Something has been troubling me about the mismatch between water seen and water sensed - through the skin, that is. I cannot think of any other area of experience where a similar lack of correspondence exists between the senses. Certainly, we can see water and think it looks cold, clear and deep, but when we say it is 'smooth', 'rough' or 'choppy', these concepts do not translate into their tactile equivalents.
We are so readily inclined towards metaphors and seeing similarity in dissimilars, that it is unusual to find a lacuna of this kind. This is perhaps especially odd in our age of
synasesthesia, where the emphasis is on the 'union of senses'. I myself am inclined to explain my love of sentence structure and prosody in kinetic terms: I feel, when I speak or write in English, that I am navigating the contours of possible clauses much as a dolphin might navigate by means of echo-location, or a fish by means of its lateral line. In other languages I plod through sand stumbling from one cliché to another as if they were oases. Fanciful? perhaps - but that's the point. This kind of mapping between kinesthesia (sense-perception) and syntax seems pretty far-fetched yet comes naturally enough, whereas I can't seem to bridge the mismatch between what water looks like and what it feels like.
The following photos, textured though they are, only trigger metaphorical associations, not literal ones. Conversely, swimming in any of the waters depicted here would never translate into seeing these images. And this even holds for the Fuji-shots taken in the water, which should recapture both the sight and the moment as I experienced it. Can anyone wade in and explain this to me?
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| Marwick Head |
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| Rackwick, Hoy |
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| Swannay |
...this one belongs to the group of people with GREAT respect of water_by nature more inclined to death by fire...one reason i am so fatally attracted to the water species...but one thing i know about the musical side of water: _ we listen to water and it sounds familiar_whereas it never ever repeats itself...
ReplyDeleteyes_the oceanic languages english_chinese_german has too much mountains_ russian is both, no?_ finnish is gold though..."plodding through sand" sounds very precisely like it; Baha'u'llah says we need ONE language to learn in addition to our native tongue so we can speak to everybody without wasting SO much time with translation; even turkish business men told me: "5 languages? thats too much: 2 are enough"
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