I want this blog to be an audience for those of us whose creativity languishes without one, rather than simply expatiating on a variety of subjects.
Decades ago, in my fiction writing days, I belonged to several writing groups, whose feedback sustained me. I wrote short-short stories, which were not in vogue back then. I could not sustain the length of a short story, let alone a novel. My pieces were inspired by my favorite authors back then: Franz Kafka, Flannery O’Connor, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges. I also loved cinematic writers such as Thomas Mann, almost all the 19th century Russian and British novelists, and Dylan Thomas, but could appreciate them only as an awed spectator. Much of what I read now is non-fiction. I have not found many contemporary fiction writers that I like, perhaps because the passage of history has not yet sorted out the mediocre.
My fiction focused almost entirely on my characters’ introspections. They were sketches told in first-person narrative or monologue. I was criticized for my lack of visual description and cinematography, my lack of plot. When I tell a verbal story, I am disjointed, trying unsuccessfully to follow a chronological sequence but jumping back and forth in disjointed time. My confused listeners interrupt me with logistical questions, further disrupting my tenuous train of thought. The comedic timing often gets lost in my mental shuffle. I write much better than I speak, especially since the advent of cutting and pasting.
Though I am a visual artist, I fiddle around with a medium or technique that evolves during my process rather than working from a preconceived idea. I started out drawing what was in front of me, and still do: people, still lifes, and landscapes. I stand in awe of the vivid pictorial imagination of illustrators.
My visual memory, even visual recognition, is poor. I get lost easily because I don’t remember what landmarks look like. I often cannot recognize ones I have seen, let alone recognize those that are being described to me by way of directions.
I am face blind. I remember only the most transitory of features: dyed hair, piercings, unusual features and dress. I remember people’s stories but often cannot connect them with whose story they are, almost until I know them fairly well. The only visual things I remember clearly are the layout of every house I have lived in, specific ambiences created by weather, melodies.
My memory resides in smells and taste. I can summon up a perfume in my memory. Sometimes I can name a scent. If I have smelled or tasted the components of a scent or flavor, I can parse it and, in the case of flavor, reproduce it. My synesthesia helps. I perceive tastes, smells, alphabet letters, musical compositions, numbers, names in color, coloristic finish and texture. Number and names come with their colors, but these usually are more simplistic, lacking specific hue, finish and texture. (For more on synesthesia, read Luria’s Mind of a Mnemonist. It’s philosophical and anecdotally descriptive at the same time.)
I have discovered that the color I perceive is different from the corresponding pigment, even though I’ve matched the color in the tube with my idea of that color. Reproduction of a color on the page looks flat and lifeless. I need to adjust the color on the page for context: for properties such as the textures brought out by light, the quality of light, where it’s coming from, the surface moisture. Green, especially, contains not only the obvious blues, yellows, browns and whites but colors from the opposing red side of the color wheel.
