Dear Reader,
One of the convenient things about writing this letter electronically is ease of editing. Normally. But I’m finding that this particular letter is a little unruly. Something of a weird ramble. I thought about pulling it to pieces and starting over again, but you know what? Screw it. We’re going full ramble. You’ve been warned.
Have you heard of aphantasia? It’s the phenomenon some people experience (or rather, don’t experience) of being unable to visualize images in their mind’s eye. If a person with aphantasia is told to “picture a tree,” they can of course call forth the concept of a tree, but there’s no actual picturing anything. It’s just a concept.
Thinking about this, I realized that while I can and do picture things in my mind, it’s not necessarily the first sense conjured by my brain. Rather, I’d say that I’m a predominantly tactile thinker.
Which: huh? How does that work? Well, it’s sort of a terrible analogy, but let’s say my mind is a bit like the ball tumbler from a bingo game.
Images and concepts are a wild jumble that I can sift through and ultimately express. But how my brain works is all tied up in the physicality of things: the smooth turning of the handle, the thrumming of the balls against the wire frame, the gentle back-and-forth press of the rubber feet against the surface of the table, the whirr of air as the wheel turns.
When I describe a ball as round, I really mean the sensation of roundness, the smooth plastic curve that you’d feel under your fingertips or as it was cupped in your hand, the way it would nestle in the bingo tray or roll loose across the table. These things become visual images in the way that I describe them, but I imagine them most vividly as tactile impressions.
When I think of my cat, I think of the silky feel of her fur, or the flattened quills of her whiskers against her cheeks when she rubs her face against my fingers, or the cool tips of her ears, or her little knobby kitty elbows. Sometimes she sleeps curled up with one paw tucked over her nose, and it looks so cozy I could die.
When I think of snow, I imagine the way it compresses under my boots when I go out for a walk, or the feel of it collecting on my jacket and hat while it falls, the chill and the absence of smell and whether it’s wet or dry depending on just how cold it is. I think of the soft whoosh-thump of clumps of snow collecting and letting go of bare branches in the winter woods.
And when, say, I think about imaginary hot people, I suppose I don’t really think all that much about how they might look. I know some people are super into a particular look or type — burly lumberjacks, curvy bombshells, nerds in glasses, vampires and werewolves, whatever — but I’ve never been particularly hung up on type. I mean, sure I appreciate lovely physical attributes; I just think that lovely can take a lot of forms. But when I think about what’s sexy, to me that has to be touchable.
Makeup can be very visually beautiful, but it’s not very touchable. Same with perfect hair or exquisite fashion. Anything too carefully, too perfectly arranged? If it’s a look that smells like chemicals or has to be stuck in place with fashion tape, then to me it has very limited appeal.
At the other end of the spectrum from too-put-together, how about a filthy, sweaty mess? Think hot construction worker at the end of their shift, or maybe fitness instructor post-workout? That’s not really for me either. I’ve got nothing against a little honest dirt or sweat, but generally speaking, I think clean is more touchable.
And sexy is subjective. It’s all about appeal, right? Obviously there are plenty of different opinions about what’s appealing. I have to think that people who are super into fashion or, like, Kardashianism must be very visually oriented. And maybe filthy-sweaty-mess people are scent-oriented, and so that sweaty-mess image wakes up their olfactory brain. I dunno.
Probably there are infinite variations on this — on how cognition and sensory processing relate to one another. I’d venture that my primary orientation is tactile, but scent and taste are also very vivid in my mind. I can readily call up, say, the taste and feel of a bite of spaghetti bolognese, or fresh asparagus with butter — or the rich smell of sandstone in the rain, or peonies in early summer (which smell comes with the tactile memory of petals against my face and the sensation of pollinating ants making a getaway across my fingers on their soft little ant feet) — or the sweet baby smell of my nieces and nephews when they were small. And visual images come much more naturally to me when they’re attached to touch or smell or taste.
Maybe this tactile-processing quirk of my brain is why I enjoy giving massages more than receiving them? Receiving a massage is nice enough, and honestly I could do with one right now because my neck has been killing me for the last couple days. But I really love giving a massage. It feels like having a whole conversation in muscle and bone.
And maybe also this is why my love of philosophy and just pure, wild speculation always seeks purchase in what is real, in what exists in the world. I can get so far out on the kite string of what is possible because I am securely tethered to the feel of the earth beneath me.
How do you perceive the world, friend? What senses resonate most in the way that you think about things, or in the rooms and halls of your memory? I am so curious about this. I think it also must be another thing that I like about reading — because the way someone constructs a narrative or sets a scene or frames a character, it quietly reflects all these interesting things about the way the writer thinks.
Recently I happened to read a couple of m/m romance series involving motorcycle clubs (MCs). And I really don’t know anything about the world of MCs, so already I can feel myself sounding like Derry Murbles from Parks & Recreation:
Again, I don’t know anything about MCs, but I do know a wee little bit about the carnival shitshow of law enforcement, the courts, and the corrections system. And discussion of these things? It lights up a very odd part of my brain.
When a character in one book pulled a gun in a nearly-empty bar as a warning to a side character, the immediate thing it evoked in me, weirdly enough, was the sense memory of sitting in a slightly ill-fitting suit jacket, pulled up to a zinc-topped table in a prison’s visiting room, my left arm bracketing my legal pad, the feel of the paper against the heel of my right hand and the scratch of my pen as I took notes, talking to a guy who was serving a sentence for shooting someone who had been belligerent with him in a bar. My client was a skinny blond guy, maybe an inch taller than me. Not a big guy. He had gone out to his car, and the other guy had followed him. My client pulled a gun from his car that he kept for self defense and used it to threaten the other guy. The other guy threw up his hands and kept coming, and my client shot him, and the guy died. And if you are unmoved by the fate of some guy picking a fight in a bar, it turns out he was a pretty ordinary dude, with a family who loved him, who’d been struggling with clinical depression and grief following the death of a parent earlier that year. My client chose to pull a gun because he had this idea of standing his ground and defending himself, but he could have just gotten into his car. He could have driven away. Instead he was sentenced to 21 years for killing a guy. The facts were all laid out in the sentencing hearing, the transcript of which I read end-to-end because it was related to what I was helping my client with. He was sentenced under an old parole system, so 21 years meant the combination of prison plus parole, which could end up being 21+ years in prison if the client was a fuck-up, or could have been more like 14 years in prison plus 7 years parole if he toed every line and parole was never revoked. And if you are a white collar professional working with people who’ve been convicted of a crime, you’d say that parole (or probation or extended supervision) can be revoked, but if you’re on the jumpsuit-wearing side of the system, you’re more likely to use the word revocated.
So, the character in the book pulls a gun, and my brain immediately ziplines down that entire sense-memory track, all of those facts and details embedded in that memory of sitting at that table and taking notes: oof, remember that client — jesus, this could go so wrong — wait, this character just got out of prison, but he’s not on parole, right? or shit, is he gonna get revocated for waving a gun around??
When I was a baby lawyer, I thought revocated was an amusing non-word. I know I joked about it with peers. But I see it differently now. “Do you think her probation will be revoked?” is just a dry statement of bureaucracy. But “Do you think she’ll get revocated?” has a different heft. Do you think she’s going to get nailed to the wall for this inability to comply with an arbitrary rule her supervisor made up? Do you think this latest particular fuck-up means she’s going to lose her job and her apartment and access to her kids? Revocated means being kicked back to zero, again, and probably with new baggage.
I like to think that I don’t have overly cynical or overly romantic views of people with criminal histories. I’m solidly against doing harm, but as moral standards go, that’s pretty vague — and beyond that I think that it’s just generally a bad idea to commit crimes if you can help it, which is more of a pragmatic stance than a moral one. And most people who get popped for petty crimes aren’t coherently motivated by one clear thing, like some definable moment of past trauma which can be confronted and resolved to reach a happy ending — usually it’s more complex and more chaotic than that, and what most folks need isn’t a big psychic resolution but rather plain old stability and consistency and to live in a world that can be trusted not to sweep their feet out from under them at any second.
Anyway, that’s a very rambling way to say: I tend to have sort of complex feelings about main characters who have a history of conviction or who are engaging in acts for which they might be criminally liable. If that sounds like a lawyerly way of saying it, well yeah. I can’t help that. There’s a part of me that’s forever dressed up in that suit and taking notes and bleeding a little over something that can’t be fixed. I can feel the rubbed-smooth edges of that fat file. I can feel that pen in my hand.
But as for the actual books! Both series about motorcycle clubs, but otherwise very different.
The Leather & Chrome series by Kiki Clark starts with Tank and CJ. Tank just got out of prison and is hoping to patch in to the Michigan chapter of his MC and leave his old life behind, and especially to start a new life with CJ, his sweet prison pen pal. Tank isn’t immediately accepted by his new brothers with open arms — first he has to prove that he’s committed to walking the straight and narrow, and that he’s not going to bring trouble to the club. When instead he brings home his aspiring-artist boyfriend, it quickly becomes clear that Tank and CJ are a match for this out-of-the-ordinary MC and its secret mission. The first book also kicks off something of a tour of kink throughout the series, with each book so far including different forms of D/s relationship. There’s at least one more book yet to come.
The Rebel Kings series by Garrett Leigh is a much darker world, centered on an MC in the UK that’s trying very hard to pivot toward non-criminal enterprise. It’s gritty and includes some brutal violence as the characters square off against rival gangs and defy human traffickers, and the books grapple hard with the recognition that sometimes there’s no way out but to fight through. The series opens with a poly romance that spans the first two books, when MC president Cam strikes up a new relationship with outsider Alexei which then ignites the existing bond between Cam and his sergeant-at-arms Saint. The third book takes up another long-slow-burn relationship between the MC’s chaplain and its enforcer, with another round of explosive revelations and more fight-or-die. And there’s plenty of back story setting up the long-thwarted romance between the road captain and the pres’s estranged brother, which is due out next May.
And because motorcycles, here’s a link to my plain-Jane cover of Greg Brown’s great cover of Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” (Sean Rowe’s version is also killer.) Or for more general rock and roll vibes, I’ve been enjoying the Beer & Wings playlist on Spotify.
Happy midwinter to you, and wishing you light and warmth through the longest night.
Love,
Beas
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