"It's the unison where the magic happens." (Darnell "DeeSoul" Carson on Synaesthesia)
Darnell “DeeSoul” Carson (he/they) is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s ninth issue, synaesthesia. He is a Black queer poet, performer, and educator from San Diego, CA, and Editorial Assistant at The Adroit Journal. A 2020 TWH Writing Workshop Fellow, his work has been featured on Button Poetry, as well as in The Adroit Journal, Between My Body and The Air (A Youth Speaks Poetry Anthology), and elsewhere. He graduated with a degree in Cultural/Social Psychology and a minor in Creative Writing from Stanford University and will be a Writer in the Public Schools Fellow in the NYU MFA program in Fall 2021. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com.
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 Darnell “DeeSoul” Carson’s vision of the blue undressing of voice—the song-scent wafting on wind—the tongues of memory and light…
Synesthesia (noun): The production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.
Formally, I know very little—if anything at all—about music and how to engage with it. Everything I do know comes from the simultaneous experiences of being a Black American and being my father’s child. More on that later.
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Later (part 1): My partner, who is much more musically knowledgeable than I am, says that they enjoy how I let music into my body. I’m perplexed by the statement. How can anyone listen to a song and not feel the rhythm, not catch the beat? How do you hear a bass line and not make a “funk face,” a universal signal that the musician did what needed to be done? When I listen to music, it moves through me because it has to. The soundwaves hit my ears, and my body decides where it needs to go next. How does the rest of the world not feel the same drift of music as flight?
It’s only upon remembering that I’m a student at a predominantly white institution that I realize the answer.
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Later (part 2): When my father was young, he DJ’d at a roller-skating rink in his hometown of Oakland, California. I’ve never seen my dad DJ, but if it’s anything like his roller-skating, he must have been quite good. Now and then he’ll break out his MC’ing talents, ad-libbing an interlude to rival any radio show host.
When I was growing up, he played the bass for church choirs. At any given time of day or night, when he wasn’t handling work business, he was rehearsing. He couldn’t read sheet music, but he could feel and replicate a bass line, even improvise on it. When he was particularly pleased with himself, he would make that funk face I mentioned and his hands would kind of take over, hypnotizing and present. From him I gained an appreciation for rhythm and gospel music and a habit of noticing the details that work together for the listener’s good, the dynamics like gears elevating different parts of a song.
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Synesthesia presents in many ways. I met a friend during my freshman year of college who has chromesthesia, the association of sounds with colors. She used to close her eyes when she played the piano to see the colors in her head better. For her, my talking voice was a reddish-orange color, but it was a deep purple when I read poetry.
I don’t have that, although I will tell you that most surf rock is yellow to me. But for the most part, I don’t see letters in different colors, or perceive years spatially, or taste names. Instead I know sound in my body.
When I’m listening to gospel music, I feel an acute tinge of discomfort when I miss one of the adlibs, like the little “woo” from one of the congregation members on Fred Hammond’s “Take My Hand.” When reading poems where the form and function work together particularly well, like Layli Long Soldier’s “Obligations 2,” I get a little tingle up my spine. There is such a physical sense of relief I feel at a sound arranged just right.
Without musical talent, poetry is the way I recreate that, the exquisite rendering of words as song. For me, synesthesia lives in the body, manifests in movement. It’s the unison where the magic happens. Any breaks in that unison must be just as magical.
Darnell “DeeSoul” Carson’s “Ode to Telefone,” 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.