Luc is a brilliant artist working in the film industry. When we were speaking about a script he had been developing in college, he mentioned that his co writer seemed to be creating a story with a "different shape" to explain their subsequent abandonment of the project. My ears pricked up at this visual descriptor, which I suspected was more than just an 'English-second-language' quirk.
Sure enough, to my delight and his surprise, he is completely and profoundly synaesthetic. More so than anyone I have met. His world is a chaos of colour, shape, placement in space, sound, taste, vibrations and language. Luc is a talented professional and obviously highly intelligent adult who has mastered more than two languages. His hard won success, he now knows, is in spite of the challenge of layers of 'noise' superimposed on his world, especially in the school setting as a child.
Luc explained to me that for him, numbers, letters, names and words have their own colour. But a word will have a different colour depending on whether it is in English or French, and whether it is spoken or written, and even how it is pronounced! I think he may even experience them as taste too?
He also experiences the world according to his health and body temperature, his synaesthesia serving as a visual thermometer. The closer to fever he gets, the 'greyer' the world becomes. We spoke often about his sensory experiences, and a group of us, fascinated, and pleased for the distraction from our production schedule, would ask him to draw his synesthetic experience. The flavour of Gruyere was a soft white, rounded wedge shape that fit in the mouth and the more piquant blue cheese was a stringy stream that he felt around his forehead. He also had a special colour for each of us according to our name, how long he'd known us, the sound of our voice, and how he liked us! It changed over time.
After many conversations I felt I could ask a most personal question. "How do you experience orgasm?" To my complete envy he described a fantasia of exploding colour and shapes. Damn! He is one lucky guy, and I'm sure there are many out there who literally experience what we only can metaphorically.
I'm grateful for Luc's patience with my obsession. He is an awesome painter with a phenomenal sense of colour and light. To drive around in his brain for just a day would be a dream.
They are synesthetes. The have Fantasia-like orgasms, count by colour and can taste your name. I'm dead envious and determined to catch it.
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