhermit.livejournal.com]

Someone I know has quite serious synaesthesia. We walked into a pub recently and we had to guide him for a moment because the smell made him blind - all he saw was colour.

Then I made him smell vinegar and that was fun. For me.

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

Wow, poor guy. That sounds very severe. Was it the beer smell in the pub?

[soapyhermit.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but there's also a kind of old woody smell in pubs, you know? It was a mixture of things.

It's funny because he can tell you what colour you smell like.

[losseniaiel.livejournal.com]

Good luck with the registration piece. :)

I taste words. Sometimes whole writing styles, but more often single words. Perhaps that's why I like philology so much. Sometimes I have to explain to someone (usually my dad) that a certain word can't be related to another word because it doesn't taste right.

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

That is very cool. It sounds like the ideal talent to have as a philologist.

I can't even explain which sense it is that I'm describing above, because it's some weird overlap of sight, touch and sound. The words resonate, but they give me this very clear visual image (endless deserts in the moonlight, deep, still pools of water, brilliant, tropical lakes surrounded by rice fields), and the sort of sensation you feel if you were standing in a bell-tower and you felt the vibrations of the bell ringing.

I can't explain it any more clearly than that.