Picture if you will, an apple. Not a Red Delicious, more of a Gala. Shorter, rounder, shades of red mixed with yellows. There’s a brown stem coming up from it. Do you have it?
When I asked you to picture the apple, described the apple, could you? Was it photorealistic, as if you could take a juicy bite right out of it? Was it more of an illustration with a thick outline, maybe some shading? Or just flat colors in what you think of as the shape of an apple?
For me, it’s a ghost apple — the one you’ve no doubt seen in the memes. A once-apple covered in a thick shell of ice, rotted and sloughed out a small crack in the bottom, leaving only a clear husk of what it once was. That. Take it and stick it on a black background, and you’ll begin to understand what I see when I read the words.
Lots of people talk about seeing a “movie in their mind” when they read a scene, I never understood that. Some are easily enthralled by an audiobook describing the ebb and flow of a battle, or magic, or a grand dance. I am not. I frankly can’t do audiobooks because the narrator clashes with my inner dialogue.
It’s always been hard to describe for me — ironic, huh? — until I was talking about it with my friend Sean (you remember him, I always will) who asked me to picture an apple as I asked you. That started a long, long conversation — most of which I’ll spare you, but we looped others in as well — that really illuminated the utterly different ways in which we all engaged with books.
Turns out I operate under the influence of something called aphantasia. I don’t see the scene in my brain so much as taste and hear and feel it up behind my eyeballs.
A feeling — more like a phenomenon — that lies in that salient space between words. I often talk about the taste of the words because it’s the closest I can come to describing this umami of the mind.
The words have shape on my tongue, as if I were about to speak but never do yet they exist unuttered in my mind, forming a ghost apple. It feels just like I’m having a lengthy conversation that’s never spoken. If I’m on a roll writing, it’s just like a whirlwind of a party where I’ve gone around glad-handing everybody for hours and hours, yet have said nothing. At least aloud.
I’ve admittedly always had trouble talking — rather verbalizing. There’s a difference. When I write, it’s like I’m talking. Just to the page. It certainly affects my words — how I tell stories, my “voice” and style as people aptly put it. That one makes total sense to me while it never settled right with others I know — because they don’t experience words the same way I do.
It’s something I’ve become quite conscious of in my work of late, and when I hit a block, I often talk my way through it.
So keep that in mind as you write your own words — some people don’t see the movie, only ghosts, while others fail to grasp the taste of the words. The umami of the mind.
–j.e. pittman