"The essential mystery of things is sometimes best articulated by their own organic resonances." (Ryan Griffith on Synaesthesia)
Ryan Griffith is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s ninth issue, synaesthesia. His work has appeared in elimae, Night Train, Dogzplot, Nanofiction, FictionDaily, and FlashFiction.Net, among many other journals. His work was awarded the Editor’s Choice Prize for Best Fiction from The Beacon Street Review and was named one of the Top 50 Very Short Stories of 2012 by Wigleaf Magazine. He was the resident storyteller for The Lounge on KPBS radio, where he read from his acclaimed series, The Midnight Pharmacy. His most recent work is a multimedia immersive installation, Relics of the Hypnotist War, currently showing in San Diego.
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 Ryan Griffith’s vision of the blue undressing of voice—the song-scent wafting on wind—the tongues of memory and light…
In 2015, while visiting Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, I stumbled upon a cemetery with thousands of grave markers, pale obelisks riding bright green hills into the horizon, the Muslim victims of ethnic cleansing by Serbian forces during the horrific Bosnian War, all with the same year of death chiseled into their white stones: 1992. One number, 1992, repeated as far as the eye could see, as though it was the only number left on earth.
I was in the city for the Sarajevo International Film Festival, where that night I watched a documentary screening about the life of Kurt Cobain. Cobain’s fame zenithed with Nirvana when their album Nevermind shot to the top of the Billboard chart in 1992, a series of anthems for the alienated. I left the theater with Nirvana in my ears, bile and rage and wounding in Kurt Cobain’s voice becoming an unlikely soundtrack for Sarajevo. As I walked the cobbled streets of the darkened city, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come as You Are” and “In Bloom” looping through my head, I imagined Sarajevo in 1992—mothers blown to bits by mortar shells as they bought bread, children sniped from the hills as they sought water. At a visceral, intuitive level it all somehow made sense—Cobain, Sarajevo—yet when I sat down to write, logic failed me.
“Cobain, Sarajevo” in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue IX: Synaesthesia failed to come together for three more years. Each aborted poem draft fell short of capturing the nightmare and violence and pain, the way the music collided and brought the image of those endless gravestones back to life. During those years I began to practice collage art; I quickly became obsessed with the artists Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work existed in the confluence of surreal juxtapositions, employing dream logic in a kind of fluency that I had been unable to achieve through words. In the junk shop grammar of Cornell and Rauschenberg, a celestial map might be married to a child’s building block, or a painted goat encircled by a spare tire, creating, in the words of the Surrealist Andre Breton, “a spark from their contact.”
Through Cornell and Rauschenberg I learned to trust that the contact between disparate objects would produce a spark, and that the essential mystery of things is sometimes best articulated by their own organic resonances. For years I had heard the artist’s dictum “trust your materials,” but it only started to make sense in my study of collage, with strange fabrics and colors and patterns coalescing in startling meaning. I needed to trust language in the same way. In 1992 the world presented me with a first taste of synaesthesia, the intersection between Kurt Cobain and Sarajevo. It took me years to realize that my job wasn’t to explain or understand, but to trust the mystery, and say thank you to the darkness.
Ryan Griffith’s “Cobain, Sarajevo,” 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.