As I drove into work very early this morning, it was as if I was seeing
everything for the first time. It was a crisp clear winter morning,
with a fresh dusting of soft snow on everything except the roads. The
streetlights made the snowflakes sparkle like diamonds on the medians,
the lawns, the country boulevards. The traffic at 6am is quiet, even on
the major routes, and it almost felt as if everyone was paying extra
attention, unhurried. The moon was still out and painted everything
with a soft blue-white glaze. You could hear the music playing in a few
cars, mostly latin and classical. The sounds of tires on the wet roads
filled the spaces with a tranquil hiss. Getting closer to the city you
could smell the bakeries, already in full gear, and the strange soft
'blue-green' smell of freshly-fallen snow. As the wind picked up, it
blew the snow from the leaves of branches, with a faint hushing,
moaning sound. The traffic lights seemed somehow brighter than usual,
their colours more remarkable, moist, smiling. I could smell and taste jasmine, vanilla
on my lips, and from my just-washed hair. I absentmindedly caressed the
leather and steel of the car's interior, feeling the grooves in the
fabric, the cold of the metal. My head was full of fresh memories of
other scents, smells, feelings, surfaces and textures, real and
imagined, blurred together.
It was intoxicating. It was as if time had stopped. The experience is
called synaesthesia.
It is an integration of sensory/sensual, aesthetic
experiences drawn from two or more of our senses into one combined
experience, with the integrated whole being greater than the sum of the
parts. It is an experience I have had rarely in my life, and when it
has occurred it has often been the aftermath of an especially moving,
stirring emotional experience, such as
falling in love or discovering a great work of art. It is as if
something
asleep in you has been woken up by this 'stirring together' of your
senses. The word
often used to describe the sensation of synaesthesia is rhapsody, which
literally means 'sewed together song'.
The way in which our emotions sew or weave together rich, complex experiences
is, indeed, similar to how an orchestra creates a rhapsodic experience
by weaving together different melodies, and the different tones of the
four sections of instruments:
- brass instruments, with their sharp, discrete, punctuated sounds correspond to intellectual love
- string instruments, with their soaring, continuous sounds correspond to emotional, romantic love
- woodwinds, with their plaintive, natural sounds correspond to sensory, sensual, aesthetic love
- percussion instruments, with their incessant, driving sounds correspond to erotic love
Ever since high school I have thought of love as having these four forms, tones. And in my recent article on the chemistry of love
I summarized the five groups of hormones that provoke and reinforce
different forms of love. The hormones don't map exactly to the forms of love, though the phenylethylamine-provoked euphoria,
the dopamine- and neopinephrine-provoked feeling of blissful well-being and the
oxytocin-provoked urge to embrace and protect (which are replaced after
the first blush of intense love with the endorphin-provoked feelings of
contentment and attachment) are all associated with the intellectual,
emotional and sensory/aesthetic forms of love. Meanwhile the androgen-provoked feelings of desire and arousal are more clearly
associated with erotic love.
Women
seem to appreciate, intuitively, or because they are more grounded,
connected to the Earth, the difference between the sensual, and the
erotic and emotional forms of love. The photos above represent the
sensual form of love, not the erotic or emotional. Men seem to muddle
them together -- for them, the strings and the percussion are
constantly drowning out the woodwinds. So for me, a synaesthetic
experience like the one I had this morning comes as a revelation, a
reawakening to another dimension of experience and another nuance of
love.
This morning my senses were alive, acute. The women I met
were creatures of light, sound, smell, taste and touch. I could smell
their longing, their anger, their despair, their desire. I could sense
what they meant to convey from the dilation of their pupils, the way
they brushed my hand or touched my arm when they were talking with me.
The catch or edge of their voice, rich as bird-song with a subtlety,
another track of conversation beyond the words, the melody of meaning.
I wanted to touch them, hold them, protect them, reassure them. I
wanted to show them that I understood, appreciated, loved them, sensed
them, wanted to help them fuck their pain away. I wanted to speak with
them in their astonishing foreign language, the language of love,
conversation and community that I am just beginning to learn.
A caress so soft and gentle that it aches, quivers, screams. If this is a dream I never want to awaken.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
