This is where I'll keep my essays
Aching
I ache to write. For the eloquent phrase scrawled on the sea of a page. Not for the sake of eloquence; not to be applauded, or named, but for the sake of the words. To touch the knowledge of beauty that is innately part of us, and so often unlearned. To expand the glint in every child’s eye to a gleam, then a flash, and a blaze. A glint still in everyone’s eye, though it may be hard to see. Are we not all children after all? To have words so simple, so clean that the ink on paper is lost and only their meanings meet our minds. Sentences that hide in the dusk before the dawn. The dawn of ideas filling the soul with the knowing of potential. Incalculable potential. Words that take no attention for themselves but are there only for truth to stand on. Wordless words that do not mean but simply are; that do not match the absolute, but meet to lay it bare. I ache to write such words but rob them with my strain.
I imagine that writing should feel as the pouring of water from a glass. Each drop so fluid with that last that only a clear stream flows. The weight of it released, let down through thirsty leaves making full and empty the same: an empty glass, a fuller flower. Such satisfaction rarely comes from pouring out; from reaching the bottom. But only after the bottom is met do words leave ourselves more full. Only as the candle burns can corners be brought light. Dark corners we may fear to go until a candle comes. I burn to write so purely but always ashes fall on my pen.
Don’t think me hypocritical. I see my toils coming short. But what pours better than a waterfall? And even they splash. For the sake of the words I continue. For the ache to write I go on.
The Zipline
“Let go Lee! Drop!”
“I can’t; I’ll fall!”
Smack! Lee face-planted into the tree.
Take a trip with me to an easygoing little street in the neighborhoods of South Provo. The houses have a dried-out shoe leather quality to them. The people are much the same. They would just as soon water their lawns by hand, and in the fall they rake each other’s leaves. The air has secrets in it. Schools out, there’s way too much energy available, and there’s nothing left to do. I don’t remember who’s idea it was; we were all collaborators though. Leave it to a gaggle of bored nine-year-olds to think a zip-line’s a good idea.
Allen had a fantastic backyard. The trees were like leafy parapets of an abandoned castle. A rusted out van was the carriage under the archway of golden branches. The peaks of the castle towers was the perfect place for our project. Michael was a “big kid” from across the street. He always had some sort of junk cobbled together into contraptions too varied and useless to define. This time it wasn’t so useless though. Bicycle handlebars and a plastic pulley can do amazing things with the right application of imagination. Jordan’s dog ran ruts in the ground around the stake he was tied to. I’m not sure where the dog was while we were using his cable. My contribution was a set of obsolete snow chains that made a marvelous ladder. The blueprints were more mental than print. The planning consisted of, “We should build a zip-line!” followed by several resounding, “Yeahs!” It wasn’t long before a board, resembling the solidity of a dead fish, was nailed to one of Allen’s trees about twenty feet off the ground. We tied the cable to the tree just above our platform, stretched it almost to the ground, and tied it to another tree as far away as it would reach. I cannot, for the life of me, remember how we stuck the pulley to the handlebars. We may have used spit for all I know. But there it was, in all it’s splendorous, horrifically questionable glory: The Zip-line. Oh, what a beautiful invention! A goosey little nine-year-old could feel truly free as he rocketed through the air, holding on until the very last second until he had to let go to avoid the tree at the end of the line. We never thought to put down a pad of any kind down. All we were thinking of was how much fun we were having. My Mom didn’t believe we had actually made a zip-line; she had seen our inventions before. Our flying machine made of cardboard, plastic wrap, and a fan; or our time machine made of Christmas lights and a bed frame. She had this uncanny ability to make our equipment malfunction on it’s maiden voyage every time. Anyway, it was all fun and games until Lee showed up.
Its astounding that nobody was hurt sooner. Lee was a bit younger than us, and a bit slow to boot, but when the threat of, “I’ll tell my mom” pours out of another kid’s mouth you start cutting deals. After no small measure of begging and threatening from Lee, we finally consented to let him ride The Zip-line. Thinking back, his awkward midget-like steps up the ladder seem like the banging chimes of a clock-tower just before your carriage turns into a pumpkin. “Hold on really, really tight,” we told him. “One, two, three, go!” Off he went. But one important detail had been left out. We didn’t tell him how to stop. All at once everyone screamed at the top of their lungs, “Let go Lee! Drop!” Being small and stupid his only reply was, “I can’t, I’ll fall.”
Lee didn’t let go. Lee didn’t drop. Lee’s face was all over that tree like ugly on a moose. If ever you want to stop quickly, smacking into a tree is a good way to do it. We told him to walk it off, but I doubt he could hear us past his own wailing. Again, it’s uncanny; the ability mothers have to ruin fun. Maybe it’s my fault for telling her about Lee’s near-death-like disaster. When she finally saw it, she might as well have shot a disintegrator ray at it. The Zip-line was no more. All this hullabaloo only lasted about a week, but oh what a week.
In a town on a street where life is what happens while you’re busy doing other things, sometimes drastic measures are necessary to compete with boredom. We didn’t just compete with boredom; we obliterated it.
It’s Me
When I tell people that a color sounds funny they usually give me a look like, “Don’t ever ask me on a date,” or “Dude, go take a nap.” I don’t hold strange looks against anyone. I realize how crazy it may seem; colors don’t “sound” anything. They’re just colors, right? Well, for people with synesthesia, that’s not true.
Sometimes synesthesia is called cross-wiring. It comes in various forms and intensities. Researchers don’t really know what causes it, but people that have it (Synesthetes), don’t think the same way as other people do. That’s not just an opinion either; their physical brain pathways are different. I could write for days on the problems it’s caused me, and all the joy it’s brought too. See, my brain wires for sight and sound are crossed. Everything I hear has images, everything I see has a noise. That’s my variety.
I first discovered I had it as a junior in high school. I was driving with my family and the name of a friend’s mother, Ramona Styce, came up. I said, “Her name looks like a gypsy dagger wrapped in a red and a blue piece of silk.” Everyone gave me their own variation of those weird looks I mentioned earlier. I didn’t know why they were so confused; it seemed perfectly reasonable to describe what I saw. Why didn’t everyone else tell me what they saw? When I asked that very question the reply confused me: “Names don’t ‘look’ like things,” they all told me. As long as I can remember, sight and sound have always gone together. It’s almost like two manifestations of the same sense. When I said that to this car full of people, they all decided it was great fun to spout words and random noises and make me describe what I saw. That got old real fast.
I’ve had trouble making sense of the world the way people think I should my whole life long. When I was five and asked my mom if I had to eat the toe of the bread she thought I had just gotten mixed up. It wasn’t clear to her until this year that in my mind if the heel was at one end the toe surely must be at the other. Part of the problem was that I thought everybody thought the same way I did until that experience in the car.
Understanding why my teachers didn’t understand why I didn’t understand what they were saying took some real effort to get past. I’m sure it took some effort for you to get through that sentence; now you know what I felt. I had to bend my brain in directions it didn’t like to go. It made me think I was stupid. Turns out I was just different.
Synesthesia has done beautiful things for me too. Music isn’t just something to listen to. It’s something I can see and feel almost palpably. The screaming bursts of golden fire as the mountains light with day are doing just that; it’s not just pretty imagery. That’s really how it is for me. I remember people by their color or their texture; not just memorizing name plus face. Everything I see or hear has another sense connected, building a bridge of association right into emotion. The phrase, “Life is beautiful” means different things to me than to other people.
Most people’s reactions when I tell them of my personal phenomenon follow the same pattern: a bit of, “You’re nuts,” followed by, “Are you making this up?” a dash of, “That’s so weird,” culminating in either a blank stare of dis-understanding or a string of positive adjectives connected by their wishes to experience the same. It’s a double edged sword; it comes with unique struggles and unique blessings. I don’t know that it’s better or worse than anything else. It’s just the way it is. I’ve never known anything different. At least not until recently.
This summer I was given the chance to go caving with a bunch of climber friends. The cave we went to, Spanish Moss Cave, is about three hundred feet deep straight into the heart of a mountain. It makes you realize how indomitable mountains are; there are no holes. There are no cracks or slits of light. There is no way for the outside to get in except through one small entrance, a tunnel hundreds of feet through winding corkscrews and caverns lined with silver and gold in minute spirals of crystal so delicate they seem to breathe. In this absolute removal of the outside, someone suggested we all turn out our lights and be silent for a moment, just to see. And see I did: an utter absence of sight or sound, so thorough it might have been tangible. I had never felt that before. All the sights of sound, all the sounds of sight, were gone. It was like waking up for the first time. It’s worth mentioning that I had been having a particularly rough time with life. Nothing seemed to be going right. All I had was stress. With this experience, I finally found peace. A kind of peace I had never felt before. It felt like an ancient well, born of glaciers too deep to be touched, had poured, cool and clear, through the volcanic torrent that had been my mind and made it still. It was as if time were a substance, like water--a darkened sea, and sight and sound were what marked it--the peaks and the crests of the waves and breakers and the winds and the rain the only evidence that the sea was there; turning them off turned off the conflict of time. It was made smooth so you couldn’t even tell it was water anymore. It was like standing on dry ground. Then somebodies stomach growled and we laughed and the sea turned back on and everything went back to “normal.”
This experience has given me somewhere to go when I get too lost in the conflict of life. Having a cross wired brain in an uncrossed world will always have it’s challenges. Having something to compare things to has made it easier. It’s funny to me that I found a foundation in the middle of the earth.
