"Maybe there’s a world where feeling is the same as knowing." (Sunny Vuong on Synaesthesia)
Sunny Vuong is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s ninth issue, synaesthesia. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Interstellar Literary Review, and a poetry mentee of the 2021 Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship program. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Diode Poetry Journal, Kissing Dynamite, and perhappened mag, among others. Find her on Twitter @sunnyvwrites.
We asked three of our Issue IX contributors for their personal definitions of synaesthesia: how it’s formed, where it’s been, what it could be. Here is Sunny Vuong’s vision of the blue undressing of voice—the song-scent wafting on wind—the tongues of memory and light…
Sweat-soaked soccer jerseys and iron bleachers when Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” pours from a speaker. It’s not the strangest of my sensory linkages, largely because I think of it as the most explainable: the serenade scene in Gil Junger’s 1999 classic 10 Things I Hate About You, to an overly sentimental high school soccer player like me, no doubt played a part. Heath Ledger’s arms wheeling, dancing out of the grip of campus police with the marching band booming on the soccer field below, at once sickly sweet and boldly vulnerable, you’re just too good to be true / can’t take my eyes off of you—
I’ve always found it hard to articulate how a sentence in a book can taste like week-old Valentine’s Day chocolate. How a B-flat is pale violet, and some lullabies are inherently itchy. Where are the words for the smell of longing?
To feel and be known at once. To sing like Frankie Valli, joyful on the bleachers, what love tastes like.
“Frankie Valli’s In Love With You” in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue IX: Synaesthesia is a confession by musical proxy, a desire to write love without words. It’s easier said than understood, and maybe I’m dancing around the topic like Heath Ledger’s flailing arms—but in the poem I don’t have to, because Frankie Valli does the loving for me. For a synesthete with deep-seated vulnerability issues, it’s what works. So Frankie Valli’s in love with you. Frankie Valli’s suspiciously singing all the things I want to say, all the things I want you to know. Frankie Valli’s feeling, tasting, seeing what I do. He’s brave enough to ask if you feel it, too.
Frankie is my surrogate lover. In his nonsense love declarations, a sensory shower of truth: no, you might not understand, you might not get it, exactly, but you feel what I’m feeling. Even if it’s not one-to-one. The music makes it easier to tell you, sparking dynamite, pathway to seeing.
In technical terms, synaesthesia is the phenomenon of linked sensory pathways, sensation in an unrelated modality jump-started by another pathway’s stimulation. But for three minutes and 23 seconds, that magic stretch of a song where my poem lives as both love letter and record player, synaesthesia is more like a bridge.
Maybe proprioception is a shortcut—a gateway to a kinder understanding of the acts we commit in the safety of our minds. Maybe there’s a world where feeling is the same as knowing. Maybe when Frankie Valli or Heath Ledger serenades you, with the echoes in the speaker of sweat-stench and metal bleachers, some part of you will know it’s really me.
Just hear the words and you’ll feel it. I’m the one that loves you, baby.
Sunny Vuong’s “Frankie Valli’s In Love With You,” along with twenty other pieces by contributors and three columns by the Half Mystic team, are compiled in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue IX: Synaesthesia, a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, and prose dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. Examining what it means to be fully present in the world, Issue IX flirts with the corporeal, sings as it stings. This is a story about touch which means hurt, hurt which means salt, salt which means movement, movement which means joy, joy which—of course and always—means music. It is available for preorder now.