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:
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. Category: Being Human
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Women never really expect a “mere male” to attempt to understand them. Collectively, we have this unspoken understanding that we are somehow slightly “superior” to men because of our complexity of emotion/mind/spirit. It’s a fallacy of course that we are but still… girls do like feeling a little bit powerful on occasion. Men CAN be very simple after all. You feed them well and fuck them often and they pretty much leave you be to do what you want.When males take an interest in a womans perspective, it’s not just disconcerting but also a little bit satisfying and a little bit dangerous. If men were to completely understand women, I’m not sure how we’d react. Women are like spies. What they do behind the scenes has more power than what they do in the spotlight. Secrets, subterfuge, manipulation, wiles, coquettishness and old fashioned emotional slight of hand are our power tools. I think we are “better” at it than we care to admit. It’s not that we are out to fool men all the time, its just that its easier than having a man with wounded pride get all uppity and cranky because he’s been shown up for his idiocy.Yes! It’s a game…and old old old one. If we stopped playing it who knows how the world might change?
Once I described a similar sensation (synaesthesia)to my bioenergetic doctor and she told me that it happened when you are able to open your 7 chakras alltogether…. that also means that you have activated all your glandular system because each chakra is an energy vortice connected to specific glands…. .interesting isn´t it..? we seem to be much more physical than what we would like to be…..our attention jumps to a different kind of percepcion.I agree with Michelle´s comment… but ¿why do we play it? ¿Do we really like the game – men and women-? and what happens with the people that never learn how to play….. ? or that never realized it is a game?
Dave…..you make it sound like you were in a group fuck and got some or a lot last night….did you? All these tantalizing posts with suggestive illustrations, I was wondering….
Of tastes and smells, sound and music, touch and texture and all that makes a woman, a woman…independently from a man… they are not to be compared…they are different creatures who may complement each other when they reach out and try to understand each other’s mystery.
Michelle: This is brilliant. I hope it’s not entirely right, that it isn’t just a game. Our world has no time for games. Mariella: We are indeed more physical than we dare admit. The spell of the sensuous is one whose power we may not want to admit. And I’m not sure what happens to those who don’t play the game, but I plan to find out.Anant: Nope, it wasn’t, and isn’t about sex.
I had a very similar experience about a year ago while driving. I descibed it as the realization that I was alive. I remember thinking to myself, “I’m alive, most of the matter I see around me is not but the matter in me, at this time, is.” It only lasted about 10 minutes but it was amazing. It felt like it was coming from a part of me that is usually buried by some kind of repeating program – don’t really know. Man, if I could live in that state for a while.
I read your blog Dave …on and off.Have you…like countless others begun to lose the plot between what’s SL and RL ?It’s not that simple, I know….but sheesh mate…..rhapsodic ? endorphin provoked ?The only love I was thinking about engaging in ( ever since high school was a series of duets with the odd solo performance amongst other wind instruments.SL dosent come even come close….. in any register…. with the real thing….on all levels.Perhaps one day it will but till then I’ll be content with avoiding the up-skirters.