I haven't blogged about this in a long while, but those of you who have been following me for a very long time, by way of one or more of my various blogs, might recall me having talked about a phenomenon called synesthesia. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a copied and pasted snippet from Wikipedia on the subject.

Synesthesia is a neurologically-based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme → color synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored, while in ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise).

This is actually a phenomenon I have experienced all my life, and more or less all the time. I have the most experience with the "grapheme" and "ordinal linguistic personification" varieties of synesthesia paraphrased in the above description, but I have also experienced it in other ways that I don't think the quote covers. For much of my life, I actually thought that everyone experienced the world in this manner. I thought everyone disliked certain names because the combination of sounds tasted bad in their mouths when spoken. I thought that everyone saw abstract concepts as having colors, flavors, and smells. Very real ones, too. It wasn't until more recent years that I found out that not only was that not so, but that this phenomenon actually had a name.

I don't consider my synesthetic experiences to be unpleasant... not at all. In fact, I rely on mine heavily when it comes to my artwork and my creative writing. My work literally would not be what it is without synesthesia. It especially makes writing descriptive passages and poetry a lot easier. I'm not being as deep and inventive as it sounds sometimes. I'm very likely just interpreting what I actually see, hear, or smell when it comes to certain concepts more often than not. The real challenge is in figuring out a way to interpret these things so that they make some logical sense to other people as well. This is usually easiest to do with my visual art, because anything seems to go when it comes to pictures.

I recently finished reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which was probably one of the most beautifully written books from a language standpoint that I've ever read. By the end of the first paragraph, I could tell this man was a fellow synesthete. We have a very distinctive way of expressing ourselves that jumps right out at other synesthetes. When I got done with the book, I decided to look up some additional information on the book and on Nabokov, as I often like to do such things upon finishing a book or movie that I particularly enjoyed. I turned out that Nabokov was indeed a synesthete as I had thought, and that like me, his synesthesia is something he relied on quite a bit when it came to his creative expression.

Among other things, I remember reading a direct quote from him on how he interpreted the word "loyalty". He said that for him, the word loyalty invokes the image of a golden fork lying in the sun. I thought that was incredibly beautiful. I don't know that I personally get a golden fork from loyalty, but it does have a very warm, sunny feeling attached to it. However, to me, it smells yeasty and golden... like freshly baked bread that has been made with white flour. I feel that if you could hold loyalty in your hands and give it a squeeze, it would give way easily and be pliable and soft much like bread is. Thinking about it does make me feel lazy and innocent, as if I've been lying on the beach in a sunbeam of perfect temperature without any clothes on.

This gave me the most wonderful idea for a series of art pieces I'd like to begin as soon as possible. I've been wanting to start a new series for a while now, except I didn't want to do any of the same old ones a millions artists have already done. I wanted something that you don't see much, if at all, and that only I could really do in quite the way I'd do it. I'm thinking that I'd really like to do a series of indefinite length that will illustrate how I see the names of certain abstract concepts through synesthesia. I'd love to share some of that with others, because as I said, it's so difficult to do properly in words. However, pictures seem just the thing. I don't know why I've never thought of it before.

Obviously loyalty will be first. I see what I want to do very, very clearly in my head, and I know already that I'm going to be very proud of the results if they even come close to what I'm imagining. I hope you'll all like this series as much as I know I am going to like creating it. If you find synesthesia interesting and would like to read more about it in general, feel free to read the Wikipedia article I quoted in its entirety right here.