52.46... seeing visually
I think I may have mentioned this before, but the big joke in my most intimate crowd of friends is "Oh that's Karen... she sees things VISUALLY". (beat) (beat) (beat) Duh-uh!
It's my own fault. I think it mighta been at the Thanksgiving table a few years ago when I- without adequate aforethought- blurted out in the middle of a conversation "Well that's because I see everything visually". Meaning that I'm more highly attuned to visual stimuli than to anything else in a given situation. If the light's too bright- in my opinion- in a room I will have a hard time concentrating on what is being said until I adjust it. Certain colors- or color combinations- will make my teeth clench. I can remember minute details of the rooms of houses I was in years ago even when I can't call to mind the name of the host. And visual chaos, other than of course my own clutter, will render me incapable of productivity... and even my own visually cacophonous environment will get to me when it reaches a certain point. Didn't have my camera with me on my walk home today from my nutritionist appointment, so of course I saw two dozen imaginary oblong frames over perfect photo ops through my built-in organic viewfinder in the course of two miles.
I'm sure the visual bunch around here can relate!
For some reason this penchant of mine seems particularly acute near the holidays. In both good and bad ways. I love, for instance, how illumination can be used so beautifully to set mood for the "dark of winter" holidays that hover around the solstice. And I have a healthy appreciation for some good old fashioned kitsch... good thing in my neighborhood! But I have no tolerance for the "over the top" sensibilities of the "bigger is better" crowd. Last night when I was over at Matt's for the weekly viewing of my favorite show "Pushing Daisies"- beloved by me mostly for it's fabulous visual sense, but also it's slightly absurd point of view- I hit my limit of bad holiday advertising visuals in less than three hours. A new record I believe. Luckily, I have a significant counterbalance in memories of holidays past.
Last week when I was making pies the day before the holiday, with a buncha friends and family laughing and talking at a table across the room, just the act of looking down into the bowl at the pastry blender mixing fat and flour conjured up a breathtaking remembrance of the barren front yard and manual water pump of my Indiana grandmother. As a very young child I would sit on her ramshackle sagging porch staring out at that pump while we waited impatiently for the pie-day treat she always made us... little individual piecrusts to eat plain and salty and warm from the oven. And then, as always happens when that visual comes to mind, I remembered too how her kitchen looked when my grandad would take a bath in the galvanized tub, with water from the pump heated in kettles on the stove while she was baking the pies. If I was paid to I don't believe I could recall the timbre of my grandfather's voice, or what kind of fillings grandma put in the full-sized piecrusts.... but I could paint you an accurate picture of that front yard, and can draw a groundplan of that kitchen with its farmhouse table and well-used butter churn and the hole in one of the sagging floorboards that you had to avoid. It's not that I didn't love them.... it's that my visual memories overwhelm most of the others.
There's another visual memory I was trying to describe to Matt recently. Much harder to describe. One Christmas Eve when I was maybe 8 or 9 or 10 years old, and we lived in a happy but crowded small duplex, I escaped to the tiny bathroom- the only room with a lock on the door- to elude the party downstairs and the inevitable festive chaos for a few minutes. It had snowed that day, which prompted some of the celebration below, and in there, with the lights turned off, the quality of the light that came through the venetian blinds- reflected off the cold white untrammeled-as-yet snow twenty feet below- had a serenity and a magical quality to it that I've never forgotten. Almost blue, but feeling both warm and cool at the same time. Bright enough that there must have been a full moon, though I don't recall seeing it. The din belowstairs seemed far away for a moment, and there was a feeling of promise to it that I know had to do with anticipation of Christmas, but that felt- in that moment- something more portentous than that.
I bring this one up because, over the many years since that night, maybe once every few years, I will be in a dark room somewhere and the quality of the light will immediately transport me back to that moment.... and I'll see it again as if I'm a child sitting in that tiny bathroom, just hours before Santa's anticipated arrival by sleigh. It's a very happy feeling.
Not all of the visual memories are holiday related, of course. Seeing lavendar growing anywhere near silver artemesia will bring to mind herbalist Adelma Simmons- now long dead- bending over a row of her plants in her signature capelette and skullcap tackling an unwanted weed. Any image hereabouts of a straight highway through a desert will recall to me precisely the way New Mexico looked over the dashboard of our rental car when Matt introduced me to the beauty of that part of the country via route 40. My friend Zen Granny posted a photograph from a mountaintop in Switzerland recently that brought back a memory of sitting on a misty mountaintop high above lake Lucerne so vivid and clear that I swear I could feel the chill in the air that I felt there 34 years ago. I've been known to miss my bus stop when someone on the route reminds me of my mother, and I get lost in a photorealistic picture in my head of a day she was across from me on the Newington to Hartford bus explaining to a newcomer where the best bargains were to be found in the area. I was a sullen teenager at the time too embarrassed to sit next to my mom, but not so jaded that I don't remember the exact way the late afternoon sun sat on her shoulder, or the grateful smile of the mousy blond woman in the incongruous black fishnet stockings who- though she didn't know it at the time- was being inducted into the exclusive cabal of my mother's G Fox & Company cronies.
Oh, you know I could go on and on, but I'll spare you the tedium. Sometimes this acute visual memory feels like a curse, but most of the time I'm grateful for it. Would I trade it for some of the memories that are less developed in me? ...names. ...dates. ...how to make money reliably. Those would be tempting ones to have. But not if I'd have to give this one up. Even if my friends do make fun of me for it.
52.46... seeing visually
I think I may have mentioned this before, but the big joke in my most intimate crowd of friends is "Oh that's Karen... she sees things VISUALLY". (beat) (beat) (beat) Duh-uh!
It's my own fault. I think it mighta been at the Thanksgiving table a few years ago when I- without adequate aforethought- blurted out in the middle of a conversation "Well that's because I see everything visually". Meaning that I'm more highly attuned to visual stimuli than to anything else in a given situation. If the light's too bright- in my opinion- in a room I will have a hard time concentrating on what is being said until I adjust it. Certain colors- or color combinations- will make my teeth clench. I can remember minute details of the rooms of houses I was in years ago even when I can't call to mind the name of the host. And visual chaos, other than of course my own clutter, will render me incapable of productivity... and even my own visually cacophonous environment will get to me when it reaches a certain point. Didn't have my camera with me on my walk home today from my nutritionist appointment, so of course I saw two dozen imaginary oblong frames over perfect photo ops through my built-in organic viewfinder in the course of two miles.
I'm sure the visual bunch around here can relate!
For some reason this penchant of mine seems particularly acute near the holidays. In both good and bad ways. I love, for instance, how illumination can be used so beautifully to set mood for the "dark of winter" holidays that hover around the solstice. And I have a healthy appreciation for some good old fashioned kitsch... good thing in my neighborhood! But I have no tolerance for the "over the top" sensibilities of the "bigger is better" crowd. Last night when I was over at Matt's for the weekly viewing of my favorite show "Pushing Daisies"- beloved by me mostly for it's fabulous visual sense, but also it's slightly absurd point of view- I hit my limit of bad holiday advertising visuals in less than three hours. A new record I believe. Luckily, I have a significant counterbalance in memories of holidays past.
Last week when I was making pies the day before the holiday, with a buncha friends and family laughing and talking at a table across the room, just the act of looking down into the bowl at the pastry blender mixing fat and flour conjured up a breathtaking remembrance of the barren front yard and manual water pump of my Indiana grandmother. As a very young child I would sit on her ramshackle sagging porch staring out at that pump while we waited impatiently for the pie-day treat she always made us... little individual piecrusts to eat plain and salty and warm from the oven. And then, as always happens when that visual comes to mind, I remembered too how her kitchen looked when my grandad would take a bath in the galvanized tub, with water from the pump heated in kettles on the stove while she was baking the pies. If I was paid to I don't believe I could recall the timbre of my grandfather's voice, or what kind of fillings grandma put in the full-sized piecrusts.... but I could paint you an accurate picture of that front yard, and can draw a groundplan of that kitchen with its farmhouse table and well-used butter churn and the hole in one of the sagging floorboards that you had to avoid. It's not that I didn't love them.... it's that my visual memories overwhelm most of the others.
There's another visual memory I was trying to describe to Matt recently. Much harder to describe. One Christmas Eve when I was maybe 8 or 9 or 10 years old, and we lived in a happy but crowded small duplex, I escaped to the tiny bathroom- the only room with a lock on the door- to elude the party downstairs and the inevitable festive chaos for a few minutes. It had snowed that day, which prompted some of the celebration below, and in there, with the lights turned off, the quality of the light that came through the venetian blinds- reflected off the cold white untrammeled-as-yet snow twenty feet below- had a serenity and a magical quality to it that I've never forgotten. Almost blue, but feeling both warm and cool at the same time. Bright enough that there must have been a full moon, though I don't recall seeing it. The din belowstairs seemed far away for a moment, and there was a feeling of promise to it that I know had to do with anticipation of Christmas, but that felt- in that moment- something more portentous than that.
I bring this one up because, over the many years since that night, maybe once every few years, I will be in a dark room somewhere and the quality of the light will immediately transport me back to that moment.... and I'll see it again as if I'm a child sitting in that tiny bathroom, just hours before Santa's anticipated arrival by sleigh. It's a very happy feeling.
Not all of the visual memories are holiday related, of course. Seeing lavendar growing anywhere near silver artemesia will bring to mind herbalist Adelma Simmons- now long dead- bending over a row of her plants in her signature capelette and skullcap tackling an unwanted weed. Any image hereabouts of a straight highway through a desert will recall to me precisely the way New Mexico looked over the dashboard of our rental car when Matt introduced me to the beauty of that part of the country via route 40. My friend Zen Granny posted a photograph from a mountaintop in Switzerland recently that brought back a memory of sitting on a misty mountaintop high above lake Lucerne so vivid and clear that I swear I could feel the chill in the air that I felt there 34 years ago. I've been known to miss my bus stop when someone on the route reminds me of my mother, and I get lost in a photorealistic picture in my head of a day she was across from me on the Newington to Hartford bus explaining to a newcomer where the best bargains were to be found in the area. I was a sullen teenager at the time too embarrassed to sit next to my mom, but not so jaded that I don't remember the exact way the late afternoon sun sat on her shoulder, or the grateful smile of the mousy blond woman in the incongruous black fishnet stockings who- though she didn't know it at the time- was being inducted into the exclusive cabal of my mother's G Fox & Company cronies.
Oh, you know I could go on and on, but I'll spare you the tedium. Sometimes this acute visual memory feels like a curse, but most of the time I'm grateful for it. Would I trade it for some of the memories that are less developed in me? ...names. ...dates. ...how to make money reliably. Those would be tempting ones to have. But not if I'd have to give this one up. Even if my friends do make fun of me for it.