KjB

Grapheme

“In one of the most common forms of synesthesia, grapheme → color synesthesia, individual letters of the alphabet and numbers (collectively referred to as graphemes), are “shaded” or “tinged” with a color.”

I’ve never listed this all out, but I feel compelled to today. My grapheme synethesia looks like this:

0-silver

1-white

2- the blue of a the sky after a storm

3 - cornflower yellow

4 - lavender

5 - cobalty/grey blue (much darker than 2)

6 - lime green

7 - kelly green

8 - bright, neon orange

9 - raspberry red

2, 7, and 9 are have very strong, distinct colors. When I see something of those colors, the number pops in my head. When i see the number, the color appears. It’s bizarre - and until i learned what synestesia was, i thought everyone probably saw this stuff.

Even better, though, is the music stuff.

Music-Color Synesthesia

“In music → color synesthesia, individuals experience colors in response to tones or other aspects of musical stimuli (e.g., timbre or key). Like grapheme → color synesthesia, there is rarely agreement amongst synesthetes that a given tone will be a certain color, but individuals are internally consistent. Tested months later, a synesthete will report the same experiences as they had previously reported.” (from Wikipedia)

For me, when I play music or write music, there’s a strong, linear visual storyline that scrolls past that inner-eye in my head. Almost a player-piano scroll of color and shapes, rising and falling. If i need to remember a part, all i have to do it back up the scroll, envision the picture, and i remember. It happens less often when I’m listening to music. The trigger seems to be that I have to be creating the sound myself, or composing it. In this way, every song I’ve ever played has an accompanying landscape portrait. They’re all wildly different.

We’re not Jewish, but we drank Manischewitz. (Well, there’s speculation about the other side of my family, but the side I celebrated with today…they’re totally Irish. No question.) We played euchre. (All the cards that matter - nines and up only. Alone hands. Left bower. Right bower. In the barn.) We ate Kentucky fried chicken. (Probably the one restaurant open this evening. God bless the Colonial and his merry holiday ways.) We learned Spanish cuss words from my Mexican step-aunt. (I won’t repeat. The pope’s on TV next to me. Wouldn’t seem right.) We listened to holiday classics, played dirge-slow on a church pipe organ, on tinny cassette tape. (It sounded like a funeral, in an alternate universe, in a David Lynch movie.) We heard about the exciting life of being a small-town cop. (”I chucked my Mag-Lite at his back. Usually, when you do that…they go right down.”)

We opened presents. We listened to the year’s stories about pets and kids and deaths and births.
We were all together, for one of the two times it ever happens in 365 days.

Cheers to the family. Merry Christmas.

We’ll call this one: “my father has a lot of stuff…and an awesome sense of symmetry.”

1. Cigarettes smoked in the throes of insomnia at 2 AM will not give you cancer.

2. When packing for a five day trip, you will always shove 50-70% more than needed into the suitcase, then arrive, and think all week, “I have nothing to wear.”

3. No matter how obsessively you play out the possible scenarios in a situation, what acutally happens will probably be that one thing you never, ever thought of.

4. The ipod, set on shuffle, always, always knows just what you need to hear.

One in a series of nineteen.

Some explanation: Sometimes an album pops up on the ipod and I can’t shake it. It gets in my bones. I hear its refrains in everything–a running staff in my head–notes, chords, wild wiggly synesthetic compositions of color and light. (A topic for another time.) There is, I believe, almost always the perfect music for the moment. This moment for me, it is Rachel’s “Systems/Layers.” Designed as a soundtrack for a SITI Company performance of the same name (man, would I have loved to see that), this has somehow become the soundtrack of my life of late as well. Because I can’t seem to shake it, I thought I’d add something of my own. One short, probably disjointed, stream-of-consciousness narrative piece for each of the album’s tracks.

In case whoever’s reading doesn’t have their own copy of the song, i’ve posted it here: Song One.

Moscow Is In The Telephone.

I am alone on the train.

Pressed and perfect in my work clothes the day stretches ahead, threatening to pass in fogginess, as if with the lampposts that thwump, thwump by the car window. I am wholly in my own head. Quiet and muffled, the sounds of colliding track and wheel slowly give way to shuffling papers, shoes on marble, whispers in the lunchroom. This is home—a desk facing plate glass. Chicago in winter. 1942. Cold rain in sheets. This is home—routine. Wakefulness and dressing, 20 minutes on the train, shuffling papers, whispers. My desk, my typewriter, my friends, my life of eight years.

It wasn’t always this way.

Buttoned and scarved in my northern gear, the night winds away from me, threatening to be lost as I try to recall the scenery of my family home. I am wholly in my own head. I remember grey skies. The factory on the river. A last night so silent it felt as if I’d gone deaf. This is home—a house on a hill. An orchard overrun with brambles. A gaggle of turkeys, patrolling, proud. This is home—a place I don’t belong anymore. The brightly painted room. The parties by the ponds. The friends with farms and husbands and children.

I am alone on the train.