Are you interested in lucid dreaming or ball lightning? How about the feet of geckos or spiders? The aquatic ape? Cave art? Maybe you like clouds. You might have a fascination with out-of-body or near-death experiences, collective nouns or synesthesia. You can find all that here. Just use the handy little search bar.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but mostly this website exists as a place for the Green Comet trilogy and my other novels to live.
rjb
This week’s reading is The Scent of Strangeness by JM Kinnear. Its themes are mathematics and synesthesia. Length about eight and a half minutes. Listen to this and other stories on the Audio page.
rjb
“Clock with one hand” by Rick Payette is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
I’m still glad I learned on an analog clock, though. The shape of it and the positions of the hands lent themselves to concrete visualizations of the time of day and where in the hour one was. I think it had a strong effect on the form taken by my temporo-spatial synesthesia, as I explain in that post. There may have been some confusion in the beginning, but it worked out in the end.
When I was teaching my son how to tell time, though, I made sure to refer to the hands as “long” and “short,” to save him the confusion.
rjb
People ask why I use human referents in my stories about aliens. Why, for instance, did Archie take the name Archimedes when his history doesn’t include Archimedes? Shouldn’t Archie have named himself after a great mathematician from his own world? The answer is, he did, and I’ve substituted that alien name with one we recognize immediately. I have communicated why he chose the name without having to write an explanation of his history into the story. I have saved the reader a lot of reading, and myself a lot of writing, if only we agree to imagine the alien equivalent when we see a human referent.
Rather than thinking of these stories as translations of alien texts, I think of them as whole-text transliterations, where I present the human equivalent and not the raw result. So, if you will agree with me to use this shorthand, we will save ourselves both a lot of work.
rjb
Carol Steen / American Synesthesia Association
Synesthesia of the Day – Temporo-Spatial Synesthesia
Temporo-Spatial Synesthesia, also known as Time-Space Synesthesia, mixes the senses of space and time. People with this form of synesthesia see time as having a visible form. When thinking about the year, they might see it as a circle wrapped around them. A week or a month might be a sequence of rectangles laid out in a consistent pattern. A day is often a circle. Whatever form it takes for them, it does so consistently. For some, in addition to the shape, different parts can have different colors.
Credit Dankonikolic – CC-BY-SA – tap for larger
For as long as I can remember my year has been egg-shaped, with the pointy end centered on the last week in December and the broad end comprising the summer, particularly July and August. I know that makes the oval asymmetrical, with the spring side being longer than the autumn side, but that’s my egg. Depending on where I am looking in the year, I might see the months stretching out ahead and curving to the right, or behind and curving to the left. The winter end is darker and the summer lighter. The spring side is greener and bluer, while autumn is yellower and redder. There are many more details that show themselves under closer looking, and everything looks different depending on where on the year I am. I did not know that this was a form of synesthesia. If I had thought about it, I would have assumed that it was the same for everyone. Neither of these images looks like my year.
My months are graduated segments of the track of my year. My weeks are straight pieces with humps for the weekends. They can be parts of a month, or they can be isolated. My days are two twelve hour circles, bright or dark depending on the time. It seems obvious that these shapes are the result of how time was depicted in the culture I grew up in. I’m glad I grew up with analog clocks.-)
Here are a couple of links. This one is by a woman who tells a story clearly and well. This one is for people who like and understand phrases like projector-associator distinction and visual salience.
Does your year have a shape?
rjb
ISBN 978-0-9919532-0-2
