The Taste Of Memory
Consider the thin boundaries between all our senses, all our bodies. All this food.
Food has never been particularly erotic for me — joyous, comforting, revolting, maybe sensual in the case of a perfectly split-pearled raw oyster — but never sexy.
Maybe it’s the mastication — all that chewing feels a bit bovine — or maybe it’s that I always have too-big eyes and a too-small stomach, so eating is nearly always synonymous with light nausea, a too fullness, for me.
But this year, on the cusp of this season so tautly bound with feasting, I will say my senses, in response to food, feel distinctly — and newly — alight.
There is a creeping kind of synesthesia happening, a collapsing of colors and smells and tastes and touch with time and memory that is leaving me reeling in the grocery store. Inside restaurants.
In staring at the contents of my refrigerator.
In wandering through the beautiful bowels of the internet I discovered that there were many different kinds of synesthesia — in addition to the “most common” and studied, Grapheme-color synesthesia (every letter or numerical has a particular color — people also taste words.
In reading an interview with one synesthete whose brain collapses the boundaries…
