First of all, let me just say: this article is going to be about Ray Kurzweil. He’s an author. And he wrote a book called How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. This article is about Ray Kurzweil and his booky, here, and how both will be at The Kentucky Center for the Arts [4] tonight being interviewed (the book probably won’t say too much, though) for the Kentucky Author Forum. It’s $20. You should go. This article will be about that, quintessentially.
But, really, I want to do this more:
I would like to share a secret with you. Here: when I see words I see colors. Mostly.
In all the misstep and brilliant little blowouts of gunfire and fluff (does anyone else get images of raw cotton – the close-up, macro kind – when they think of their own mind? Maybe?) that goes on in my head, when the pixels make the words of the English language we get to speak every day, I get a slosh-bucket riot of color. Not text. Sometimes textures. Sometimes movement. But not text.
A swatch of butter – real butter – yellow, the shade that is almost an absence of color, almost “nude” in its paleness, overtakes my vision when I think of the name “Josh” (this is not an arbitrary example, but I will mostly certainly not be explaining). This word has a texture too (not all of them do): it’s plush in the same way as a sea sponge. Squeezable. And this makes perfect sense to me because of the mouthfeel.
Listen:
You drop your jaw to a comical length to say the first part of this word – that great and cavernous “AHH” of long “O” sound right after that freakish little lurch of “J” out of the gate. Do it; feel your mouth hanging there; it’s a big round thing that you’re saying there. It’s full. It’s plush. It soaks up all of your mouth there, doesn’t it? That’s a lot of sound there, and it’s almost too big. That’s a heavy, pregnant sponge.
But – wait:
Here is the end of the word; it’s silencing you. Oh no! “-SHH”. The almighty jet of hollow puff-cheek word-sneeze – they call this “hush” – that takes the big open maw of “AHH” and slices it off with a whisper. It’s enough to double you over. It compresses you. All the full, big, domed expanse of vowel love going on in your mouth just zippered up, pushed off a verbal cliff. Flattened. Compressed. Hands together, palms together. And the sponge is now just millimeters thick there between them, squished. And that word is done. You've got a puddle on the floor.
“Josh”: Butter yellow. Sea sponge. That’s the word in my head; that’s how it looks before I have to spell it out like in grammar school and use symbols and denotate its connotations and sandwich it up in a syntax, snazzy it up with punctuation. Slap it on somebody’s face like a sticker. Whatever you want to do with it. It’s a vessel. But the split second before? Butter yellow. Sea sponge.
And I can’t help it. All the words do this. I’m usually exhausted after writing. A little dizzy and slosh-water belly sick. Because all the words do this. All the words I want to use. All the words I don’t want to use but considered. All the words describing the one word I do want to use. It’s like playing 600 songs backwards at the same time. If songs were colors.