SCIENCE AND NUMBERS

Deadline: 9 NOVEMBER 2013

We know, we know, you’re ‘not a numbers person’. That’s totally fine. Neither are we. We failed Maths (three times), so we really get it. But numbers don’t have to be scary. If you’re a poet or a songwriter or a lyricist or something equally wonderful, you’re thinking in numbers without even realising it. You’re working with beats – 1, 2, 3, 4.

We’ve put science and numbers together because we think it’s going to be beautiful and frightening and it’s going to send us stark raving mad. We’re going to use that other side of the brain that really, really scares us. It’s going to be a challenge, because most writers aren’t scientists or mathematicians. But we’re curious. We’re curious about how the world works, all its chemicals and colours and the way a person’s skin sometimes goes bumpy when you touch them. In fact, we’re science’s perfect outlet.

Note: You don't have to intertwine both science and numbers - either/or will do.

Technology

Thinking in numbers also lends itself beautifully to art and photography. There are all sorts of tricks and mechanisms in a camera that are alien to most but to photographers, it’s as natural as, well… 1, 2, 3. It brings in a whole other element to the theme – technology. That’s a huge word, but as writers and artists, we’re obsessed. What’ll the world look like in 70 years? What is this thing that we're writing on with fast fingers that can show a million people all across the world our thoughts in less than a second? We've become so used to fast technology we don't stop to think about how quickly we can have almost anything we want at the touch of a fingertip. Technology is magic. Technology is a monster.

Synaesthesia and science

And then there’s synaesthesia. The neurological condition that involuntarily compels a person to muddle their senses has barely been touched upon by scientists. We can only go so far deep into the mind before coming out onto a misty road and not having a clue where to go next. Do as synaesthetes do: observe. Have a read of our interview with synaesthete and writer Rachael Spellman in our CITIES issue on pages 18-19 to understand the way colours and sounds can influence the way she writes, and turn your own senses on their head. Colours are science. Science in colours.

Numbers

Numbers have structure. Poetry has structure. Stories are bound by beginnings, middles and ends. We’re not going to separate words and numbers anymore. We’re going to let them exist side by side so they can fight it out and hug for a bit and just be friends. 9’ll hug its cousin nine and metaphors will lie across atoms and molecules and they’ll talk about what colour they see the world in.

And if your maths brain needs a little goading, have a read of David Tammet’s Thinking in Numbers. We’ll leave this passage here, just to get you started:

“Like colors, the commonest numbers give character, form, and dimension to our world. Of the most frequent — zero and one — we might say that they are like black and white, with the other primary colors — red, blue, and yellow — akin to two, three, and four. Nine, then, might be a sort of cobalt or indigo: in a painting it would contribute shading, rather than shape. We expect to come across samples of nine as we might samples of a color like indigo—only occasionally, and in small and subtle ways. Thus a family of nine children surprises as much as a man or woman with cobalt-colored hair.”

Atoms of inspiration

• Riddles. Lewis Carroll was a genius when it came to writing riddles and poetry with a beat, with a sway. Think mathematical sums, think x = y. Hey, look! Now we've got letters. We're good with letters.
  
• Breaking Bad may be over, but, cor, didn't it give us some beautiful words? Magnesium. Methamphetamine. Endling: a word used for the last living representative of a species. Ununoctium. Ununoctium has the highest atomic number, so it's very unstable. Imagine Unu as a high-flying CEO with quiveringly poor social skills. Uh oh, he's fallen for Magnesium (Maggie) - popular, slightly materialistic, sour Magnesium.
  
• There's poetry in the periodic table, you know. You just have to look for it.
•  Space. Space is huge. Space is terrifying. No-one in their right mind would fly out to space but people do and it's mad. Why do people do it? What if something sent you on the brink of insanity and you just wanted a holiday somewhere that wasn't on this earth? What if.
• It's really very hard to rhyme/The right sorta beat should do it/It's like/Da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum/Like one and two and three and four/What if, you say, you mess it up?/Yeah, er, then you've really screwed it.
• Artists: think skeletons. Think the skeleton of a phone, or a radio. Think sound waves. Step inside a television. 
• Photographers: think in colours. Think in graphs. Think about the mathematical structure of a building.
• Time travel – go full science fiction if you like, or take a step back and look at it quietly. What makes us want to travel through time?
• Give numbers personalities.
• Give colours sound. Mute the world; what if sound didn't exist?
• Play with the months of the year, the days of the week or the numbers on the clock.

Most importantly, don't forget the deadline: 9 NOVEMBER

Have a read of our NEW submission guidelines, and email all submissions to synaesthesiamagazine@gmail.com

What's in a name?

by Harry Harris

 @CmonHarris 

Set yourself a challenge – think of your favourite novel, one you know like the back of your hand, one that maybe you’ve read a couple of times, have picked apart and put back together. One that you would give to someone important and go: “Read this.” Got one? Okay, try and imagine it with a different title. A nigh-on impossible task, but fascinating nonetheless. How does a title of a piece of writing impact how you interpret that piece of writing?

Titles seem rather innocuous at first. As a writer, they’re often the launch pad, a match to a keg of gunpowder that explodes into devilish prose and immersive dialogue. For the longest time I carried an idea with me, a song loosely based on an old Welsh bloke I used to work with who told me stories of when he worked at Graceland and owned Elvis bars all over the world. That was the germ of an idea that took many forms, but it wasn’t until I came up with the title 'The Day I Met The King' that the story of the song began to take shape. Conversely I wrote a song not too long ago that I think is okay, and I think is finished, but the only title I can think of at the moment is 'Letters', which just kinda blows. It won’t see the light of day until that’s remedied.

A nice way to imagine titles are as frames – in that, they instruct you how to look at something. Herman Melville named the greatest novel in the English Language Moby Dick; or, The Whale, and yet the titular character is very much present by his absence in the novel itself, the narrative instead focusing on the narrator Ishmael, the psychotic Captain Ahab, the deliriously entertaining Queequeg. Yet, despite the whale never appearing until deep into the book, the title literally hangs over every page, mirroring the struggle within the narrative. Similarly, the balance of the title is directly reflective of the way Melville will occasionally move away from the narrative entirely to just describe the behaviour of whales – some of the most beautiful passages of prose in the book. So, with that title, Melville is pointing us in two different directions, setting the course for the novel without us even opening the page.

Then there are the titles that are perhaps more elusive, more puzzling, ones that don’t seem to directly reference anything in the novel, the ones that make you keep your eyes peeled for something hiding between the lines. Carson McCullers is wonderful in this regard – I’m currently reading her short novel Reflections In A Golden Eye, which so far is a typically melancholy, intimate story of the goings on within an army barracks. There’s a beautiful passage in which McCullers talks of a man falling asleep imagining a great bird coming to land on his chest, the golden eye of the title being the eye of the bird, so, the title line is never said, but in that moment the reader gains a new sense of clarity, and it informs the way in which we view that character and indeed the rest of the story.

Without getting all “death of the author” on you, what a good title can really do is empower the reader to interpret the story in his or her own way, which is the most wonderful thing about writing any kind of story. Nothing belongs to you. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and you’ve got to let it do its own thing, sometimes it comes back to you in a way that you never expected. But that doesn’t mean you can’t point people in the direction you want them to go in. Next time you finish a story, or a poem, or a song, think about what you want people to get out of the story, the character you think is most interesting or the tone you want to strike. Give it three titles. Give those three stories to three different people and see how their reactions differ. Which reaction most chimes with what you wanted? Call it that.