Lucy Samuel 2

The Irony of an Imagined Reality

In Illinois, I can’t go outside without feeling assaulted by swaths of dark grey. Huge flat expansese of murky grey, the texture of drying poster paint, buffet my ears. I turn my body against the bitter winter wind, and all of the exposed skin on my body turns orange. This is the same orange that coats my knees when I run for too long on the treadmill, the same disgusting hue that lines my stomach when I eat too much. For as long as I can remember, I’ve hated the color orange. I didn’t know why until the summer of my 12th birthday.

I was flying alone to visit my best friend at her summer house in Vermont. My mom was dropping me off at Dulles airport, and she was nervous enough for the both of us. She was reviewing the contents of my suitcase and suggesting that I call my friend’s mom as soon as I landed. Then she asked how I would remember my connection gate, and, with a shrug, I replied that it was lavender and yellow.

Wikipedia, the college essay bible, describes synesthesia as a neurological condition. I’ve always had to hesitate, when asked exactly what synesthesia is, before labeling it. Perhaps if it were harmful, it could be considered a disorder. I certainly feel disordered when I look at an algebraic formula and try to separate the colors from their meanings. However, ‘disorder’ connotes struggle, notable difference from the general population, and I believe I’d be unable to garner any sympathy from anyone regarding my experience with synesthesia.

I don’t particularly care if anyone believes me when I discuss the condition. I know I’m not the only one and I know I’m not making it up. I also know that I don’t own synesthesia, just as a schizophrenic doesn’t own his disorder and a blonde doesn’t own the experience of being blonde. Just as no individual in a group of funeral-goers owns the grief. Rather, I would say I belong to synesthesia, as do hundreds of thousands of other people who, if they were to read this essay, would see nine small red blotches everywhere the letter “a” appeared in this sentence. Synesthesia drives me, entirely automatically and generally against my will. I assume it began sculpting my perception of the world the day I was born, but I have no way of being sure. I assume this because I believe that suddenly experiencing sensations synesthetically would be a dramatic and highly memorable experience, like discovering the benefit of contacts after years of being legally blind. When I became cognizant of my synesthesia, it was as if someone had just given a clinical name to the general condition of being alive. That the number seven was yellow seemed so obvious to me that I could hardly imagine numbers existing without their colors.

I’ve always been curious how most people who don’t experience synesthesia remember sets of numbers. My mom says she remembers phone numbers by either their shape or by the map of their sequential placement on a keypad. It is strange that a set of colors would be any more memorable than a set of shapes, but I’ve never stuttered in recalling a phone number or an ATM pin. All the pertinent numbers in my lifestyle are filed as colorful patterns in my brain. I’ve accidentally memorized friends’ credit card numbers and the 1-800 numbers at the bottom of the screen in infomercials entirely based on the colors they elicit in my head. This is what synesthesia does to me.

My experience with synesthesia is similar to Joan Didion’s experience with migraine. Most people don’t have to count the grays, greens, and purples to figure out how many days until the end of the school year. Most people don’t have to stop and blink the black fuzz out of their eyes when a car backfires nearby. Most people still have never even heard of synesthesia as a neurological condition that occurs automatically. I’ve found that many people have a hard time believing me when I tell them about my perception, unless I’ve known them for a while and have had a chance to gain their trust. Synesthesia exists solely between the synapses in my brain. It is part of a reality in which I am primarily alone.

Watching Disney’s original Fantasia is a great way to understand the synesthetic experience. While I don’t know if synesthesia as a neurological condition has anything to do with the basis of Fantasia, the mixture of movement and color in close relation to dynamic musical pieces is very similar to my perception of music. Painter Wassily Kandinksy is thought to have experienced synesthesia, as he described much of his work as “musical.” I have, upon request, created artistic renderings of my synesthetic visions, and I can attest to the statements Kandinsky made about his work. Kandinsky paintings are extremely bright and active, particularly his later works, and the shapes and colors he uses in his work are very similar to those that appear in my drawings of music. In my renderings, bass notes spring from the bottom of the page in brown and black, striped and round. Piano chords appear as black drops of liquid descending from the upper section of the drawing.

Call it a gift, you wouldn’t be the only person to say so, but think: would you refer to your ability to spontaneously recall the alphabet a gift? Do you remember learning the alphabet? I certainly don’t, but I know it as clearly as I know my own name. Synesthesia comes as easily to me as remembering to breathe at the proper intervals or blinking when the wind blows in my eyes.

On a website called Synesthesia and the Synesthetic Experience, funded by the MIT Council for the Arts, a woman named Karen Chenausky discusses her synesthetic experience on an audio recording. “...It's kind of like figuring out that you have a belly-button,” explains Karen in terms that I can certainly vouch for. “You know, at some point you just notice, and start playing with it! [laughs] Then, for a while, you get really into it. ‘Wow, a belly-button! Ooh, this is cool!’ And after a while you get bored with it, because, after all, it's still there, and then you realize everyone has one. Except that not everyone has synesthesia.” This explanation helps me understand why I experience discomfort when new acquaintances launch into a barrage of questions along the lines of, “what color is my voice? What does my laughter look like? If I play you a song, will you draw it?” Questions like these, and particularly the way in which they are often posed, make me feel less like a “gifted,” interesting person and more like a machine, something people can use to their benefit. I find myself hesitating before I tell a man with a deep voice and flat inflection that the words that come out of his mouth are the color of healthy shit. People in general don’t respond well to such discoveries. Most people I’ve met seem to hope they’ll be awarded with a pink or yellow voice, as they believe this makes them a lovely, relaxing person. Sorry, folks. Whether you’re an asshole or a saint, the color of your voice has nothing to do with it.

In my everyday life, I only acknowledge synesthesia’s influence once or twice a week. A piercing laugh, a book dropped, a machine that emits a high whine. I stood in the stir-fry line a few days ago squeezing my eyes shut because my ears were ringing. Experiences like that are pretty rare, though. Occasionally I drive past a billboard decorated with colorful letters, and the obsessive-compulsive synesthete in me grimaces at the audacity of displaying a yellow A or a red Q. Mostly, though, synesthesia works through me silently and unobtrusively, a divine force that I accept and allow to influence me slightly and occasionally.

I used to hate it. I haven’t taken a math class in two years, but when I did, synesthesia made me anxious. Consider your basic pre-algebra class. You are introduced to your first formula, something laden with “x”’s and arbitrary numbers. Most people look at such an animal and are able to take the problem at hand, insert whatever values belong in the formula, and work it all out to something that makes sense. I look at an algebraic formula and see a tangle of colors that have no reason to belong next to, on top of, instead of each other. I can memorize a formula but when it comes to manipulating it, I’m useless. It seems synesthesia has been telling me, since the day I took my first math class in elementary school, that I should probably stick to art and music as my choice passions.

I believe my experience with synesthesia is translatable to the experience of individuals who experience any sort of neuroses or psychological disorder. While I certainly don’t equate myself, medically speaking, with the split-personality patient or hypochondriac, both they and I exist in a world of perception created by something other than average scientific reality. My synapses present me with the ability (if it can be referred to as such) to hear shapes and textures, to watch a musician build a sculpture. A person living with hypochondriasis is driven by some neurological force to convince himself he suffers physical disease. The hypochondriac obsessively self-examines. I sit down with a box of colored pencils and draw the theme song to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. To the hypochondriac, the world in which he has contracted HIV or is breaking out in hives is reality. To a doctor, it is false. I could stand with a group of people
and point to the space in front of me where the sound of a bubbling coffee pot dances in my imagined field of vision. To everyone else I’d be pointing at thin air.

In recent years, I’ve found ways to use synesthesia to my advantage. In my senior year of high school, I did an independent study with my art teacher over the course of a semester. I painted a portrait of myself, backed by a forest, half of which was painted based on my synesthetic perception, half of which was painted in regular natural colors. For example, the word “tree” is green, so the trunks of the trees were painted green. For me, doing this painting was almost therapeutic, as it was a way of bringing my imagination into the real world in a solid, undeniable form. The painting hangs near the dining room table in the house I’ve lived in my whole life, serving as an admission that I’ve got some things going on upstairs most people in our house don’t share with me. I imagine my parents hosting dinner parties while I’m away at college and gesturing at the painting, saying that’s our daughter. She hears in color. Isn’t that unique?

The Faculty of Education at Cambridge runs a website devoted to synesthesia information and research. This website makes the claim that there is evidence that everyone is born with some form of synesthesia, and then loses this effect as the millions of useless synapses we’re born with begin to die off. If our memories were stronger we could all attest to this, and it would save me a lot of time explaining myself.