Kevin Van Aelst

by Elizabeth Nagel

Poor and in graduate school, Clem and I had our priorities straight. Buy music first, furniture follows. We discovered Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Sounds of Pictures, mingled with the folk music of the sixties, filled our apartment. We’d crank the volume up as high as others in our building could tolerate.

Mussorgsky began his musical composition visually rather than with sounds. A friend’s drawings and watercolors were the inspiration for a stroll through an imaginary collection of art. His music simulates walking and portrays images he saw in his mind.

The creativity of Pictures planted seeds in both of us. It was the beginning of a walk of our own over the years: exploring ways the senses could be woven together. Today as working artists, our creative energy is directed toward the complex relationships among words, sound, and sight. Clem’s poetry evokes images from the natural world, whether from his backyard or the many places he has traveled. Sometimes he uses poetry to address social issues and discuss injustices, through images drawn from moving personal stories.

My creative work stretches across several media. When I traveled as a young woman, the photographs I took were a means to bring my experiences home with me. Over time, and without conscious thought, I began to use my camera lens differently. I found I could create visual emotions that spoke a language or opened the heart.

Three years ago, Clem and I visited an Alaskan museum. The display of stark images coupled with lyric descriptions was one of those “aha.” moments. Photographic images as poetry. Words as metaphorical imagery. Sounds of poetry read aloud.

We came home and began direct collaboration, beyond editorial feedback about each other’s writing. We experimented with framing Clem’s poetry with my images. Our intention was to create a conversation, rather than one medium describing the other. We hoped viewers would have their own conversations about what they saw and heard.

Immersion in the nonverbal visual space of photography forced me to let go of words to express myself—and then returned me to the challenge of poetry to create visual imagery. Clem has taken his poetic voice to write prose, something he believed he could not do. Recent collaboration with a musical ensemble to create imagery was another avenue that pushed us beyond our respective comfort zones. It offered an exciting opportunity to learn other ways to weave the senses together.

We dug deeper into how we use our senses as artists. We explored how people rely daily on those same senses and observed that people have three primary senses rather than five. Taste and smell have become nonessentials for survival in today’s world. Our contemporary Western culture is visual, auditory, and sometimes tactile. Vision is most people’s dominant sense. Driving on the freeway demands vision and hearing. Braille depends on touch and ASL (American Sign Language) on vision.

Ask someone to spell “elephant.” Then ask her how she did it. Visually dominant people “see” the word in their head. Auditory-dominant people hear the sound of the word. Imagine a theater in which a thick red curtain rises to a symphony orchestra. Tactile folks might “feel” the curtain. Visually dominant people might close their eyes to hear the music more clearly. No one tastes or smells an elephant or an orchestra!

Cultivating the capacity to interweave our senses intrigued John Daido Loori, who was both a photographer and a poet. In his book Making Love with Light, he talks about seeing with the ears and hearing with the eyes. He describes the process as taking off “the blinders that limit” us in constructing our reality. Awakening ourselves to the “sheer and free wildness of things as they are” through words, images, and poetry. Moving outside the box that our rational mind tells us is real.

We discovered the concept of synesthesia, an involuntary neurological condition in which the senses mingle, rather than being experienced separately. Some people experience words or letters as having color, such as “A” is red. Others associate sound and vision, such as seeing music or music as having color. Some artists are neurologically wired as synesthetes, such as Kandinsky, Liszt, and Nabokov. And there was Mussorgsky, who probably borrowed the concept when he composed Pictures.

Children are better at commingling the senses than adults. They happily cross over boundaries that the world has established to separate our eyes, ears, and the rest of our senses. Writers and photographers intentionally (and unconsciously) remember these child skills when they create powerful work by weaving together the senses.

Norman Fischer, a writer and Zen teacher, adds another perspective. He describes metaphor as our sixth sense. Poetry sometimes is viewed as the art form to convey something beyond words—metaphor evokes images that mingle the senses. Yet as writers, we all know metaphor is not limited to poetry.

Cultivating the capacity to see with the ears and hear with the eyes through art, music, and poetry has practical value in our culture, which too often treats the arts as nonessential. We encourage others to look at our complex world in new ways as we “think outside the box” and experiment with the senses in writing. Such fresh perspectives may birth solutions to problems facing us that past generations never imagined.

The next time you settle in with a book that holds your attention, ask yourself what two-dimensional expressions of ink on white paper evoke within you. What do you see in your mind? What do you hear, smell, feel, or touch? Walk a nature center trail or around one of our beautiful lakes and see the sounds of leaves. Smell of the colors of leaves touched by soft rain. Hear the sight of water.

Clem and I are having great fun—how about you?

Clem and Elizabeth Nagel are teaching artists at The Loft Literary Center. Among Clem’s published poetry are two books, Prairie Ground Prairie Sound and Listen to the Silence: A Walk through the Natural World. Elizabeth has just published a book of poetry, Waiting for the Heat to Pass. They recently collaborated with NUBE Ensemble (a musical group), writing the script for an hour-and-a-half performance piece. They can be reached at cnagel@cpinternet.com or enagel@cpinternet.com. Elizabeth will be coteaching Writing into Wisdom with Carol Bjorlie this fall. And Elizabeth and Clem will be coteaching a Saturday workshop, Songs of the Sacred, this fall.