April 26, 2008

• Synesthesia

   

  I am so curious about synesthesia- do I have it?

   

  I'm well aware some people see numbers and letters and music as colors.  I've looked around the internet, and I've read a few books, but the most I see of synesthesia is that some people who have it are able to use it in a savant way or feel emotionally attached to or repulsed by something they see or hear that gets interpreted as color, using the color as the indicator.

   

  I seem to be a bit backward.  I see colors as places, locations, memories of having been somewhere (very not *here*), as spatial coordinates in a nonspatial universe.

   

  For instance, when people might associate yellow with joyful, warm, and other positive emotions, I feel like it's a direction that I'm not facing, but I know where it is, because I can feel where it should be.  When people see red as strong or angry or celebratory, I see it as behind me, below me.  When people see blue as calm or deep, I see it as lengthy, flat, and in front of me.  These are very basic descriptions, which get very very complicated as I go through hues and brightness levels, as if I could fine tune a place I am going.

   

  The verbage in the above paragraph can be view psychologically as me having difficulty with joy, having my back to holidays, and being emotionless.  It is very easy for people to anthropomorphize, and even easier for them to presuppose a cause and effect that doesn't exist if the sentence structure leads to that.  It is NOT intuitive for people to understand what I'm trying to say.  I'm not trying to draw a similarity to emotions at all with colors, those were just examples, and the 'directions' I see have nothing to do with those emotions.  So don't make the leap there and psychoanalyze me based on something so shallow as what those sentences are.

   

  Now I will get a little more complicated.  I think it will help for you to visualize a stained glass window.  You may pick any shape, and any colors and patterns you want for this visualization.  But let it fill your vision, so that the stained glass is all you see.  You don't see the light beyond it, and there is no room you are in.  The stained glass is your whole vision.  You are not standing there looking at it, you are part of it.  It is a world.

   

  Feel yourself sink into the colors in the glass, travel over the colors.  See the different hues of blues and purples and reds and yellows.  Notice that when you look at one color long enough, you can turn and look at another without lifting up off the glass to move over to it.  You know it's 'over there', and you can see it and move toward it.

   

  That was still very basic.  If you would like a taste of what I see in my mind, let go of the glass.  Now it's just color.  There is no wall it shines on, it simply is.  It is not liquid or air or solid.  And as you go into the colors you realize they are very big and take up some sort of space.

   

  At this point, some of you might be able to understand me saying that color has a topology.  It's not just a surface, but an interactive spacial function.  Wrinkles in the yellow produce a variety of golds and lemons.  Flow in the green produces forest and seagreen and lime.  Pushing or pulling on different parts of blue can make it navy or sky.  All these colors can become more 'electric' when they are twisted (not literally), or more sublime when they are left alone.

   

  Color also has a great depth of being.  It is in a very big place.  When I say I'm not facing the direction of yellow, I really feel in my soul that I'm not facing a particular direction, and before you aura enthusiasts jump on the 'reading', that is NOT what I mean.  Color in my world cannot be interpreted as human emotion or motivation or action.  Color is itself.  It occupies a space, a place.  The expanse is enormous, like our universe.

   

  Blue in the context of this conversation also doesn't mean myself in relation to the distance and how fast I'm moving toward it, as the way scientists measure stars moving around on a doppler light shift.  I know it's really hard to let all that go, but do it.

   

  When I hear a strain of music on a certain instrument, it is an 'address', a particular location to a very specific color in a nonspatial universe, a real place in a reality that coexists with all of us.  When I hear that music, I instantly see the coordinates of a 'place' defined in my mind only as color and know exactly where to find that color, down to the minutest hue and brightness.  I feel there is a definite 'left' or 'up' or 'over there' to it.  I feel like when a movement of music is pieced together, it is a map that tells us how to arrive to a location, and I see it all as colors.

   

  Another thing about the colors is that although there are definite areas of blue and red and all the rest, there are much smaller areas where they can show up and either mix or flow with other colors.  The closest way I can describe this, having studied the art of cartography, is elevation lines.  The lines look flat on the paper, but they indicate depth, height, steepness, slope, etc.  Or perhaps like a weather map that shows air flow at various elevations.  Oceanographers might understand this as they study water traveling around the globe, sometimes mixing, sometimes moving other water over, sometimes just flowing past.

   

  I know this is complicated.  I imagine I could go on and on and bore some of you to death.  But this is something I feel is important for some reason, and it took me many years to realize I've been seeing colors as places, locations of some sort.  I felt as a child that I wished I could go 'into the blue' when I looked at a skein of royal blue embroidery thread.  I feel like I've already been to red and yellow, but I loved being in blue the most.  This life I am in now is about blue somehow.  I am facing blue, it is very distant, and I want to go there more than anything else.  Music only makes me wish harder I could really do this, because it gives me maps that I can't seem to understand with this head I am living in.  I feel like my soul sight is blurry living in this body.

   

  I'm not into new age studies, but I'm vaguely aware there are levels of existence.  I'm also very into physics of all kinds and have harbored a suspicion of pan dimensionalism for years that goes beyond what we see around us (although I think this earth is pretty cool, and I love geography and geology studies).  I feel like this 'me' is someone who's been around a bit, knows a few things, and has definite goals.  I feel like these weird things I experience with my autism are clues that stimulate me to think more deeply than I might have without them.

   

  I found a couple of youtubes I like to zone out on.  They are deceiving because you feel like you are traveling someplace, but you are really getting smaller and smaller, but size and distance have no meaning, really.  Maybe the universe of colors and locations is like that.  By the way, I was picturing stuff like this in my head long before I ever found out about Mandelbrot sets years ago.  Click the titles for the full screen versions, which look fantastic.

   

   

   

  Fractal Zoom Mandelbrot Corner

   

   

   

   

   

  Fractal Zoom Mandelbrot Edge

   

   

   

   

   

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