A Tale of C⋆⋆⋆⋆
I awake, feeling different.
I know “different” isn’t that helpful, but it’s the best I can do in a short phrase. There just aren’t words for this.
It’s new sensation for everything. A handful of objects sit on my desk. Previously unnoteworthy, they now provide a cornucopia of experience. I lack the words, but I can try. I pick up a ticonderoga and stare at it. It’s... I don’t know. All the same, and all different. There’s something else now. It’s hungry. It’s alive. It’s full of electricity. Well, the wood is, anyway. The eraser is full of electricity too. But in its own manner. I lean back and close my eyes, and it’s all gone. Eyes shut and life is just as before; eyes open and something is up.
My friends naturally find it concerning. A “new indescribable experience”, seemingly with no context. Certainly seems like reason for pause. They want me to see a psychiatrist.
I am convinced that this new sensation is to be respected and attended to, and so I respect and attend to it. The sensation appears to exhibit, at the very least, a self-consistency. A produce display in the grocery store, for example, is unified. Each individual fruit produces its own kind of sensation, but each produced sensation is highly similar to the individually-produced sensations from all the other fruit, so altogether the display seems to induce roughly ‘just one’ flavor of sensation. Further, some sensations correlate with seemingly-unrelated phenomena. I can tell the ripeness of a fruit, the wellness of a plant, and (with some mistakes) the flavor of an ice cream just by looking at it and feeling it. The ice cream phenomena is particularly surprising, because where one can tell the ripeness of fruit and wellness of a plant by factors such as shape and texture, two sorbets truly look identical. But they feel different.
I’m having a beer with a friend. We cheers, and there’s a pause. He looks at me. “Well”, he says, “We’re all baffled. I’ve never seen anything like it. But I guess it’s real. So you have some kind of bizarre gift, I suppose." He pauses. “You should give it a name. If we’re accepting this thing as ‘real’—whatever it is, and whatever that means—it deserves a name” I smile. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Maybe—color?"