The Resonant Wealth

Every sensation resonates with every other sensation. This fills every experience with unlimited richness.

Right now, I’m typing on my keyboard, standing on my oak floor in bare feet, feeling the air move across my exposed skin, the weight of t-shirt and jeans on my skin, my heart beating in my chest, breath breathing, refrigerator compressor gently humming, screen glowing, and the mud room behind my computer in my peripheral vision…a slight emotional movement between boredom and irritation is present.

And it is all resonant.

Breathing in “brightens” my fingers as they type. Breathing out “settles” them. Moving my finger “sharpens” the sound of the refrigerator compressor. Stilling my fingers “clarifies” it. The sound of the compressor “vibrates” my feet. The relative experience of the compressor being off “spreads” them. Boredom “vignettes” these experiences, anger “sharpens” them.

This is all figurative language. The effects are quite subtle. This is not prominent synaesthesia, but rather the inherent interconnectedness of sensation and emotion, of outer and inner experience.

There is a theory of metaphor as grounded in sensation. “Warm up to you” grounded in the sensation of bodily warmth, “lost my bearings” grounded in physical disorientation, “Grounded” grounded in the contact of the feet on the ground, as opposed to falling. In all these cases, one experience, the one the metaphor addresses, is described in terms of another experience, the resource for the metaphor.

In some sense, all sensations, all experience, inner and outer, are metaphors for each other, with no final foundation or initial point. Each experience can be understood by how it impacts the net of experience…the nature of each “knot” of experience pulls every other part of the net a little to this side or the other. As simile: “My typing was sharp like an inbreath”, “My breathing was still like my feet on the floor”, “The sensation of the floor was bubbly, like my typing”. As metaphor: “My typing was an inbreath”, “My breathing was my foothold”, “The floor was bubbly”.

Recognizing experientially this interconnected wealth of sensory modification fills experience with unlimited richness.