Day of the Dead

Let's face it: some cultures are better than others at shrine-making.

Luckily for me, the area where I live is a hotbed of shrine-ism and, in fact, an intensely rich deposit of Dia de los Muertos celebrations. Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is not the same as Halloween, or All Hallows' Eve. In the European tradition, All Hallows' Eve has its roots in the Gaelic holiday of Samhain (pronounced Sow-wen), which came after the harvest, at the end of the year, just before the world died for awhile. It was a liminal time, when spirits came close and magic was strong; and it had the shadow of the dark behind it.

Dia de los Muertos, on the other hand, comes from the indigenous peoples of Mexico, who celebrated the deaths of their ancestors for nearly a month each summer. Perhaps because it is less associated with autumn, with the beginning of the dark and cold, it has an entirely different feel from Halloween. In Mexico, it is a time to rejoice in your loved ones and your ancestors who have passed on to another life. Offerings of food, toys, blankets (so they can rest after their long journey), flowers and so on are put out, in specially-built household shrines or on tables in the yard, for the dead to enjoy. Graves are cleaned and hung with flowers; in some places whole families spend the night at the graves of their loved ones, picnicking and singing, with candles and colored lights.


Children stay up and run around the streets, sucking on sugar skulls. Little statues of skeletons, grinning madly and doing all manner of humorous things, can be found everywhere. Death, in Mexico, does not pall. In fact, it is to be celebrated. Dia de los Muertos is a joyous occasion, full of music and food and lights in the darkness.


There are so many cultures who enshrine. European enshrinement seems to happen largely inside or around specific places of worship, which I find fascinating but ultimately somewhat limited (pictures of one's dead mother/father/brother/etc. next to/under a household cross being a small exception). In some cultures, if there is any reason whatsoever to build a shrine, they will do so.

In Japan, for example, the Buddhists build big temples, and not so many shrines (though there are always examples out there which will prove me wrong; I'm speaking in generalities). The older and more shamanistic Shinto, however, which coexists side-by-side and simultaneously with Buddhism (in other words, sharing worshipers), is a religion that is suffused into the countryside. It is everywhere, celebrated in nature and in the shapes of the landscape, and cannot be separated out. Therefore, small signs of Shinto are everywhere: in little roadside shrines and rocks, in the paper or rice-straw ropes tied around significant trees. True, you can nd large, church-like Shinto "shrines" as well, but even they have an odd quality where the outside seems as important as the inside, and often center around an important landscape quality.


But the best are the tiny shrines, the little places that are used and loved by local people, who believe in kami, little mythical spirit beings, who live in the world with us and think and feel much as we do.

What makes a shrine really a shrine are the offerings, the attention. The loving bits left for whatever spirit dwells there. Without this care, this consciousness of its specialness, it is nothing. The mindfulness is the thing.

Bali has exquisite offerings, made with care and an asthetic eye out of flowers and leaves, and sometimes a sprinkling of rice. Bali is probably one of the most mindful places I've ever been; there is this daily routine to the beauty, the delicate and conscious handling of daily devotion. Everything, everything is carefully, beautifully done: the washing of the steps, the morning laying out of offerings, the care with which people dress. And the festival offerings are really works of art.


One of the reasons, as I said, that I love California is the intense Central American influence. There are many Day of the Dead celebrations to be had - more and more as time goes on and it becomes more ingrained into the culture. I remember the first American Day of the Dead thing I went to, a parade in the Mission District of San Francisco, years ago. I was annoyed with the way that it was politicized, probably for good reason - mourning the U.S.'s transgressions in Central America, perhaps; I was young and didn't pay enough attention. There were a lot of European Americans involved, all wearing sort of Grim Reaper attire. It was heavy and dark, and not very celebratory, and it made me unhappy that such a marvelous holiday - no, festival - could be reduced to such a grim and feeble remnant.

It seems especially reprehensible when you consider the traditional U.S.-based Central American mode of expressing political dissent: the murals. They have colors, they are intense and bright and full of life. They are not heavy, grim, or dark. They are all about empowerment and celebration. They are shrines to what should be. If you like these ideas, and if you are ever visiting San Francisco, take a walk down Balmy Alley, in the Mission district. It's a continuing tradition which is worth a visit.

Now, however, people are catching the idea of Dia de los Muertos. Not only has the cheerful nature of the holiday taken hold, but the color, the joy, and hopefully the thinking of death in a new way, has begun to infiltrate the California culture.


In Oakland, for example, there is a whole weekend devoted to the Dia de los Muertos festival, with a section of 14th street closed and stalls, bouncy castles, sugar-skull decorating for the children, crafts, candles and flowers. People who live there set up shrines. It's a Thing. It's still looking through an American end of a cultural telescope, but it's real, and, well, they're getting the hang of it. And folks love it. Children make little shoebox shrines to their ancestors in school, regardless of race. Chrysanthemums are sold on street corners.

And if you're ever driving down the road and see a small, flower-covered place - a little box full of flowers and/or toys, or a bouquet tied to a phone pole - stop for a moment and look. Because that is the place where a person died. And someone who loved that person made a special place, just for them - not only to comemmorate them, but to give their spirit some place to come, and know that it is loved.

Star Trek Translated into Gorey-ese

What can I say? You must read this, by Shaenon Garrity, to believe it.

Weird thing is, I was actually a young teenager visiting Massachusetts in 1980 when Gorey's Dracula was being put on nearby (see the link, they discuss it). I was dying to see it, but couldn't get a ride, and was too young to find another way - it even had Frank Langella, who had starred in Dracula: a Love Story, and on whom I had a massive crush at the time. I have regretted it ever since. Moral: spare no expense to do something you will regret not doing for the rest of your life...

Animation About Clockwork Freedom

Check out The Cags, a stop-motion-and-CG animation from Alexei Petrov. Very cool. I love the endless lines they draw, and the sound they make when they touch.

NaNoWriMo et Moi

Who knows? Perhaps it will become a masterpiece

Okay, I signed up to do a stint on NaNoWriMo, so bear with me in November while I attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I'm going to try to keep doing the blog thing too, if only as a collection of interesting bits I come across along the way. I want to try the palimpsest-world-building idea (at the end of the post, below) beforehand: I'll write a flash fiction thing every day, hopefully, so that I'll have this pile of interesting glimpses into my new novel's world by the time NaNoWriMo starts on November 1st. Maybe it won't all be crap when I'm done on November 30th.

I'll be there under the username Heatherdoodle. Wish me luck!

Anyone else want to write a novel and get it over with? Go to the National Novel Writing Month webpage and join the insanity by clicking on "sign up".

PS. I'm posting my efforts here...

Palimpsests As Metaphor

Photo courtesy of Lou

I recently came across a reference to an "architectural palimpsest", and was fascinated, not only because the term is so interesting and apt but because the way it was used could apply to so many different ideas. What a mental find! My mind went crazy with the different possibilities for a few days. What about the marks that pictures make in the places where they used to be on the walls? What about the dry spot on the ground where a car was parked during the rain?



Historically, palimpsests are parchments made of animal hide which have been scraped "clean" again so that new works can be written on them. Generally, a ghost of the original(s) remain behind the new writing, leaving traces of what once was. Sometimes, the deliberately destroyed work (parchment being more valuable than writings, at times) is the only remaining copy of an old document, and many otherwise lost works have been recovered this way.

So an architectural palimpsest is the ghostly remains of other buildings or parts of buildings that are still apparent on existing buildings. And, it turns out, there are tons of other kinds of extended uses of the term. The art and philosophy worlds are, of course chockablock with them. Archeologists extend the idea of architectural palimpsest into their own study of layered structures, to mean "accumulated iterations of a design or a site, whether in literal layers of archaeological remains, or by the figurative accumulation and reinforcement of design ideas over time." It is a good word for structures or traces which have obviously morphed over time but which defy specific dating.

Photo link

The term is also used by forensic scientists to describe how objects at a site are layered on top of one another, showing the order of events. That in itself is fascinating. Forensic science can be incredibly dull, but in its basic form - the study of the laying-out of objects to see what happened to make them fall that way - it reeks not only of Sherlock Holmes, but of Miss Haversham, that perfect example of creepy time-stoppage.

In more theoretical discourse, palimpsests appear in relation to psychology, culture, and even mythology. Baudriard, that inimical but required author we had to slog through in graduate school, discusses the way modern culture is simply a layered miasma of images of images of images - a totally mediated experience - until we no longer know where or what the original once was. Myths and rituals get worked over by time and human creativity until the originals show through only in glimmers; fairy tales gain and lose characters, nastiness, and motif depending on the era in which we live. Our whole existence could be seen as a long progression of palimpsestic reality, where the old cultures, the old ways, are stripped away but continue to shine through in the ways we do things: our superstitions, our celebrations.

Photo courtesy of Lou

Historians are, in fact, beginning to use the word more and more, not only to describe revisionist histories and how they never work, but to describe history as a whole, in the way people experience time. We all, in fact, wake up every morning with the memory of yesterday all ready-scraped for us to write the new day on. Our whole experience of the world could be said to be like a palimpsest. I could go on and on - it is a lovely metaphor.

And what about technology? My friend Gwyan is interested in virtual ruins, the remains of old websites that linger around the internet, out-of-date and unused. They are archeological artifacts, echos of earlier information which have not yet faded. To some extent hypertext itself is a bit like a renewable palimpsest...or hard drives! Now that's what I call a palimpsest. And, in a cyberpunk future of endlessly re-used technological junk, can't you see old circuitry being re-fitted and re-programmed for new uses by junk-diving scavengers? Talk about re-use. You never know, I might be talking about reality for us all, in the future. The gods we know now and in the known past could be replaced by scraped-over versions at any time.

Sometimes, I get a fleeting glimpse of an idea, and long to make it real. I wonder, in fiction writing, if it might be worth literally creating a type of palimpsest for world-building. What if a writer wrote stories about other stories about other stories, and then used that as a jumping-off point for the real story? Wouldn't the end result be deeply enriched? Wouldn't that writer's built world then take on the patina of a real, true place with actual thickness, rather than that of a stage set or a newly-built suburb? This does happen, to some extent, with fan fiction and with writers who write about the same world throughout their lives. But I'd like to try it as a really disciplined experiment, a rigorous exercise, a buildup of reality for the history of my world.

Ah, well, maybe in that other lifetime I keep saying I'll live. If only we could write over ourselves and live many, many times, with the old self showing through...oh, sorry, I forgot: they do that in India, don't they?

Synesthesia: the Flavor of Music, the Color of Touch

In the late 19th century, synesthesia, that strange and magical condition where the sense are intertwined, was the subject of much research all over Europe and America. The fact that some unspecified number of people experienced sensory crossover was fascinating, but attempting to design tests that would satisfactorily prove its existence, not to mention why it happened, was difficult. With the advent of behaviorism in the 1930s, a field which disallowed any usefulness in internal experience, interest in synesthesia waned, and it became a forgotten science. Then in the 1980s, with the cognitive revolution, science began once again to pay attention to internal states. Lo! Synesthesia slowly crept back into fashion.

We all know stereotypical synesthesia from movies and TV: the idiot savant who sees colors when he or she hears music, or perhaps the brilliant cryptographer whose different letters and/or numbers in different colors move about to solve a mystery. Because I first heard about it as a child, I had a bunch of really wild ideas about the condition, based on a description of a condition where the so-called sufferers' "senses were mixed up". I had imagined people who could taste sound, or see smells; people who felt color or pattern on their skin, or perhaps people who smelled their way through life, instead of looking.

Some of the above are actually documented, but others are (at the moment anyway) merely fancies of mine. When I started reading around in preparation of this post, though, I found a fascinating array of different perceptual issues under the same heading. In fact, as I started reading, I began to realize that I was synesthetic myself.

Drawing of the neural circuitry of a rodent hippocampus

Strangely, I had often thought how cool it would be to be synesthetic, but had assumed, like narcolepsy, that it was relatively rare and rather unmistakable. When someone I knew said she was synesthetic I figured it was a bid for attention, a way of making herself more interesting. I knew that I had some perceptual quirks, but simply put it down to being highly imaginative, or perhaps merely the leftovers of some childhood way of teaching myself things.

For example, when I was first learning my alphabet, I saw the letters as having distinct personalities. I didn't seem to have any choice about what their personalities were, but they were clearly there. Putting together words was much like putting together little conversation groups at a party: the dynamics were different if you forgot one, or put it between the wrong two letters (thus my spelling was always excellent). To this day, I still see the letters as having these same personalities (with some odd effects due to fonts - some fonts I don't like because they warp the poor letters' personalities in uncomfortable ways); however, now I gloss over it. Like so many things when we grow up, we begin to take things for granted, like the motions of driving or the walk to the mailbox. We say to ourselves, there's the oak tree, or oh, it's sunny today, but we say it in shorthand. We don't really look at the oak tree, and we certainly don't stop long enough to actually look at the way the sun is hitting the grass.

So I have been living with these little characters [sic] all my life, without really noticing them much. But if you asked me about them I could tell you all about how the "a" and the "y" don't really like each other - but that might be because the "y" is kind of stuck up, and the "a" is really very down-to-earth. And so on.

It turns out this is called Ordinal Linguistic Personification, and can be identified as true synesthesia by a test they use for many synesthetic expressions, ie. a test where the quality of the picture shown is in contrast with the automatically perceived quality as seen by the synesthete. So, for example, if the synesthete sees a "b" as female, then making a male figure out of "b"s will slow their recognition time.


This form of synesthesia often goes hand-in-hand with Grapheme-Color Synesthesia, which is the most common form: seeing letters and numbers as colored. I don't personally have this form of it, but like many forms of the condition it can be seen as actually colored, or can simply have a strong, automatic color association in the mind of the perceiver. Which makes it difficult to put a finger on, except that tests have proven that people can be confused because of the strength of their perceptions. As one person says, of her grapheme-color perceptions, "I thought this was caused by me over-thinking things." Apparently this is actually quite common, for people (like me) to simply believe they are being imaginative, or making up systems to help themselves (as I did), in school or elsewhere.

A picture of one person's number-form synesthesia, ie. the mental mapping of numbers, from Francis Galton's study, The Visions of Sane Persons

One of my favorite forms is lexical-gustatory synesthesia, where people experience phonemes as different tastes in their mouth. Can you imagine? It would be like the fairy tale of the two sisters who have jewels, frogs, etc. falling from their mouths, except all mixed together, depending on what you were saying. It might be enough to turn one into a seriously laconic individual.

What about people who "see" music, or sounds? This is another common form of synesthesia, to have colors associated with specific tones, so that listening to music becomes a more intense and complex experience. I always thought that the little thing I did, where I "imagined" the music as colored ribbons which twined above, and slightly to the left, of my vision, was a sort of game I played with myself, because like a page on a computer desktop I could minimize it if needed. But it was always there, even if I wasn't specifically thinking about it. Apparently, this is not an unusual type of synesthesia for musicians to have.

In fact, it seems to be fairly common for synesthetes to be creative people. "Some studies have suggested that synesthetes are unusually sensitive to external stimuli. Other possible associated cognitive traits include left-right confusion, difficulties with math, and difficulties with writing." [wiki]

Carol Steen's painting of a synesthetic experience of acupuncture

I find this interesting, because I have all of those traits (except writing), and am terrible with numerals. Conceptually, I'm all over math, but when I have to deal with the visual symbols I get lost. On thinking about it, I realize that seeing letters as interesting social groups actually helps me to spell, but it doesn't help with math. The personalities of the numbers confuse me when I'm trying to work with their numeric values.

This human ability to make up stories, to find systems so as to make sense of a chaotic universe, is inherent in everyone, reaching right down to some of our most basic ways of interacting with the world. Like face recognition, storytelling is one of the deep ways we recognize things and organize our world. But synesthesia lies even deeper, right down to the molecular levels of the brain. It is beginning to emerge that the characteristic is X-chromosome-linked, and there is some evidence that some of its effect (though not all) is associated with the hippocampus, a part of the limbic system of the brain which is crucial for spatial memory and navigation, and which is affected by many kinds of altered states of consciousness. LSD, for example, is said to induce synesthesia sometimes, and its effect is connected to the hippocampus. Interestingly, the limbic system is also where many emotional associations are made.

There is some researchers who believe that neonatal brains have minimal sensory differentiation, ie, that we "learn" to differentiate between the five senses; and therefore synesthetes may be people for whom these differentiations have not developed into such specifically walled-off areas. A common conception is that when sensory stimulation comes in from one area, such as the ears, there is a sort of cross-stimulation that takes place where neurons in the sight area of the cerebral cortex are activated as well, causing a visual response.

As Mr Cytowic (see below) says, "Mechanistic explanations have been plentiful throughout synesthesia's history. The notion of crossed wires turns up repeatedly. As early as 1704, Sir Isaac Newton struggled to devise mathematical formulae to equate the vibration of sound waves to a corresponding wavelength of light. Goethe noted color correspondences in his 1810 work, Zur Farbenlehre. The nineteenth century saw an alchemical zeal in the search for universal correspondences and a presumed algorithm for translating one sense into another. This mechanistic approach was consistent with the then-common view of a clockwork universe based on Newton's uniform laws of motion."

There are other aspects to it, which haven't been explored so much, which don't fit in so well with the scientific community's penchant for following single ideas down to their roots. For example, synesthetes generally have very good memory, recalling things such as conversations, directions, and verbal instructions with surprising accuracy. They are very often amazingly good at spatial location "such as the precise location of kitchen utensils, furniture arrangements and floor plans, books on shelves, or text blocks in a specific book. Perhaps related to this observation is a tendency to prefer order, neatness, symmetry, and balance. Work cannot commence until the desk is arranged just so, or everything in the kitchen is put away in its proper place. Synesthetes perform in the superior range of the Wechsler Memory Scale." [Cytowik again]


It is interesting to note how the term "synesthesia" has been used for many years in the world of literature, art and music, not as an experiential condition but as a metaphoric edifice, a sort of symbolic way of expressing things. The metaphors (that storytelling urge, again) which pervade our senses, the smell of green cut grass or the clarity of wetness, are a cultural construct, a direct connection to the arts. Despite this, there are many famous creative synesthetes, who have made their mark, directly or indirectly, on our lives. Vasily Kandinski, a well-known synesthete himself, is quoted many times in scientific literature. His desire to bring the immediacy of his perception to audiences, his exhortation to "stop thinking!" has endeared him to those people fascinated by the wild individuality of the condition, the repercussive echos that it brings to the study of the brain. For synesthesia is, at heart, that most ineffible of things: a creative experience of the world, immediate and unquantifiable, having an everlasting impact on our culture through its artists. It brings to mind what Kandinski said, back in 1910:

"Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and . . . stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?"





Some links:
Richard E. Cytowic's very interesting and absorbing review of the subject from 1995, very worth taking a look at for a more detailed and sensory description.

His book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, can be found on Amazon.

Wired Magazine's 2005 take on the phenomenon.

(Thanks to Violinist.com for the image at the top of the post)

Creative Use of Junkyard Find

Check out this sculpture created by a 6th grader at the school I work at. Gabe H., on seeing this adding machine at a junkyard, decided it looked like a car, and wanted to add wheels, so with the help of his dad he welded these sawblades to pipe-axles. Give it a shove and it really travels - but watch what surface it's sitting on...




it reminds me just a little bit of a kind and gentle Survival Research Labs machine (see below).