O Pioneers

O you daughters of the West!

O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!

Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,

Pioneers! O pioneers

Walt Whitman

 O Pioneers is about the life  of immigrants who settled down on the plains of Nebraska in the late 1800’s. Willa Cather deals with many fascinating themes that make this novel a timeless story:  love, friendship, social prejudices and the relationship of the immigrants with their new environment. (I fell in love with My Antonia three years ago and I didn't know I would love O Pioneers just as much).

 The heroine of this novel is Alexandra Bergson, a woman ahead of her times.  Before her father passed away, when she was still a teenager, he entreated Alexandra to be responsible for the land. Therefore, the financial future of her family fell upon her shoulders.

 Eking out a living in Nebraska meant making the land productive and sustainable.  Unlike her mother, who was unable to adjust to the demands of the new place, Alexandra found ways to make the land prosperous, enabling her siblings to make a living on their farms.  
 Alexandra had three younger brothers, and she was able to surpass her siblings in terms of financial accomplishments. However, she was not free of the gender inequalities that shaped the prejudices and behaviors.

   Willa Cather is skillful at showing how women were judged differently from men, and some of these judgments continue to resonate.  I will analyze these aspects of the story because I think they tend to be overlooked by the critics.

 Alexandra was confident and practical, but she did not have time or energy to devote to love. Her brothers were  ashamed of the fact that she was still single at age forty. On the other hand, her friend Marie was married. She fell in love with Frank and married him hastily, but she later found herself in an unhealthy relationship.

 Marie was outspoken, spontaneous and affectionate whereas her husband was possessive and short-tempered. He drank too much alcohol and often bullied her. This marital mismatch led Marie to withdraw from him and to fall in love with another man: Emil (Alexandra’s youngest brother).  

 Alexandra was too pragmatic to sense that Emil and Marie were in love with each other.  She was interested in her male friend Carl Linstrum, but her brothers Lou and Oscar opposed a potential love relationship with him because they were convinced that Carl was only attracted to her money. Besides, they hinted at the idea that a man would not care for a single woman once she is in her forties. Through this conflict Willa Cather shows how the male characters feel they have a right to her money and to opine about her personal affairs. They also imply that as  women age, society does not expect them to get married. 

Did the same idea apply to men? No; it is made clear in the novel that Carl was expected to marry somebody younger. Hence, this idea carries the innuendo that a woman is a kind of love object that only serves the purpose of marriage when she is young.

 I will share some extracts of their conversations to support my statements.

“Lou turned to his brother. ‘This is what comes of letting a woman meddle in business,’ he said bitterly. ‘We ought to have taken things in our own hands years ago. But she liked to run things, and we humored her. We thought you had good sense, Alexandra. We never thought you’d do anything foolish.

“Alexandra rapped impatiently on her desk with her knuckles. ‘Listen, Lou. Don’t talk wild. You say you ought to have taken things into your own hands years ago. I suppose you mean before you left home. But how could you take hold of what wasn’t there? I’ve got most of what I have now since we divided the property; I’ve built it up myself, and it has nothing to do with you.

“Oscar spoke up solemnly. ‘The property of a family really belongs to the men of the family, no matter about the title.”

“Everybody’s laughing to see you get took in; at your age, too. Everybody knows he’s nearly five years younger than you, and is after your money. Why, Alexandra, you are forty years old!”

 ‘I only meant’, said Oscar, ‘that she is old enough to know better, and she is. If she was going to marry, she ought to done it long ago, and not making a fool of herself now.’

Another reason why I believe Alexandra was ahead of her times was her understanding of Ivar.  Ivar was a sensitive compassionate man who probably had a mental condition that made him vulnerable. People did not understand him, so they criticized him and shunned him. Alexandra, on the other hand, knew that Ivar was in need of empathy:

“As Ivar talked, his gloom lifted. Alexandra had found that she could often break his fasts and long penances by talking to him and letting him pour out the thoughts that troubled him.”

  Alexandra stood up for him whenever people tried to have him sent to an asylum. She continued to let him work for her despite the rumors against him. She disregarded what other people said and endeavored to support him instead of getting rid of him.

 After something bad happened, Alexandra found out that Marie and Emil had been in love with each other, and she was very disappointed with Marie. Interestingly, she blames Marie for the love triangle, another sign of how the social dynamics played against women by making them guilty of situations that do not only involve the female sex. (After all, her brother Emil had never been blind to the fact that Marie was indeed a married woman).

 “She blamed Marie bitterly. And why, with her happy, affectionate nature, should she have brought destruction and sorrow to all who loved her?  That was the strangest thing of all. Was there then, something wrong in being warmhearted and impulsive like that? Alexandra hated to think so.”

 Later in the story Carl would make her see that it had not been Marie’s fault. Yet there's still a tinge of blame in his statement:
 "It happens like that in the world sometimes, Alexandra. I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin around them through no fault of theirs...they are too full of love, too full of life."

 Even though Alexandra and Marie were so different, they had something in common: their love for the land. This feeling for the land was a source of comfort and hope. Willa Cather describes this deep connection in her poetic prose:

“The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”

  The metaphor of love seemed to be inscribed in the landscapes around them:

“There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back. Like the plains of Lombardy, it seems to rise a little to meet the sun. The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if one were the breath of the other. You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic, puissant quality that is in the tilth, the same strength and resoluteness.”

Have you read this literary classic? Share your thoughts.

On Freedom and banned books

"Think wrongly if you please but in all cases think for yourself."~ Doris Lessing

In this era of television screens everywhere, drones and cookies I think of George Orwell and conclude that he was indeed a visionary. Television screens are highly efficient at manipulating the masses, and then there is another issue that curbs freedom: censorship.

 Those who ban books may believe that they have a higher “sense of morality” but I doubt the morality of those who abuse their power by banning books.

 I believe censoring a book is a violation of people’s freedom: the decision to read or not to read a book belongs to each individual person.

  What does the act of banning a book entail? Let’s analyze it.

 When somebody bans a book or makes an attempt to ban it, they are taking for granted that their opinion is more relevant than anybody else’s opinions. They do not give others the chance to read the book themselves and to reach their own conclusions regarding the quality or the significance of it.

   Do the people who censor books believe they are superior to the rest of the population? They are certainly not an example of humility but the epitome of manipulation and control which George Orwell portrayed so well in “1984” and “Animal Farm”. Not surprisingly these books have been censored and are still censored in some places.

 Another term that I want to challenge is that of the “challenged books”. When they say that a book has been challenged, they mean that a group of persons made an attempt to censor it or to restrict the access to it in some way.
 Challenging a book should carry a different meaning, though. It should be about reading a book and having an open discussion about it. In order to grow and learn we should all be allowed to read the book first. Then we can have a healthy discussion on it.

 I appreciate the opportunity to read other people’s opinions on books I read.  I may agree or disagree with them, but in both cases I find it enriching to learn what other people think about the same stories I have read. It is also thrilling to discover the different paths that a book can take in the minds of different readers.

 When I was writing this post I came across the news that a blogger in Saudi Arabia will be flogged 50 times every Friday during 20 weeks in a public square because he criticized Islam on his blog. His name is Raif Badawi.
 Raif Badawi is also jailed for ten years  due to the fact that he was brave enough to express his opinion.  (George Orwell shows in his novel 1984 how  prisoners of conscience  are subjected to ill-treatment and boundless cruelty.)
   Raif should be in Canada with his family now, but he is currently in prison, suffering the consequences of this torture.
I have signed a petition to ask the authorities to release him and to drop the charges. Here is the link.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." — Martin Luther King Jr., who was born on this day in 1929.

Van Gogh's letters

 “And men are often faced with the impossibility of doing anything, imprisoned in some kind of horrible cage. There is also, I know, deliverance, eventual deliverance. A reputation ruined rightly or wrongly, embarrassment, circumstance, misfortune, all these make people prisoners. You can’t say what it is that shuts you up, what walls you in, what seems to bury you alive, but you still feel some kind of bars, some kind of cage, some kind of walls.

Do you know what makes the prison disappear? It is every deep, genuine affection. To be friends, brothers, to love, that opens the prison by its sovereign power, its powerful charm. Someone who does not have that remains bereft of life.

But where sympathy is reborn, life is reborn.

Sometimes the prison is called prejudice, misunderstanding, fatal ignorance of this or that, distrust, false shame.”

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh’s words are rooted in a timeless universal truth. 
Reading his letters seems to make time come to a halt. It throws me into a deep meditative state of serenity. And it is also akin to the effects of connecting with a sincere friend.

 (I am not going to focus on his death here, but I want to clarify that van Gogh did NOT commit suicide. He was shot to death by another person. )

 I believe every person who endeavors to take an artistic discipline seriously will benefit from reading Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo. There are various reasons why his deep insights and wisdom are of much relevance today.

  His letters reveal his self-taught journey in drawing and painting. The drawings and paintings that he enclosed in the letters are shown; they correlate with his musings, reflections and life anecdotes (some of them are funny!).

 Van Gogh shares his learning process with painstaking details. He also describes nature and people with great care, and from his unique interactions with them we learn about his exquisite sensitivity and intelligence. Being a keen observer of his surroundings was vital to his artworks.

 “The doctor is just as I would like him to be, he looks rather like some of the heads by Rembrandt: a magnificent forehead and a very sympathetic expression, I hope I have learned something from him, in the sense that I hope I will be able to deal with my models more or less in the same way he deals with his patients, that is, to be firm with them and to put them in the required position without further ado. It is marvelous with how much patience this man treats his patients himself by massaging, applying ointments, and handling them in all kinds of ways, infinitely more firmly than an attendant, and how he has the knack of removing the scruples and getting people in the position he needs them to be. There is an old man who would be superb as a St. Jerome: a thin, tall, wiry, brown and wrinkled body, with joints so fabulously clear and expressive that it makes me melancholy not to have him as a model.”

Through his delightful prose and images we witness how his work progressed over time; we can appreciate the skills that accrued as a result of his persistent dedication and passion. (Yes, he was talented, but talent alone wouldn't have been enough to accomplish what he accomplished). 
 Every time I contemplate his masterpieces I immerse myself in those places as if I were a real visitor. Not only do I see the settings he portrays but I also absorb their moods; I become a part of them.

  Last but not least, I admire his humility. The thoughts and feelings he expresses are humble and genuine. His letters unravel his soul and regale us with his deep introspection and friendly voice.

 I will share some of his quotes and I hope that the energy of his words spreads and becomes contagious.
Thank you, Vincent.

“How enormously pedantic it is really, how absurd, a man who thinks that he knows it all and that it will be as he thinks, as if there were not always in all things in life a je ne sais quoi of great good, and also an element of bad, from which we feel that there is something infinite above us, infinitely greater, mightier than we are.”

“A man who does not feel himself small, who does not realize that he is just a speck, how wrong he is basically.”
“Art demands a tenacious effort, an effort in spite of everything, and continuous observation. By tenacious effort I mean in the first place constant labor, but also not abandoning your views at someone else’s say-so.”
"In my view I am often immensely rich, not in money, but (although just now perhaps not all the time) rich because I have found my metier, something I can devote myself to heart and soul and that gives inspiration and meaning to my life."
"My moods vary, of course, but nevertheless I have on average acquired a certain serenity. I have a strong belief in art, a certain faith that it is a powerful current that carries a man to haven, although he himself has to put in an effort too. I think it is such a blessing when a man has found his metier, that I don't count myself among the unfortunates."

Song of the Simple Truth

“If my love is thus, like a torrent,

like a river swollen in a full tempest,

like a lily starting roots in the wind,

like an intimate rain,

without clouds and without sea…

if my love is of water,

why do they try to tie it to immovable courses?”

Julia de Burgos

 Julia de Burgos’s poetry is like a torrential rain falling on a desert. Her free spirit is a volcano that erupts in her verses, flooding us with the lava of her imagination. 

 Nature is present in most of her poems. It is the language of her soul. Her poetry is a wellspring of passion and intense emotions.

Reading her verses makes me cry, laugh, think, feel, fly. The themes deal with love, freedom, identity, solitude, and political concerns.

 Neglected by the literary world during her lifetime, Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) was an accomplished poet and journalist who was censored and persecuted due to her political ideas.  I came across this poet for the first time when I read Edward Hirsch's anthology entitled "Poet's Choice". His essay on Julia de Burgos’s poetry piqued my curiosity, so I got the compilation of her poems that Mr. Hirsch recommended.

     I’m glad I did.

    Jack Agueros did an excellent job of gathering all her poems in a bilingual edition entitled Song of the Simple Truth.  Mr. Agueros also indulges us with a fascinating chapter about her life.

  

  Julia de Burgos was a free thinker, and she expresses this in her poem “My Soul”.

“The madness of my soul

cannot repose,

it lives in the restlessness

in the disorder

in the imbalance

of things dynamic,

in the silence

of the free thinker, who lives alone,

in quiet exile.”

 In the 1930's, when Julia was still living in Puerto Rico, the economic situation was a disaster. Unemployment was at an all time high of sixty percent according to some sources, and Julia  was affected by the upheavals of this period.

   Julia de Burgos went through a variety of jobs which included working in a milk station offering free breakfasts to children, and writing for a radio program called the School of the Air, where it is reported that she was fired for her political beliefs. She also worked as a school teacher in a rural area.

  How can we not be seduced by Jack Agueros' s poetical description of Julia de Burgos?

“Julia de Burgos was one of those persons who burst into life like a comet sizzling through our solar system. We watch such persons with a mixture of great awe and trepidation—we enjoy seeing the fiery aura and tail, but worry about them crashing into us, or burying us in their smoking wake.

“There is no doubt they are beautiful and brilliant—but perhaps they would make us happier if they buzzed some farther planet. After they are gone—burned out—or looped out in their elliptic trajectory heading back to whence they came, our enthusiasm for them grows.”

 Julia de Burgos evokes the beauty of her homeland and her intimate connection to it in her famous poem “Rio Grande de Loiza”

Rio Grande de Loiza!... Elongate yourself in my spirit

and let my soul lose itself in your rivulets,

finding the fountain that robbed you as a child

and in a crazed impulse returned you to the path.

Coil yourself upon my lips and let me drink you,

to feel you mine for a brief moment,

to hide you from the world and hide you in yourself,

to hear astonished voices in the mouth of the wind.

Dismount for a moment from the loin of the earth,

and search for the intimate secret in my desires;

confuse yourself in the flight of my bird fantasy,

and leave a rose of water in my dreams.

Rio Grande de Loiza!... My wellspring, my river

since the maternal petal lifted me to the world;
my pale desires came down in you from the craggy hills
to find new furrows;
and my childhood was all a poem in the river,
and a river in the poem of my first dreams.

Juan Ramon Gimenez, the 1956 Nobel Literature Prize winner, said: “Since I met her in Washington, I admired profoundly the writing of this extraordinary woman for her endowment of creativity and expression.”

 I will conclude this post with a fragment of one of her empowering poems: 

                        I Am embodied in Now.

       You have wanted to knock me down, load in the body of centuries

        of prejudices, of hatreds, of passions, of jealousies.

        

       You have wanted to knock me down with your heavy load

       

       but I found myself, and your effort was in vain.

        Go, line your centuries with the vulgar ignorant;

        

         my ambitions are not yours, my flights are not yours.

         I am embodied in now; about yesterday I know nothing.

 

         In the alive, my life knows the I Am of the new.

Cat's Cradle

Cat’s Cradle has been compared with some of George Orwell’ s dystopian stories.  There is a social satire in Cat’s Cradle just as  there is one in both Animal Farm and 1984. Yet Cat’s Cradle relies more on the plot than on the development of the characters. I am not trying to imply that characters are not well developed in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, but his approach is different.

  First of all, Kurt Vonnegut breaks the popular rule of writing fiction: “show, don’t tell”. He tells us a lot about the characters. The telling takes precedence over the showing of their identities. I don’t get to feel emotionally close to the characters, even though we learn a lot about their intimate lives. Yet this is not a flaw of the tale but a way of featuring the robotic nature of the society he portrays through humor and interesting insights.

The novel is told in first person by John, a writer who wants to research the life of the deceased scientist, Felix Hoenikker, the man who created the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. John gets to interview his three kids who are now adults, and his life changes drastically throughout the course of the tale.

 Kurt Vonnegut creates a fictional religion, Bokononism, through which he shows a society that is more concerned about faith than about the search for truth.  But Felix Hoenikker, the venerated, controversial scientist, was different from the rest (mind you, "different" does not mean "better").

 “I suppose it’s high treason and ungrateful and ignorant and backward and anti-intellectual to call a dead man as famous as Felix Hoenikker a son of a bitch. I know all about how harmless and gentle and dreamy he was supposed to be, how he’d never hurt a fly, how he didn’t care about money and power and fancy clothes and automobiles and things, how he wasn’t like the rest of us, how he was better than the rest of us…”

 Kurt Vonnegut’s  carries us away to imaginary settings and hilarious social situations in which the characters interpret their reality under the light of their dogmatic beliefs. The novel has many twists and turns that are evidence of Vonnegut’s fascinating imagination.
  One of the most important themes  of Cat's Cradle is the role that human stupidity plays in self-destruction.

 I found some thought-provoking quotes in this novel:

“She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.”

“It was the belief of Bokonon that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping the tension between the two high at all times.”

“Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”

“Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be.”

 Cat's Cradle was banned in 1972 by an Ohio School district board. The reason for this is not clear. The decision was later overturned in 1976.

The Fall of The House of Usher

   “The Fall of The House of Usher” is an outstanding masterpiece. After reading it I was curious to learn what the critics said about it and I got disappointed.  The intricacies that make up the fabric of this fascinating short story by Edgar Allan Poe have been overlooked.

 According to Benjamin F. Fisher  “the ‘Usher’ narrator’s sojourn in the ‘house’ of Usher may symbolize a journey into depths of his own self, where he confronts psycho-sexual-artistic elements that horrify him by the far greater negative than positive possibilities they raise”. I agree partially with him on this statement, so let me start by saying that many of Poe’s stories explore the dark tunnels of the mind. This one is not an exception.

Poe was a daring writer who, under a literary veil, revealed the emotions and feelings that society might have judged and condemned. His poetical prose dredges up profound feelings and thoughts that had to remain hidden to avoid the inconvenience of their social consequences. Having said this, I will now explain my  perspective on “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

 I believe the house of Usher is the embodiment of Mr. Usher’s depressive state of mind. And what is a depressive state of mind but the entrapment of the soul in a network of dark thoughts and emotions? This dark web distorts the sufferer’s views. Yet falling prey to this complex network requires a specific kind of substrate: a combination of  sensitivity and a profound understanding of reality (both inner and outer realities). This is a kind of journey that Poe understood well.

 Through this story Poe paints the complex labyrinths of Mr. Usher’s moods, and the physical descriptions of the house are symbols of his mental experience. There is a spiritual connection between the narrator and Mr. Usher. Neither of them can be rescued from the sorrow of the atmosphere described by many critics as "claustrophobic".

 The narrator fathoms Mr. Usher’s emotional turmoil while he navigates the waters of his own melancholy. 

 “We painted and read together, or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom.”

Roderick Usher had invited the narrator to his house because there was a “mental disorder that oppressed him”. Roderick had an earnest desire to see his childhood friend for he believed his visit might help him to “alleviate his malady”. Even though Roderick considered him his personal friend the narrator confessed that he did not know him well because of Usher’s introverted nature. He explained this in this paragraph:

 “Although, as boys, we had been intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties, of musical science.”

  Each and every description is memorable and vivid. Reading this story is almost like visiting this Gothic house or dreaming of it because of the powerful images that his prose evokes:
 “There were many books and musical instruments scattered on the floor, but they failed to give any vitality to the scene.”

 “The windows were long, narrow and pointed, and so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within.” All these simple details of the house carve out a feeling of isolation and loneliness. Right from the first paragraph we are thrown into an obscure landscape:

“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.”

 In this paragraph the narrator is clearly deprived of hope, another hallmark of Mr. Usher's mental condition. 

 The loss of Mr. Usher’s beloved twin sister Madeline may have been the trigger of his mood disorder. Madeline had been his sole companion for many years. Some critics suggest that there are innuendos regarding a possible love affair between Madeline and Roderick. There are those who claim that the image of their  embrace under the moonlight at the end of the story hints at the union of their souls and the beginning of a new life together.
 A sense of despair looms as the story progresses. We later learn more details about Mr. Usher’s situation and how his disorder  wreaks havoc on his life:

“And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed , an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue – but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage.”

  His descriptions help to deepen the character and move the plot forward while they build suspense. The man is struggling with his secrets. He is overwhelmed by the terror that guilt and uncertainty inflict upon him. He is very frightened and anxious.  The narrator educes Mr. Usher is a slave to his emotions. He has lost control over them; thoughts of death abound:

 “To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. ‘I shall perish,’ said he, ‘I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul.”

   I believe Edgar Allan Poe was ahead of his time. He was able to reveal complex insights on the human psyche. His poetical, timeless story is the detailed account of  a mental crisis that resonates in our era of depression epidemics.

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to check my writing on The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Synesthesia

" I saw all the colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me."
-Vasily Kandinsky

When I read "The Noisy Paint Box" to my daughter I learned the concept of synesthesia. "The Noisy Paint Box" is a book about Kandinsky’s childhood. In his writings Kandinsky describes hearing a hissing sound as a child when he first mixed colors in his paint box. Kandinsky experienced colors as sounds and sounds as colors throughout his life.

 It is thought that Vasily Kandinsky had a harmless genetic condition called synesthesia. Synesthesia is a word that derives from the Greek. It means “union of sensations”. There are more than sixty types of synesthesia. In people with synesthesia a stimulus in one sensory modality (e.g. vision) involuntarily triggers another sense (e.g. hearing). Scientists believe that this happens due to co-activation of different areas of the brain as people with synesthesia probably have more pathways between such areas.

 After reading this book to my daughter I wanted to learn more about synesthesia. One of the pioneers in the study of synesthesia is the neurologist Richard Cytowic who published a number of case reports and wrote books about it.

 Reading about synesthesia, however, left me with more questions than answers. I don’t know if I have synesthesia but what I do know is that I have  synesthetic experiences with some words. There are many words that elicit colors or images in my mind. A few of them can trigger flavors. Now this does not necessarily mean that I am a synesthete.

 Perhaps synesthesia is one feature that may or may not exist in people with creative trends. After all, the creative mind is adept at making connections and finding meaningful associations between things, ideas or objects.

 Do you ever have any synesthetic experiences, or do you know anybody who may have this condition? Share your experience.

 Here is a list of other famous people who may have had synesthesia:

Vladimir Nabokov (writer)

William Blake (Poet, writer and painter)
Albert Einstein (physicist, philosopher of science)
Isaac Newton (physicist, mathematician)

Olivier Messiaen (composer)

Richard Feynman (physicist)
Amy Beach (pianist and composer)
Charles Baudelaire (Poet)

I read somewhere that children are synesthetes but as they grow they lose the capacity to have these synesthetic associations. 
How about combining music with art in schools? Writing with music? Writing and art?    Physical movements and writing? Maths and art?
 Think about all the combinations. We tend to separate everything into boxes, and, as we do that, we may be curtailing our kids' creativity.        
Something to think about and research on. I hope neuroscientists and educators will work together to research this and enhance the educational experience. 
 If you want to learn more about synesthesia feel free to visit the website of the American Synesthesia Association