The Synaesthesia Letters (A Selection)
In our reading period for Issue IX: Synaesthesia, we received hundreds of love letters alongside your stunning submissions: about music & hope, about poetry & survival, about your favourite ice cream flavours & the songs that keep getting stuck in your head. As always, your words made us laugh & thrill & cry & sing, made us wake up & stand up, made us feel the spine of the why behind our work. Here, then, is a smattering of our favourite notes accompanying submissions to the synaesthesia issue. Thank you, songbirds, for sharing your warmth with us. We don’t take it for granted.
Half Mystic Journal’s ninth issue is a stunning constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, & prose celebrating the blue undressing of voice—the song-scent wafting on wind—the tongues of memory & light. Examining what it means to be fully present in the world, Issue IX flirts with the corporeal, sings as it stings. It is available for preorder now.
Hope these troubling times haven’t knocked all the wind out of your sails. Here’s a new short story to soften the fall from reentry.
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It is your magazine’s soliciting of pieces of memory, light, and the stimulation of senses that leads me to submit.
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In ongoing efforts to complicate my life, I’m trying to live out as many retirement clichés as possible. Why not try poetry? Problem is, after a lifetime of ignoring it, I have fallen in love.
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Much of my poetry includes both the joys of the natural world as well its capabilities of brutality. Mahler gave us both, and so my deep ties to his music. In the 4th movement, he offers the grace of ecstasy as well as anguish. And the birds carry it on wings.
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I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the ‘60s, and my friends and I became great fans of the blues. We had many adventures, some real and some imagined, in our quests for old 78s and musical excitement in the heart of the city.
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I’m a biologist and violinist who practices Bach while her cell cultures are incubating.
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I’m submitting an experiment using tarot as a means of sense-making. Music being the beating heart, the inherent rhythm coming back into itself so we can only call it cyclical, the voice following in its re-mapping.
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Because a song is built on the relationship of sounds, I see music as a compilation of tangents, and I think literature operates in the same vein. The reason I chose Half Mystic is that this place sees voices as overlapping and intricately interwoven forms of art.
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I sort of woke up one morning and there was all this music.
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Most of my work comes from my college days. I’d use skipping stones to scratch stories into the bedrock of Lake Ontario, watching the high tide wash all my prose away, just so I could write it all again tomorrow.
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Music, for me, is as nature is—redemption.
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I have been writing poetry for many years. Wislawa Szymborska’s line—“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems”—sums up what drives me to continue.
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I am bisexual, and this is my first ever poem about a girl.
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Writing to you from Austin, Texas, where the weather is so unseasonably cold today that we’ve had to wrap some pipes (and cacti) in towels. Bizarre! Until sunny-and-seventy-five returns, I’m leaning into icy times through the sounds of Iqaluit via Radio Garden.
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I was thrilled to find a press devoted to music, what songs do inside language, aided by language, resistant to language. When a poem reaches its most potent limits, I consider it reaching into the state of song. And I consider songs and poems as synonymous responses to our attention to the known and the unknown: the harmonic blending of impulse, attention, experience, and intuition. I remember when I first learned that the etymology of burden was a subject that we often return to, the chorus of a song. All the poems I’ve ever written are in a sense a chorus. The burden to address all expressions of our lived experiences within the limits of language and sound.
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Music to me is pre-conscious narrative utterly unsubscribed to linear time.
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I grew up singing and never stopped.
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Music to me means subliminal patterns of connection within a structure of surprise. It means above all the music of language, though I am also committed to music as mood, Stimmung, the voice of moments. Beethoven’s piano concertos as performed by Igor Levit have been getting me through the pandemic, as have playlists that put the likes of Lyle Lovett, Elvis Costello, and the Smiths in heavy rotation. I’m an ‘80s boy at heart.
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You all sound like you are cool and you have headphones a soul can always borrow.
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Simplicity and soul searching, songs and pink skies—this is my take on synaesthesia.
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This poem addresses the synesthesia experience intrinsic in deep empathy, when we, through immersive experience, are mixed in and/or with another’s experience of life…
I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan’s most recent record, Rough & Rowdy Ways (2020). He speculates on the transient nature of material form and of consciousness itself. With a good glass of wine, it’s a worthy listen, especially when the birds, up high in the trees, take all my nature away.
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I grew up in church choirs and in musical theatre, listening to the cadences of spoken word poets and musicians. Music symbolizes that community for me, that feeling of sound that lulls you and holds you. Half Mystic speaks in the same cadence as I do.
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And a note—a playlist I’ve enjoyed very much lately is one I made for Andy Warhol. Just a bit of New York rock from the era. A small playlist, but it’s fun and makes me want to dance, and I think that’s all you need.
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I’ve been seeking out a community full of love, something to kick back and cozy up to. When I read Half Mystic I feel briefly insulated from this year, and that’s why I’m submitting my own work for the first time…
The governing theme of my submission is obviously loss and synaesthesia, but my work as a whole considers a very simple question: is guilt a necessary form of moral reckoning? Isn’t it absurd to regard ourselves as having a firm and final grasp of reality when our history is one of misapprehension, a swathe of color tightly held as truth? I value realism and hopeful, simple language that carries spiritually urgent themes, which is one reason why I love the poetry that you feature.
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I live in Cleveland, I love espresso and my local bookstores—Mac’s Backs and Appletree Books—and I work in a bustling bakery/restaurant/coffee shop making crepes.
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As a poet, I remain intensely jealous of what a song can do that a poem cannot. The vibration in the body that music creates is a source of intense inspiration for me, and when I write I feel I am chasing that experience.
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In my neighborhood the lampposts that line the streets are covered in peeling silver paint. In the flower shops, delivery boys carry bundles of dried poppies, branches of dogwood. Behind bulletproof glass, bank tellers dream of emptying the drawers and filling their pockets. Walking between the buildings I think of beehives, of anthills, of all the silent paths of the world that remain open. Sometimes I imagine the streets were not made by men, but by sentient cars and trucks that drove over the stone and earth continuously for thousands of years, until the great escarpments that came to be known as ‘city blocks’ were formed.
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I love dark poetry which sings and rings a hundred tinny bells in the eardrums.
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P.S. I’ve always preferred malts to shakes, and “Another Space Song” by Failure has been stuck in my head for months now, which has become my midnight meditation as I drive home from work.
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Half Mystic is a place that I feel understands the nature of music as meditation.
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As a trained opera singer who became terrified of singing in my early twenties, I often think of myself as writing my way to an open throat. Like you, I fiercely believe in music—its power, mystery, and multitudes.
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Music so transcends language, even though it often contains it, where, like poetry, the words work to transcend.
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This was a small, dear poem that I wrote and have held close to my heart. I haven’t sent it to any journals before this, but I felt like this open call might suit it. Some context: blue is one of the colour spectrums that I can see fully (as I am red-green colour-blind). While I rarely use colour in my writing, this was one particular poem where it felt right to bring it in. I hope it resonates with you.
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P.S. My favorite bookstore is this amazing spot called Ophelia’s Books in Fremont, Seattle.
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Your expansive definition of music resonates with me—I want my work to connect with readers through the sound of language, the feet of a line, the white space and silence in what cannot be said, as well as the diverse yet intimate rhythms of history, both the domestic, quotidian riffs and the larger power structures insisting on their refrains.
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I am writing fiction about my own childhood experience, which playing the blues on the rooftop of a hospital helped me survive.
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There is a loneliness that exists in the space between good intentions and failure. It is there that this poetry sings.
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It is hard to say what music means to me. What does my arm mean to me? It’s difficult to ascribe meaning to such a thing.
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For me, music is about lyricism and emotion. Music is what sticks the landing and refuses to move. Poetry and music are of the same long-standing tradition of blood in the ears, heart in the mouth. My favorite writing, and perhaps yours, is constructed with a careful ear.
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The pieces I’ve included are working around the intersections and overlays of divination, memory, and what rivers and birds and time can be.
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When I read your request for something bigger, something to lift us above all this static, I thought of my father, lost recently at the age of 94, who grew up in a rural Pennsylvania town. He asked for and got a radio on Christmas, 1938. Only static until his friend showed him how to wrap wire around his metal bed springs and attach the end to the radio antenna. And suddenly. The sound of the big bands all the way from a radio station in St. Louis, Missouri. He went on the be first trumpet in an Air Force dance band during World War II.
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Two independent bookstores I highly recommend visiting and buying from are Scuppernong Books (Greensboro, NC) and Mac’s Backs (Cleveland Heights, OH).
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I think music means more to me than I ever realise until I try to articulate it, never so noticable as it is in absence.
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To answer your question, music is everything. That’s another reason I like you.
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I hope these poems stir the soul. In their own ways, each of them are bound to the alchemy of synaesthesia. It would be wonderful if they were to find a home within your journal of beauty and belief.
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And as everyone who has ever been in a total silence chamber—or a desert, for that matter—may know, vast stillness is a mystical quasi-sound, no?
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When this pandemic is over, I will be out dancing salsa again on Saturday nights.
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Looking forward to seeing more stuff from here. It’s like finding a little clearing in the woods.