I have a friend who “sees” the days of the week as colors. If you ask him about having lunch on “blue,” he’ll check his mental PDA and respond with something like, “Thursday’s not good for me, but brown…I mean, Friday…will work.”<\/p>\n
His son “sees” numbers as colors, so I suppose its an inherited trait. It’s called synesthesia, and it’s defined<\/a> as “to perceive together … a condition in which a two senses are sensed at the same time, where one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.”<\/p>\n Christian songwriter and performer Chris Rice used an unintentional reference to synesthesia in his recent song Smell the Color 9<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n ‘Cause I can sniff, I can see<\/em> I call his reference unintentional, because he seems to be saying that finding God sometimes seems impossible, but his referential metaphor obviously doesn’t take into account that there are, indeed, people who can<\/em> “smell the color nine.”<\/p>\n I recently ran across a fascinating short story dealing with synesthesia. It’s called “The Empire of Ice Cream,” written by Jeffrey Ford, and it’s included in an anthology entitled “Science Fiction: The Best of 2003.”<\/a> (Incidentally, for those who have despaired of ever again finding new SF that actually has some Sci to go along with the Fi, you’ll be quite pleased with this volume; I recommend it highly.)<\/p>\n The protagonist in Mr. Ford’s wonderful little story introduces his condition thusly:<\/p>\n The emphasis above is mine, and I believe this observation is key: a condition like synesthesia may be viewed as a blessing or a curse — an abnormality or a rare occurence of complete normality — depending on one’s outlook.<\/p>\n Even though Chris Rice didn’t meet the issue head on, I believe he’s in the ballpark in that this issue has spiritual implications. What is there is not what I always see or otherwise sense. I am like the king of Israel who saw only that he was surrounded by Arameans intent on his death<\/a>, and who didn’t see the overwhelming angelic army of fire protecting him until God opened his eyes at the behest of Elisha. I “see through a glass darkly,” using only a portion of my physical senses and almost none of my spiritual ones. As such, I’m a bookend to the fictional synesthete in the story; my lack of spiritual perception is considered normal (or not considered at all) by most human standards, but is an undeniable shortcoming by God’s.<\/p>\n [Update: This is what I get for posting late at night and trying to re-create Old Testament Bible stories by memory instead of looking them up. It wasn’t the king of Israel whose eyes were opened by God, it was Elisha’s servant. My bad.]<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a friend who “sees” the days of the week as colors. If you ask him about having lunch on “blue,” he’ll check his mental PDA and respond with something like, “Thursday’s not good for me, but brown…I mean, Friday…will work.” His son “sees” numbers as colors, so I suppose its an inherited trait.… Continue reading Non Sense<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","category-medicine","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2168"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12717,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2168\/revisions\/12717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI can count up pretty high<\/em>
\nBut these faculties aren’t getting me<\/em>
\nany close to the sky<\/em>
\nBut my heart of faith keeps poundin’<\/em>
\nSo I know I’m doin’ fine<\/em>
\nBut sometimes finding You<\/em>
\nIs just like trying to<\/em>
\nSmell the color nine<\/em><\/p>\n