So I have always described the oddities of my perceptual system as synaesthesia. But really, based on what I have read, it’s not really synaesthesia.  Normally I have seen such symptoms as coloured sounds described as “hard wired” allbeit mis-wired, but mine seems to come and go. Since I was diagnosed as a petite-mal epileptic as a teen, I have to assume that the times when my brain veers of course is somehow related to episodic misfirings which trip the synaesthetic circuits.

Now I know that’s not how it actually works but it is the closest narrative I have been able to come up with without submitting myself to scrutiny – which, based on my experiences of other forms of “scrutiny,” I won’t do.

Posting these poems together made me realize that what ever it is that happens – it happens whether I am awake, in pain or not, or asleep.  That seems to me to indicate a probable physical cause rather than a psychological one, although the lines between them is pretty thin I suspect. All this goes to say is that I have come to the conclusion that I am not crazy, despite occasional protestations to the contrary.

So, my question to myself is “what is it?” That is, I recognize that ting-yellow is an illusion, but…

Yellow doesn’t ting, nor does the sound “ting” have a yellow face. But it is also true that a purple hyacinth is not really purple – that is purple is a sensation most humans get in response to a specific wavelength. That’s what purple is, a response to an environmental set of circumstances. Yet we wouldn’t call seeing a purple hyacinth an illusion, because it is one we (for the most part) share. And, for what ever reason, at certain times, I respond to certain environmental stimuli by perceiving ting-yellow.  So really I’m not so different. It’s just that ting-yellow isn’t a “normal” response to that particular stimuli.

In my thinking about these kinds of experiences and the common human response of meaning-seeking, I have had to pretty rigorously remind myself that experience and meaning are separate realms.  In other words, Purple is not out there in the world as some sort of Platonic Ideal just because we respond to a specific set of wavelengths in a certain way. Experience occurs automatically as we live in the world. Meaning is something that has to be generated and is fundamentally a story humans make up in response to the living we do.

So my short form for this is: Experience is the response of a entity reacting to its environment;  meaning is the story we tell ourselves about that response. This way I avoid the problem of illusion altogether because the word illusion is one that assumes a conflated experience-meaning; it assumes that there is some meaning that is necessarily connected to some set of experiences. And that just doesn’t seem to be true.