Folie d’un

When I get hit by a clever idea (or a brainstorm of what I think is a nifty piece of dialogue, a interesting scene or a piece of faux-history I can weave into a fictional character's life), I swear for a millisecond...just long enough to be a delusion...my vision is tainted with a light shade of red, then fades back to my normally scheduled sight. Nothing to be alarmed about: It doesn't affect my driving, video gaming or those rare instances when I make dinner.

I don't really know what to think about that sensation. When I was young, and these brainstorms would first it, they would crash onto my gray matter, akin to a mighty push, an almost sexual rush of ideas marching across my skin, my brain, my bones like static electricity. During one incident, I clearly recall leaping out of bed because I had to write the vision down, making an awful ruckus in the process, tripping and weaving and collapsing on a nearby pad and pen. I was naked at the time, too. Ouch.

That random fire is different now. I can feel it coming, and the wallop isn't so much of a fast shock, but a slow burn with a humming in my head leading to a scene or dialogue snatch taking shape in my mind's eye, Polaroid Instamatic slow-fade-in style. The sensation in my head is now a warning sign to quickly jot down what I've thought of. Wait too long to transcribe these flashes and the vision will fade with degradation of a nuclear half-life, receding in faster speeds into the fog of my swampy mind, maybe (but maybe not) snagging itself on a branch for a search party to later find. More often than not, it sinks beneath the murk. Some hunter I am.

Well, you try to outrun your own synapses sometimes, bub.

Anyway, I was talking to therapist friend of mine today after work. We got to talking about my pink, glittering ecstasies. In a fit of unabashed rationalism, I guessed the flash of pink results from the elevation in blood pressure pushing blood into the capillaries of my eyes. The bliss I feel, most likely from the serotonin levels. She thought it was possible.

And yet, I jumped back for a second into my Catholic upbringing, believing in a soul as a sort of conduit for my creativity. I don't know why I thought that. What if the notion of good and guilt we feel in our bodies is merely a neurochemical reaction caused by the training we get in whatever holy temple we wander into regularly? What if the soul resides in the brain, in a tucked-away cubic centimeter where some of the more active brain roads bypass each other in a jambalaya of a synaptic highways; and this part of the brain is stimulated by a series of words spoken in the right order by pastors or mullahs to activate traffic in our heads, making us feel pity or love or regret?

If what I feel as creativity is lodged in my brain, I have to guess that's where my soul, my spiritual sum of parts, resides, too. And if, as my therapist friend points out, we can change our thinking with mental exercise, then what does that say about the soul, about age-old religions, about human nature?

For some reason, the word “cryptography” is emerging in my mind. I don't know why.

And I also think about all those holy men driven to write the scripture from the heat of the fire rolling in their brains.

Today's Word: Exhale

From One Word

The relief coming from another posting. The itch that drives to write daily is sated for another day. I can relax, knowing it's the longest possible time before I feel compelled in a primal way to make the words dance for me, to wrestle thoughts out of my head and on to a text slate. I do this, and I can relax.