I see it very clearly. It is night outside and the cabin is surrounded by trees and the wind blows and rustles the leaves. Inside, sat on the floor, is a young man and a woman in her thirties. The interior is oak and there’s a fireplace and the pair are sat on a white rug and leaning against a grey sofa. She has a guitar and sings a song as he watches, lost in his own thoughts.
This is an image I can see very clearly in my mind. It is an image from the novel Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, and the song the female character, Reiko, sings is of course the song Norwegian Wood by The Beatles.
Honestly, I have no idea if this imagining is accurate to the book. I can't remember anymore. It’s been a few years since I read the novel the point is, I can see that image, it sticks with me.
If I were of the mind, one evening, I am sure I could simply sit there and delve deeper into this image and I would be able to tell you what she’s wearing (a grey sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms) or the posture of his body (back against the sofa, knees bent, elbows rested on knees, hands lightly touching one another in the middle). The point is, I see it as if it were one of my own memories, as if it happened to me.
Yes, I suppose in many ways it did happen to me. I was there. A voyeur, an eavesdropper, a stalker. Because reading a book isn’t passive like watching a film, instead you are really there, these images are conjured in your mind, and the memories they create become, to me at least, indistinguishable in quality from a memory of my own life.
I see Watanabe and Reiko as clearly as I see my brother and sister, mother and father on a Christmas day morning when I was a child. Can I say the same of films?
I can imagine a film, but what I imagine was not created by me, I was passive. I can recall Marlon Brando with an orange quarter in his mouth chasing his grandchild through the orchard. But it feels like recalling facts, I don't feel I was somehow in the orchard with them. The Godfather is one of the finest pieces of art, that is not to detract from film, it is just to say it is different to reading.
This image conjuring is something I took for granted. A few words on a page and I see it all:
"A red car roars down a road past the bustling crowd."
What do you see?
Do you see anything, or do you simply know what those words mean?
I see it. Not in the sense that I stop seeing through my eyes momentarily, but moments after I have read it, I remember the image as if I had really seen it with my eyes.
I assumed everyone saw their imaginations in the same way. So stupid to assume anything, but I did. I can sit and daydream for hours, but I do not daydream in words, but images, dialogues, entire worlds, parallel universes where I go and speak to the interesting person by the bar instead of standing by, quietly alone.
I see myself in the future, I imagine the past if I had done something different. I see it all, every detail.
Speaking with two friends recently I found out that when they read, they do not see these images. That the people in their books are blurs, faceless, abstract hints of colour and shape. They are no less moved by the writing, and feel everything perhaps just as I do. They just do not see it. They would not see Reiko, they would see no cabin, no trees.
This got me thinking about how one would write for different imaginations. Even if we just take two camps of imagination: those that see, and those that do not (and it is quite possible there are many levels on the spectrum of imagination) you could write two different passages to achieve different thing.
As someone who sees, I love deeply detailed writing. Someone like Hemingway who would write something along the lines of:
And we walked up the hill and the grass was wet from the morning's dew and when we got to the top of the hill we could see out over the trees and in the distance was a lake and the sun shone on us and it was a fine day to hunt.
I can see everything and it’s no coincidence that Hemingway's books stick with me far more as memories than other books, I can say the same of Charles Dickens and Arhundati Roy. Different styles, I know, but swathed in detail.
But take someone like Eimear McBride – whose writing is abstractly beautiful – you may get something like:
A step. Mud. I hope that. Deep breath. We get to the top soon. Oh and the land stretching and swirling shimmering dancing. He, next to me. I, catching my breath. Water down my throat. Look at the lake.
While I think there is something wonderful about McBride's language – read her, not my imitation – to me, personally, it is laborious. I need an image or else I lose interest, I am distracted. The story is reduced to pretty words and I am very aware I am reading, I am inside no one’s world. Whereas I know some friends who deeply love her style and feel everything her characters feel and are entwined with the nuances that can be expressed in this staccato almost private-feeling style. These friends mostly say that they do not see.
There is a term for mind-blindness, the inability to imagine a picture, it is congenital aphantasia. For these people when asked to recall a memory – or perhaps a story from a book – they often describe them as a conceptual list of things that occurred rather than how I would, like a movie reel playing in my mind’s eye.
In an excellent Conversation article the authors refer to Firefox internet browser inventor, Blake Ross, who explained his own mind-blindness in a Facebook post.
“He can ruminate on the ‘concept’ of a beach,” writes Rebecca Keogh and Joel Pearson. “He knows there’s sand and water and other facts about beaches. But he can’t conjure up beaches he’s visited in his mind, nor does he have any capacity to create a mental image of a beach.”
To find out whether the difference was indeed in the ability to imagine an image, and not, just the ability of the person to describe what they see, the authors carried out a study using an objective means to identify the ability of one’s imagination. It is described well in the article, but the result is that it is true that some people just do not have visual imagery.
I wonder if this is a spectrum along which all of us will fit. Those that can see Reiko and Watanabe in full detail, those that see faint images with no faces, and those that can simply process the words and know what they mean with little or no image at all, and everything in between.
Well, then, the way a writer writes a story would affect different people’s experiences very much.
But what about the way a person reads? When we spoke with Jonathan Harris he spoke of reading as an activity in which you are present with just yourself and the book and your imagination, the page. When looking at a screen you are in fact looking into a multi-dimensional portal of the internet, distracted by browsing, social media, email and all that goes with it.
How does that effect imagination? With a book it’s hard to get distracted, with a screen, much easier, so perhaps it is harder to form those images, whatever those might be to you, and even harder to maintain them when your mind wonders so easily off the words and to the red notification; as your hands anticipate the buzz of a new message.
It’s worth thinking about, there must be some reason a book feels different to a screen.
