Sensual. Sensory. Senses. Sensitive. Nonsense. Let's write, focusing on the senses. Take a few minutes to prepare.
Clear a space on your desk.
I want you to include SIGHT – SOUND – TASTE – TOUCH and SCENT in the flash today. Some of these will come into play when you are pausing for thought.
Try and make all the sensory things you include reflect that mood.
Touch – have something you can feel when you need to. If you are in a romantic mood, perhaps a silk scarf or something velvet. If you are in a more critical rant mood, a stone, or sandpaper. Be creative…maybe a marshmallow.
Smell - Light a scented candle or incense - put some cinnamon near by, perhaps a bulb of garlic or a moth ball. Or douse yourself with your favorite perfume, or the perfume your mother in law got you that you hate. Maybe, the scent of a lover. A t-shirt that smells of her or him or them.
Taste – something you can periodically taste. Lemon drops, scotch, mints, pretzels, black licorice, coffee with cinnamon…a garlic bulb.
Visual – put something that matches your mood where you can see it. A picture of someone you love, your favorite painting, a crystal, a painting you hate.
Sound. Be creative.
Lastly…and perhaps most importantly. SYNESTHESIA syn-es-the-sian. Physiol. Sensation produced at a point other than or remote from the point of stimulation, as of a color from hearing a certain sound (fr. Gk, syn = together + aisthesis = to perceive).
Does your favorite book smell like textured circles? Do you think you are the same age as the cerulean blue, steadfast, brotherly, male number 4? Do you dislike the personality of your bedroom’s doorframe? Do you see white when you stub your toe? Does the odor of road tar taste salty? Does Sting's voice look like golden spheres? Synesthesia literally refers to the fact that in some animals, a stimulus in one sense modality involuntarily elicits a sensation/experience in another sense modality. An example of this would be the taste of lemon visually evoking the color blue. The elicited synesthetic experience does not replace the normal experience but instead always adds to it.
Play with this. Write a page, or five or a scene or launch yourself into a full length pony.
Post in the feedback section under your own thread for comments, and make sure to comment on other.
On your mark. Get set. Orange!
Paddy
Last edited on Thu Mar 13th, 2008 05:16 pm by Paddy
Edd, I believe what you have is insynesthasia. It is rare condition where you taste tastes, smell smells, see sights, and feel feelings. Exotic and bizarre, a terrible affliction for those who work in all night diners, but tolerable enough for playwrights.
wow, paddy ... that's an amazing exercise. i need to make the time to do this one.
the first thought that came to my mind as i read this is that whenever i smell diesel exhaust, i hear the music of the Dominican Republic. i lived there for a semester in undergrad, and have had this happen ever since that time.
Orange: I need to either eat the orange that is in the bowl with the garlic or I need to throw it out. Because of its hermetic shell casing an orange will last longer than other fruit. I leave oranges in my lunch pouch on occasion for a week. Sometimes it is still edible. Maybe I will eat this particular orange in the garden when it gets warmer outside. The taste of an orange is the only taste that bears the same name of the fruit itself. An orange is the only smell that carries the same name as the fruit. Taste and color are intrinsic to an orange, one might say. One can smell an orange in the room. No other fruit can compare. There is an orange fragrance in Florida and California, where entire streets smell of orange blossoms. An orange slice is made like a package that neatly folds out of the shell of the fruit, unless you have long fingernails, and then the juice squirts all over your sweater. An orange is the perfect package. One cannot hear a orange, however, not if it is stationary. I love orange juice, or O.J., and loved it before the former football player took the name of the juice I used to drink. Orange is my favorite color, especially when the Broncos are winning, though the Orange Crush is more like the Orange Slush these days, and the orange logo is little more than a quarter moon. And orange joke:
Knock, knock:
"Who's there?
Orange:
"Orange, who?"
Orange you gonna let me in?
HM. Maybe I should think oranges and the neurons would re-o-range themselves into an effluvium of creative synesthaesia. Right now, all I am getting is oatmeal sludge.
Well, I was not amused to discover that the first synthesthetic vision that came to me during this exercise was having oatmeal mush for brains. Actually I pictured dry oatmeal flakes peeling off the pia mater -- a truly disgusting vision. I don't even like oatmeal.
I am trying to replace the vision of my brain as a bowl of oatmeal slush with a hologram of a radiant sun. That sounds like my brain's on drugs though, doesn't it? I don't do drugs, however. . .nor oatmeal.
a radiant sun sounds AWESOME, I am certain if you were on drugs it would just be an orange haze...you have much greater clarity than that.
it is true, oatmeal is not the most INSPIRING of images.
So, turn the oatmeal flakes into SNOW flakes. Or if that is too cold, turn the snow flakes into sacred geometry, okay, so now it sounds like I am on drugs...*giggle*
The imagination is a WONDERFUL tool and I LIKE muslie. *wink*
