Flying Blind
Discover more from The Means Whereby—Inspiration + Expansion for Creatives
Sleeping with the windows open I’m attuned to the eerie che-chees of the night chirpers. What do they say? And what does it mean to me? We’re always living in the unknown, of course, but October reveals that in beautiful ways. The dark sky holds fantastic flocks of unseen birds, with some 794.3 million in flight country-wide on Wednesday at midnight and a predicted migration of some 6,000-13,000 estimated birds per km traveling above upstate New York tonight as I write. That I can’t see them makes their transit all the more astonishing.
The cusp of the unknown is a creative expanse, a misty, generative zone that separates craft (with a known outcome) from art (defined by its unknown terminus). While the brain loves pattern recognition, finding logic and safety in the midst of the world’s chaos, it also thrills to the unexpected. We cherish the weird, the anecdotal, the story that statistics couldn’t predict, no matter how science-y our culture gets.
One of the ways I invite this unknowingness into my own practices is with a beautiful midnight blue silk blindfold. Sensual and evocative, it’s an ancient technology for inducing surprise and illumination (she puns). A simple length of cloth can change almost anything. I have a friend who plays guitar blindfolded. There are yoga studios where they offer blindfolded yoga these days, and I’ve watched people bind themselves up to dance 5 Rhythms. Naturally, martial artists use the technique to train focus, their sense of intuition and somatic awareness.
Strange things happen in the veiled world. After just one day participants in a blindfolded retreat reported vivid dreams and visions, and even hallucinations or bouts of synesthesia. After five days, one study has shown, the brain adapts, and the sense of touch begins to stimulate the visual cortex.
I was reminded of the creative power of the blindfold recently via Wes Anderson’s mysterious new Netflix short, an adaptation of a Roald Dahl story about a man who can see without using his eyes, starring Sir Ben Kingsley and Benedict Cumberbatch. The whole Wes aesthetic is at its peak, but what’s most thrilling isn’t the classic Anderson stuff, but witnessing the director as an artist, creating new narrative rules while toying with and breaking others.
So I tie on my pretty silk and enter the bath. The water, so familiar, takes on an unusual density, like clay, something I can sculpt and carve. It becomes a dance partner, then a strange terrain. Its heat electrifies my skin as I wriggle and wonder, the amplified sound of running water creating a sensorial haze. Kinky? Maybe. Doing almost anything blindfolded evokes an edgy vulnerability. Blindfolded drawing. Blindfolded writing. Blindfolded tea.
For me, putting on the blindfold is one of the easiest ways to court the Roman goddess Fortuna, who’s pictured blindfolded and armed with both a cornucopia and a ship’s wheel—her wheel of fortune. She promises blind luck, as the wheel turns and we face her caprice. Things are revealed, whether we see them coming or not, offering us the opportunity to confront our own limitations, reminding us to stay in touch with mysteries beyond our control, and acknowledging our intimate partnership with chance.
May we ride out to meet our fate! I hope you’ll encounter new worlds and new ways this week, and may Fortuna be kind. Let me know how it goes. XJessica
The Unknown Worlds of Synesthesia
Experiencing sightlessness this week led me to consider the phenomenon of synesthesia more deeply. Last year researchers examined an Italian man known only as CB, a 40 year-old who holds a phD in computer science and is both congenitally blind and experiences synesthesia—a first. Most commonly, synesthesia is seeing colors while listening to music, but CB’s inner life is a tactile and proprioceptive playground. He experiences the numbers one and two as having a cardboard-like texture, and the number three as “soft velvet.” Four and five are smooth like plastic, and they all exist as cubes in CB’s mental space, which is aligned along a mountain range. Whenever he calls a number to mind, he moves through this landscape, encountering them as he would maneuvering through his house. He can explore them from different perspectives, hovering above or dipping below.
In the same way, for CB the days of the week, letters and months all have their own textural and spatial feel. A is soft as snow, but B is like plexiglass. Monday is wooden, but Tuesday is rough plastic. September feels like a mop, and November is rough, like raw wool.
As I read these descriptions, I feel CB’s experience stir in my imagination like encountering a provocative piece of art. It’s something that synesthete artist Vassily Kandinsky could appreciate. He described art’s ability to take you into the unknown: “… lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking!” he suggested. “Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?”
A note to all
I’m so honored you’ve decided to join me in this Substack space. I don’t know whether I should be more especially thankful to those whom I’ve met before (I am!) or to those whom I haven’t yet (I am!).
My plan is to post once a week with notes on creative process, on my esoteric wanderings, and on wellness for creatives, which are all my great passions. However, you may not know that my first book, Encyclopedia of the Exquisite, a compendium of delightful and strange historical anecdotes, was in many ways meant to serve as a treasure trove of inspiration for other creatives. Happily, I know that many other writers and visual artists discovered it and used it in that way—as a source—although I am equally touched whenever I hear that the book has brought solace to someone in sickness or convalescence. To me wellness and inspiration feel deeply linked in ways that I’m excited to explore here.
If there is something particular that you’d enjoy more of, or if there is something that pulls you, pushes you or pleases you, please reach out and let me know.
