Tasting the Universe

People Who See Colors in Words and Rainbows in Symphonies

Maureen Seaberg

• Publisher: RWW New Page Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781601636676
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

"Explores a dimension of synesthesia long encountered in reports of synesthetes: its relation to mystical and artistic vision... fascinating accounts."—Patricia Lynne Duffy, author of Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens What happens when a journalist turns her lens on a mystery happening in her own life? Maureen Seaberg did just that and lived for a year exploring her synesthesia. The wondrous brain trait is often described as blended senses, but for Maureen, synesthesia is not an idle "brain tick" that can be explained away by science (although it does offer some important clues). It is a uniqueability to tap into and reveal a greater creative universe and even the divine. Join her as she visits top neuroscientists, rock stars, violinists, other synesthetes, philosophers, savants, quantum physicistsand even Tibetan lamas in her journey toward the truth. Step into Maureen's shimmering alternate universe as she explores this fascinating subject, combining clear explanations of groundbreaking scientific research with an exploration of deeper spiritual truths.
" Tasting the Universe is not only the brilliant writing of a top, professional journalist looking in on a strange but romantic phenomena, but it is the writing of a person who could embrace the feelings of those she interviews, because author Seaberg herself possesses this remarkable gift of synesthesia. I predict when you pick up this book, you will be unable to put it down, as it will open up for you a whole new world in our universe."—The Amazing Kreskin

1
Through a Glass, Darkly

I’m a tiny girl. And I’m learning how to put the bright crayon colors on the first layer of the drawing and then color it over entirely in black. “You see,” the teacher explains, “when you scratch the darkness off, you’re left with the bright colors below. Take your pencils, and draw anything you want on the black crayon layer when you’re done. You’ll see it, the beautiful colors beneath.” I take my pencil and press hard with my left hand and watch as the waxy swirls of black curl over on themselves or flake away.I write my own name.

I’m 3 years old. And I’m screaming in my antique cast iron bed at the top of my lungs in the middle of the night. It is 2 a.m. and I am sitting upright with both my little hands caught up to the wrists in the ornate bars at the foot of the bed. I couldn’t have put them in there consciously; it hurts too much, it’s too tight. And I’m terrified and confused about how I got this way.

My parents run down the hall from their bedroom, my father leaping over the safety gate. I’m inconsolable. Exhausted by my shrieking, I just want to lie down. Every time I fall over, I yank at my wrists inadvertently, then bolt upright from the pain and another wave of wailing begins. It must have been quite a sight, even for my father, a New York City police officer and former Marine accustomed to seeing people trapped and needing rescue. They work hard with soap and Vaseline. When they free me, I lie back down in the pitch blackness. As I try to fall asleep, my hands are throbbing. Was it a dream about the jails my father had to put bad guys in? Had one of them wished it on me? Did a monster tiptoe into my room while I was sleeping? I’m still confused. I comfort myself watching the colored forms in the air, my own private nursery mobile, which other people cannot see, as I later find out. These visions are normal to me. I don’t know yet how rare they are. I follow them wherever they go, with wide, blue-green eyes. They are a balm in a childhood that is not worry-free; indeed, at times it’s not really a childhood at all. But in those moments right before I fall asleep, I’m a blissful babe, still infused with the energy of this other realm from which I came.

It’s the Summer of Love, 1969, and Joni Mitchell seems to be singing to me on the radio: “We are star-dust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon….” And I think it’s not just Ms. Mitchell but everyone who sees what I do, particularly the teenagers in their tie-dyed T-shirts, whose colorful swirls look familiar to me. At that time I don’t know most of their visions are chemically induced. I watch them on the news sometimes, swaying to and even swatting at what they think they see, and I giggle. I never swat at my visions; I’m used to them. The first few times I reach out for them I realize they can’t be touched or held or moved, and they change and disappear quickly. And unlike the young adults I see on TV, I am not overwhelmed or disturbed by what I see. These visions are not part of the physical environment, that I am sure of. Though I can see something that no one else can, I’m still very much grounded in reality.

On television and in magazine advertising, the psychedelia is everywhere. My parents are far from hippies, though; my policeman father has to work later than usual when they clash with law enforcement. We are “squares,” and I can’t be living in a more authoritarian or straighter household. And yet, here I am, this little girl tripping through visions naturally and thinking that the Zeitgeist is normal for everyone all of the time. There’s never a reason to ask about what I am experiencing. Had Ms. Mitchell’s lyrical “bomber death planes riding shotgun in the sky” actually turned into “butterflies above our nation,” I’d probably have shrugged. I never really left the proverbial garden everyone was trying to get back to.

I have a brain gift it will take me 25 years to understand.

At this early age, despite the delicate and ethereal tableau before my eyes, I begin to exhibit a tendency to hurl myself, quite literally, into danger and chaos. Why someone gifted with this beauty—its teal, persimmon, magenta; its wonder—would choose darkness instead of embracing the wonder, is curious. Why someone would not feel blessed and proud, and instead want to keep these graceful spectrums a secret, is not at first understandable in this current age of greater interest in the gift. It is not long after the iron bars incident that I take an unannounced running leap over my father’s lap, landing head first into the refrigerator grill and splitting my lip. Gravity and I will be co-conspirators on many similar occasions going forward. I swing from a rope on a tree and miss a pile of leaves, breaking my arm. I hop fences and skin my knees so many times my father finally has to have a talk with me. “You won’t like these scars when you’re a grown woman….” I like to move, and I wish I could fly like my father, over the edges of buildings on ropes sometimes.

“That cop was just like Superman,” the Daily News quotes an observer on the street. The New York Post puts him on page one with our family dog, relaxing with a beer after another heroic exploit. My cousins in Virginia send up the front page of the Washington Post with an image of my father dragging a terrorist out of one of the missions to the United Nations. My friend Lynne writes an essay for school comparing my father to the hero Beowulf, another giant Scandinavian.

At night I fly, too. When I dream, I leave my body and sail around my home or over the canopy of the plum tree in our yard, off to distant places. Often, it’s the Big Apple, the great illuminated jungle gym across the bay that my father scales and swings from daily. I like soaring over the streets and dodging the spires like Wendy in a metropolitan Peter Pan. Sometimes a spirit guide appears on our street, which is named for the great Native American tribe, the Seneca, before I get too far. She manifests as a giant Raggedy Ann doll and catches me mid-air and redirects my flight, sending me sailing back into my body. I sometimes wake with a thud, landing back on my bed. As if the colored points of light I see are not strange enough, I have out-of-body experiences (OBEs) throughout my life. My dreams free me, and my experiences through them provide a sense of beauty that is lacking from the life my family is living, filled with the attendant stress of crime fighting and survival as it is. I have no idea then, nor do most scientists today, that these visions and the OBEs may be related. I will find that out much later, still.

I cry and cry when my two closest cousins go off to school first, because that means that I will have to wait one more year to solve the great mystery that is nagging at me, which is basically this: My letters and numbers seem tied somehow to color. Each one has a specific shade that rarely changes. And when I think of the numbers and letters they have their own colors, as well. Though I know that the symbols are usually black on a white background, to me they have additional “auras.” When the school bus finally arrives one day, I plant myself next to the two older neighbor girls who told me they knew how to read. Perhaps they can unlock the mysteries of the colors I’m seeing (while failing to learn how to read, despite my Mom’s best efforts) and that I can’t stop staring at in their Dick and Jane books. I am looking for answers I won’t find there. Somehow, however, I know it might not be a good idea to ask about the color part of the mystery; the girls don’t say anything about this when they explain the sound each letter makes. My friends patiently share the reading part of the secret as we pronounce things aloud together from across the aisle in the back of the bus. What joy I feel the day I understand what the symbols mean, in spite of my lingering questions: See the colors run. Run, colors, run!

Despite my parents’ guidance and sheltering, my father’s exploits—hanging from pontoons of helicopters to rescue drowning men, climbing the Brooklyn Bridge to retrieve a bomb, or tethering himself to a daredevil who almost falls down the side of one of the towers of the World Trade Center—have me living in a state of constant fear and panic. I face what I am sure will be his inevitable death so many times that when the phone rings, I’m startled. I have two worlds: my inner sparkly one, and the bleak landscape of a terrified little daughter of a hero cop in an elite emergency unit.

There is little that isn’t discussed about my father’s days at our family dinner table, for we just read about it in the papers anyway, or learn it from the many journalists who phone or regularly show up at our home. Sometimes I even see it on the news before he’s had a chance to call us. But despite the mysteries being solved around me daily from the city’s crime blotter, I remain unsolved. One thing that is never discussed in our home are my visions. Like so many others of my generation who have mixed senses, I was born into an historical vacuum without knowledge of the phenomenon. I do not know that 100 years ago, people actually knew more about it, and celebrated it in poetry and paintings and light shows at symphonies. Alas, I wasn’t born into that fin de siècle celebration. So when most kids get around to questions like “Why is the sky blue?”, I ask why the letter A is always yellow. My mother says I must have memorized it that way in school, but I hadn’t. Well, why are my days of the week all colored, too? Why is Friday always black and Saturday always green? She answers that’s probably due to the day-of-the-week underpants she bought me. But I know they don’t match my personal colors at all. And where do my colored months and music and other experiences come from? I decide to let it go and stop asking. I feel strange, so why should I advertise the fact that my brain isn’t working like everyone else’s?

My mother’s answers are actually very good ones at the time; no one knows or cares what naturally occurring synesthesia is in those days, despite a national fascination with the kind that comes from psychoactive drugs. I won’t find out there is a name for it until I am 27 years old and Dr. Richard Cytowic’s groundbreaking book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, comes out. In it, I learn that the colors around my letters and numbers are called “grapheme synesthesia.” I learn that this is the “lower” type and that I also have the “higher” conceptual synesthesia, as evidenced in my colored days of the week, months, and music. Before long I am waving the book around and talking about it to anyone who will listen. But before all this, when I was growing up, my parents were doing all they could to shield me from the darkness of the world, despite the fact that the bad news from my father’ life somehow managed to pierce my protective bubble on a daily basis. It was emotional triage—we had more to worry about than my idiosyncrasies.

At home, things are black and white, right or wrong, and there’s not much room for subtlety. My mother quits her Wall Street secretarial job to raise me and my younger brother. She is concerned about my spiritual life, no doubt to balance my exposure to the city’s worst stories. It helps me to know how to pray, as I know she does, over and over again for my father’s safe return each shift. (Although she was raised a Catholic, she later decided not to give her children to that church when it refused to let her marry my father, a Lutheran, at the altar.) I also have rituals I perform. In our first house, I pray to the Apollo astronauts, whose picture hangs on our kitchen wall opposite the black and white TV constantly tuned to the Vietnam War. They seem to fly farther than even my dad; these superheroes must have friends who are angels. And in our next house, I step on the same corner of the dining room carpet and stare at a decoupage of a London bobby’s gear on the wall each time I pass. I imagine my father wearing the gear as some sort of protective device. It’s my own version of magical thinking, I guess. I know from Sunday school that I should reach out to Jesus, and I do, but I think I’ve seen him and his girlfriend in Dr. Atlas’s office being treated for hepatitis. I know because I walk up to him in the waiting room and ask him what he is in for, and make him repeat it a few times until I understand that it isn’t “hippopotamus.” I tell him I hope he feels better as my mom pulls me away. He sure looks like Jesus, anyway, so to hedge for Jesus possibly being very sick, I have these other charms.

I placate myself in later childhood by playing the piano. We have one in the sunroom and, self-taught and two-handed, I memorize the notes according to the colors of the letters. F, A, C, E are the notes between the lines—but for me they are pink, yellow, light blue, red. I play the Muppet Movie song “The Rainbow Connection” over and over, secretly assuring myself that they will one day (as the lyrics seem to promise me) find the rainbow connection, and it will have something to do with why Saturday and the number six and the letter S are all green, just like Kermit the frog.

The best thing of all is when my mom tries to teach me to do a jig in our kitchen on a rare carefree day. And it’s not just her deft and light moves or her red-headed, pixyish good looks that tickle me, but the lyrics of the song, “The Orange and the Green.” The Irish Rovers sing in a brogue I understand due to my maternal immigrant grandparents: “Oh it is the biggest mix-up that you have ever seen, my father he was orange and me mother, she was green.” I don’t know it means that the singer’s father is Protestant and his mother Catholic, like mine. Instead I’m wondering how the songwriter chose his colors. To me, my father’s name, Richard, is orangey-yellow, and my mother’s name, Mary, is purple, so it doesn’t quite match, but I like it anyway. I surmise that maybe his father’s name is Richard but his mom’s is Samantha, a green name to me. This is because words sometimes take on a color that has nothing to do with the individual colors of its letters; often the color of the first letter is the deciding factor. And I identify people by the colors of the first letters of their names as much as I would if they were blond or bald or tall.

My mother also imparts to me a love of literature and film. She reads to me often and lays the foundation that enables me to learn how to read on the school bus. She expects me to study hard, and I do. Every Sunday afternoon we watch old, black-and-white films on television together. She takes me to the Todt Hill-Westerleigh branch of the New York Public Library to get my first library card. I assume she hopes my unbounded energy might be channeled better this way. As we wander the stacks, my mother encourages me to pick out my first book: “Just reach for the one that looks interesting.” I wander off and return with one on demonology. I’m fascinated by the winged creatures I see in there, mostly because this feeling of being scared is what’s beginning to feel normal to me. I flip through the terrifying images and notice they even have names. My dear, Irish Catholic mother takes those dark mysterious creatures from my hands and marches me over to the Betsy books—a wholesome adventure series for little girls. I read all 30 in short order—one might say, at a demonic pace. I will need a lot more Sunday school and, Lord, am I about to get it.

Soon I’m in a Pennsylvania hollow attending a Mennonite vacation bible school near my grandparents’ retirement home. I like the reading, the memory work. If you memorize a passage of scripture and recite it for the teachers, they affix a sticker on the inside cover of your Bible: merit badges for the Jesus set. I am very good at it and cover that red leather volume in no time, unaware that my synesthesia is probably responsible for my prodigious memory. “O taste and see that the Lord is good,” from Psalms 34:8, is one that moves me the most. I accept unquestioningly the idea that someone could taste God in a cross-sensory experience. But it’s the colors—the black O’s, light yellow T’s, green S’s, and red E’s—that really make the passage stick in my mind, even now, all these years later.

One day it is hot and hazy, and even the milky faces of the ladies in calico with hairnets look strained. The preacher at the front of the pavilion is shouting fire and brimstone, and I’m terrified I’m going to Hell. I’m passing in and out of consciousness until I black out. I wake to a sea of calico standing over and fanning me. I’m not sure where I am, and whether the colors of their garments are not my visions—unless this is what these visions are like when you’re dead, I think to myself. The forms are opaque, dim, and stationary, not illuminated and translucent and motile. Finally, I see the crispness of the starched cotton beneath them, and I realize it’s dresses, then women in dresses, and then the tunnel widens until I realize that I am at the center of this scene I have inadvertently created. Feeling ashamed, I shake it off as best I can and get to my feet.

Ultimately I decide to try to forget about my visions and just get on with things. And so, counter to my innate inquisitiveness, I do. It’s odd that I don’t push the issue as much as I tend to with other subjects, but later on I would learn that synesthesia testimonies are always like this. It’s such an inner experience and such an unusual one, why would anyone risk disbelief, scorn, or worse? As a result, for most synesthetes, their gift becomes a very personal, very private, very secret experience. Part of the reason for this is that it defies description. The moment I write a word about it or say something out loud, I worry I haven’t quite captured it. Even to describe it well sounds very odd indeed because, well, it is strange! And so I gasp but say nothing when, as a teenager, I see the mother ship land in Steven Spielberg’s wondrous Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the scientists communicate with it via an illuminated colored screen, corresponding musical notes, and Kodály hand gestures. I dare not speak of how I understand these cross-sensory codes, lest I be considered freakish. And I am silent again later still, when I see Flashdance for the first time. In one scene, the Jennifer Beals character recalls how she was bored at her first symphony until she closed her eyes and “saw” the music, as her father instructed her to do. I feel such a bond with that character that I promptly cut off the shoulders and neckline of my favorite purple sweatshirt, the one that represents my initial, and I sport legwarmers. But I say nothing to anyone about the obvious synesthetic connection and how it resonates with me. Stevie Nicks seems to be singing directly to me when she croons “I see the crystal visions. I keep my visions to myself.”

Eventually I realize that I want to be a hard news journalist, because they are the ones who know what’s going on, even when I don’t. There are times when I come home from school to find them sitting in our living room because my father has done something remarkable again, and they want more details while I’m still in the dark. I’d like to be omniscient like them someday, I think. I don’t notice the lines on their faces or the antacids in their purses, of course; back then, they are my heroes.

A couple of decades later my assignments run the gamut from the mundane to murder and even the troubles in Ireland, traversing those orange and green lines that were so confusing to me as a child. I have a full and busy life and yet something is missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it feels a little bit like the “mean reds” that Holly Golightly talks about in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: “The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?” I definitely understand what Holly is feeling when she offers up this very synesthetic association written by Truman Capote, but the sadness and anxiety I’m feeling lately is more the color of bile. Emotions have colors to me, and I have a case of the mean yellow-greens.

Fast-forward to just a few years ago. I’m sitting in the criminal court with the worst acoustics in the City of New York. Things stated here get swallowed in the high ceilings, which has the ironic effect of making you strain harder to hear things you’d probably rather not hear at all. That’s never been more true than today. It’s August, and the thick air further muffles the testim...