Years ago, while out holiday shopping with my sons, we stopped in at a favorite restaurant to have lunch. At first I couldn't focus on what had changed. All we could hear was the sound track that always runs in the background at a good cafe and the sounds of a well run kitchen. The whole place was full of students and their teachers speaking with sign language.
It was a symphony of hands, faces and bodies swaying to an inner music that we weren't privy to. Their world was private, elegant, expressive. They were, every person there, dancers. One face would light up with laughter, another with political zealotry. It was the perfect showdown of body language and every one of them won the gold.
Most of us live with sound in the background of our lives from the day we develop eardrums in the womb to the day we die. We hear our Mother's heartbeat next to us, the sound of her breathing and the blood of her life moving through her veins. That rhythm carries us through our life. We seek it in music, in the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves and grasses. It's there in the heartbeat of our first lover and in the gentle sounds our child makes.
One of my favorite movies is AUGUST RUSH. It's about a boy separated from his parents at birth. Along his journey to find his parents he discovers his abilities as a musician, as a genius. When he finds his parents, through his music, he discovers that they're musicians too. They're separated by circumstances that every good story needs to make us laugh, cry, to taste anguish and loneliness, to hear the music in the light on a wall. I watch that movie every year when I need to remember that even the harshest words have their own terrible rhythm. Life is music even when you can't hear.
Not too many days ago I learned about a young artist named Christine Sun Kim. She paints sound and is profoundly deaf. She has never "heard" but paints sound that she feels with her body. Her paintings are quiet, elegant, and when I see her lines I hear the colors, taste the sounds that she feels. She seeks the meaning of sound in a world that is completely silent, for her. Except that it isn't! All of her other senses have become heightened in her need to experience the music that the rest of us take for granted. And when she paints she dances with her body, with her hands and with the interaction that she has with her chosen medium and the canvas. She makes that music that comes from inside, the quiet whisper that most of us put away as we grow older.
I have synesthesia. The dictionary defines synesthesia as noun
a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color. I see sound, hear colors, taste colors, feel certain music on my skin.
I had no idea I was different from other kids. I was an adult in college before I realized that certain sounds that tasted bitter, sweet or even made my teeth hurt was unusual. I'm an artist by profession. Like most of the artists I know, I juggle a lot of different balls at once. I illustrate, design graphics. I've been an architectural artist, an interior designer, a muralist, gallery artist and gallery owner. I sing a little, tell stories and focused on being a professional dancer at the beginning of my life. My synesthesia was part of that journey and still is. It's a gift to hear clouds or to see the colors of bird song.
I think that the only difference between me and other people is that I've kept and enhanced my abilities to be open to seeing sound, tasting color or feeling the heat of a certain red. Children are a blank slate when they're born. We have no boundaries, absorb everything we come in to contact with. We see every last detail. An ant crawling through the grass is an adventure to follow, all the way back to the home nest. A cloud is a bear, elephant or unicorn flying across the sky and it's so real it talks to you. As a child we have an unbound imagination where monsters live in the shadows of the closet and cars can talk.
Picasso said, "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up." He spent his life trying to find the same joy in his work that he did as a child, the same abandon , use of line and space as a full and natural expression of his inner story.
When I paint I hear the sound of violins, the wind in the grass, the smell of my son's breath when he was a baby. When I listen to a concerto by Bach, Rachmaninov, or Brahms I feel the colors of the leaves when they fall from trees.
Life is a symphony. If you open yourself, let all of the conventions society dictates, all of the worries of being an adult slip away, when you listen to the music ... Anything can happen! Go out and lay down in the grass and listen to the wind, birds and crickets, even the slight shush, shush sound the grass makes against your cheek. Listen.
Listen.
PS. If you scroll down the page you will find the first three essays on VISION, TASTE, SMELL.
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