Most people think of memory as a photo, or maybe a video sequence, and they remember that it made them feel good, or maybe bad, maybe sad. Memories, for me, are not that. They’re not echoes. They’re bubbles in time that I return to as myself in that moment. I don’t experience time as linear in the way that other people do when they remember things from the past. For me… memory is a doorway with a warning sign. I don’t just remember moments. I relive them as if they’re happening right now.
This is the result of Synesthesia, doing what it does in combination with a memory type like mine. Sensory information is encoded into those memories allowing me to re-enter my body in that moment and replace the current sensory input, with the one from the memory. If I’m 12 and broke my arm, when I recall that memory. I’m still 12, my arm is still broken and it still hurts just as bad right now… in the present. No metaphor required… This is how my body and mind work. All of those moments carry forward exactly as they were, right down to the way the air tastes in a room. Memory for me isn’t necessarily something that I recall, I just switch channels. None of those moments ever stopped happening. I just stopped looking at them for a second.
You’ll hear quite a few people describe a condition called Chromesthesia which is when a sound can invoke a color. It’s a sensory crossover. The sound input gets tangled with other pathways in the brain associating that sound with a color. Sometimes those colors are static, sometimes they fluctuate contextually. This sensory tangle creates a secondary sensory input that other people don’t have. Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste and Touch get tangled together providing depth of field in the sensory space.
In my case, music has not only a color association, but a texture, a flavor, a smell. Sound ripples outward through the other sensory pathways and B flat becomes way more than a sonic experience. It doesn’t stop there though. Music has a space, it can be expansive or claustrophobic to me. Most people use those descriptions when they describe how open a mix sounds or how tightly the stereo field collapses… This is not that. This is when the notes align just right that there are no walls to this universe… or when they align in a way that I’m sandwiched tightly between them.
Most people experience emotional states like fear as a feeling they can describe in bits and pieces of sensory artifacts, but it’s mostly a vibe… brain chemistry… Serotonin, dopamine… Cortisol and adrenaline.
Fear might start as a thought or anticipation “Something bad might happen,” then emotion follows… Anxiety, sense of dread, nervousness or worry rise cognitively resulting in elevated heart rate, a feeling of tension, shallow breathing or stomach drop… All secondary reactions and they are temporal. Fear rises, peaks and falls. The memory of it is symbolic… Not immersive. Even when fear is intense it’s one channel at a time. The brain can label it, distract from it, override it with logic or reassurance. Fear is something they have, not something they enter.
For me, fear is not an emotion, fear is an environmental state. It’s not something I feel… It’s something I see (color), hear (ears ringing), feel (grinding joints), taste (copper), smell (ash)… It’s something I become. It doesn’t come in one channel at a time. It hits all at once and it’s sticky. I don’t remember fear… I re-enter it completely. My identity doesn’t sit outside the experience… It’s colored by it.
And because of that… Nothing ever really fades.
First-person memory re-entry
One thing that a lot of people wouldn’t recognize is that for me… I re-enter completely. This is the blast radius. This is where synesthesia like mine, and time distortion, the experience of no time passing between past events and the current moment, collide to make the perfect storm.
A smell, a texture that triggers a memory doesn’t just remind me of a fear. It recreates the moment in perfect high definition instantly. I can’t just think about the past… I am the past… every moment of every day. The color of that silence, the smell of that smoke… Still there… right now. No matter when. It’s not memory. It’s possession.
How this shaped Damages
Every song on Damages is built from synesthetic recall. The smell of the environments that created all the versions of me that led here. The lyrics are speaking, yes… but so are the guitars. The static of the high-gain. The heartbeat of the drums. The way two sounds intersect to make a third. It’s a sonic map that replicates the color, taste and texture of a moment.
Why this matters
If you’ve ever had a memory knock the breath out of you… Walked into a room and the color was… off… before you knew why. You may already speak my sensory language. You might pass through that moment. I leave part of myself there until it lets go.
That’s the core of Damages… Reclaiming all those parts of myself, frozen in moments, in fragments of time they never escaped from.
Sleep well, my friends,
Jonathan… The Archivist.
