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Matthew, LJ, and I hummed, making chords. Both of them are more musical than me, and I felt embarrassed to always offer up the most predictable note, the vanilla pop chord; never finding an exotic minor triad like they did. Glitching seemed to offer a portal into LJ’s musicality — her facility with improvisation and her attraction to found sounds — but I wasn’t sure if I was getting a better understanding of her synesthesia. What features of a particular road or roundabout determined the sounds she heard while traveling it? The lines, the colors, the shapes? When I asked her later, even LJ wasn’t totally sure.
We left Brick Lane for a tranquil path, lawn on one side and elevated train tracks on the other. LJ stopped. She wanted to hear the train come by — one of her favorite sounds. A train and a plane passed over at the same moment, the engine noises rising like a slow ocean. It felt lucky.
It was midafternoon; soon Matthew and I would have to leave for our show. The three of us disconnected and the world went regular again, though I found myself still sensitized to sound of people’s footsteps. LJ took us to a place we could debrief before parting ways. We followed her beneath an overpass where every inch of concrete was covered with full-color spray-painted murals. We passed through a small gate and the Nomadic Community Gardens opened around us: a rush of art and anarchy. Tiny wooden lean-tos were arranged in ragged rows, strewn with silk flowers, strands of lights, hand-painted signs. Some held small groups of chatting drinkers. One had a wooden piano missing two black keys, like it lost them in a fistfight. One housed a healthy-looking, butterscotch-colored dog. Sun-bleached boards were lashed together to serve as planters for unruly flowers that climbed over one another, trying to escape. In one corner, a wooden boat had been converted into a jungle gym, an aluminum slide rammed through its hull. The Nomadic Community Garden closes at night, but if permanent residents were permitted, Jack Sparrow would be their mayor.
LJ and I bought cups of tea from a woman running a cafe out of a three-wheeled vehicle. I told LJ truthfully that I’d enjoyed glitching. But I was still keen to home in on the particulars and parameters of her synesthesia. Did she hear specific notes when she ate? I asked.
“Sushi tastes like power chords on acoustic guitar,” she answered.
Excellent! This was exactly the sort of one-to-one effect I’d been hoping to learn about. But LJ went on to explain that while not all flavors had sonic resonance, her synesthesia allowed her taste each individual ingredient in a dish and reverse-engineer the recipe. Wait, I thought, was there anything necessarily synesthetic about a discerning palate? Later, a Google search revealed synesthetes are, in fact, often hypersensitive, but in that moment LJ’s response seemed to frustrate my attempt to snap a clear picture of her synesthesia. Every time I had it framed up nicely, it darted out of the shot or something else dove in. A half-dozen questions later, I still didn’t have a satisfying portrait.
On my ride with Matthew back to our hotel, and in the following days, I came to believe my approach was flawed: it was impossible to isolate LJ’s synesthesia from the rest of her, because none of us can be disassembled into our component parts. I can’t tour London as a woman without also traveling as an American; those lenses don’t come uncoupled. The question “What would it be like not to be me?” is maddening because it’s answerable only in fragmentary secondhand reports. We use the best and only tools at our disposal — conversation, art and travel — but nobody can break into another mind. Still, we try and try to pick the lock.
Dessa’s essay collection, “My Own Devices,” will be published in September. In November, she will tour Britain as a musician in support of her record “Chime.”
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