An unmet Leonardo
Earlier in the week I read a magazine article about synaesthesia, a condition causing (allowing?) words to be experienced with shapes, colours, flavours and sizes. I’m sure I’m not synaesthetic, but I don’t find it very hard to imagine what it must be like.
Perhaps most of these sorts of ‘conditions’ exist on a kind of spectrum and are part of lots of people’s thinking, just to a greater or lesser extent. For example, yesterday I read this line written by Cameron S. Redfern: ‘From the Innocuous letters of his name alone she cobbles a personality that is austere, mannerly, anti-social’.
Redfern’s matter-of-factness about this cobbling process emboldens me to wonder about my own place on the spectrum. Personally, I have so many associations with names (both first names and surnames) that my mind immediately puts together a fairly complete image for people whom I only know by name. I wonder if this happens to others too?
For me, it happens so fast that I then have to work backwards to see how the image was formed. In the same split second I first hear his name, an unmet Leonardo has the stature of the father of a child I know called Leonardo, scraggy mane-like hair, a boyish Di Caprio-esque face, the accent of the man who played Da Vinci in Ever After and the sunshiny bright persona of the cover of a Golden Book I owned as a child called The Tawny Scrawny Lion.
Upon meeting the person my perfect composite will dissolve and become irretrievable, and the new, true image of an actual Leonardo will then settle in my mind, lying in wait (lion-like) to pre-form parts of all unmet Leonardos in my future.
I wonder if anyone else’s mind works like this or if it’s only mine (and maybe Cameron S. Redfern’s)?
