On Synesthesia and The Hissing of Summer Lawns
A tall woman paces along a poolside terrace. We never quite see her face, but we know she is beautiful. Her elegant forearms and the bare ankles and feet that emerge from her kaftan-style dress seem almost golden in the early evening light.
The colours on her dress shift as she walks, from swimming pool turquoise to the brilliant green of the artificially hydrated lawns just beyond the terrace. Gold and silver patterns shimmer across the fabric, echoing the shapes of the hibiscus and oleander trees that stand between her and the barbed wire fence marking the edge of the property.
She momentarily stops to take a swig from a glass of clear liquid on a table by a sun lounger before returning to her pacing with renewed urgency. As the sun starts to set, the colours of her kaftan shift to dark ink blues and violet, and the patterns morph into something more sinister; serpents weave around the branches of the trees, their teeth bared. If this were a scene in a film, something violent or ugly would be about to happen, but it is not. This is just what tend to picture in my mind’s eye when I listen to the title track of Joni Mitchell’s 1975 album The Hissing of Summer Lawns. As Mitchell’s haunting, wordless vocals fade to silence and the track ends, the scene fades to black, leaving this faceless woman pacing by her swimming pool in an endless loop.
Lyrically, The Hissing of Summer Lawns was a notable departure from the confessional style of her previous releases. By 1975, Joni Mitchell was a wealthy woman who had left behind her rustic Laurel Canyon cabin for a mansion in Beverly Hills. Her change of status is reflected in the record, and instead of being central to her songs, she becomes an omnipresent third-person narrator, zooming in and away from the lives of her affluent contemporaries.
The result is an album that lyrically has the feel of a novel or a collection of short stories, reminiscent of Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, in its stark depiction of glamorous malcontents in 1960s/70s Los Angeles. Like Didion, Mitchell seamlessly shifts from the universal to the specific to capture a particular mood and time. In Harry’s House, a song about a disaffected wealthy businessman, “A helicopter lands on the Pan Am Roof, like a dragonfly on a tomb, and businessmen in button downs press into conference rooms.” In Edith and the Kingpin, a fragile beauty is in thrall to her charismatic cocaine dealer who “tilts their tired faces gently to the spoon.” But unlike social-observation concept albums by her male contemporaries, The Hissing of Summer Lawns was not well-received, and Joni Mitchell was accused by critics of selling out by writing songs about the lives of wealthy people. Clearly, a female musician becoming more cerebral as she gained success threatened a dearly held cultural notion of what a woman artist should be.
When I read good prose or listen to good music, I respond visually. In my mind, stories play out like a film and sound becomes form and colour. So, listening to a song or a record where powerful music combines with evocative lyrics that construct a distinctive fictional world, is one of the most fully realised artistic experiences I can have.
In The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni Mitchell perfects the interplay between word and music. She composed the record’s score for multiple jazz musicians and gave them ample leeway to improvise, resulting in a sound that is layered and sumptuous. The listener sinks into it just as the characters in the songs sink into their doomed luxury. Its harmonious complexity creates a sensation of viewing the scenes evoked in the lyrics through a kaleidoscopic lens, fragments of imagery rotating and merging into each other: the lace on a pair of jeans, the leaves on a potted palm, a room full of unnused Chippendale furniture.
Since I was young enough to remember, I have always visualised sounds, words, and thoughts to an often-overwhelming degree. It never occurred to me that everyone else did not experience the world this way until one Sunday morning in my late 20s. I was sitting outside a coffee shop on Broadway Market in Hackney with a man I had met through Guardian Soulmates. He was a composer of film soundtracks, older and serious. When I told him that I worked as an illustrator, he asked me if I see letters of the alphabet as colours. Nobody had ever asked me this before.
"Of course," I said, "Doesn’t everyone?" It turns out he did too, but 95-98% of the population do not. He explained that we have synesthesia, a neurological condition where the brain directs sensory signals through several unrelated pathways instead of the obvious one for that particular sensation. This causes one to experience multiple senses at the same time, leading to sensations of seeing, tasting, or smelling sounds, words, and numbers. Rarer and more severe forms can cause sufferers to physically feel injuries they see in others or hear sounds when they see or taste things, and it can be debilitating.
While I had not initially been attracted to the composer, I began to confuse the illuminating nature of our conversation with some sort of profound connection. After we parted, I sent him a message saying how much I enjoyed meeting him. He didn’t reply, and I processed this rejection in my customary way: by drinking a very large amount of Sauvignon Blanc.
But he had only given me part of the story. While not usually considered a disability in itself, synesthesia is usually experienced by people with a form of diagnosable neurodivergence, but it would be over ten more years until I was finally diagnosed with ADHD.
The majority of ADHD symptoms I presented have never felt like anything other than obstacles: my indecisiveness, my inability to concentrate on anything I am not completely riveted by, my forgetfulness, my lack of organisation of both thoughts and possessions. By my late teens, navigating daily life with undiagnosed ADHD led me to an almost constant state of burnout, unhelpfully mistaken for clinical depression by medical professionals. It is impossible to overstate how validating it has been to receive my diagnosis, albeit later in life, and realise that I am not lazy, stupid, or hopeless, but actually have a brain disorder that makes much of what constitutes normal life extremely difficult for me.
I am troubled by the claim, often made by social media influencers and podcasters, that ADHD is a superpower and that if you have it, you are more likely to be creative or some sort of outlier venture capitalist. Yes, my neurodiversity has gifted me a strongly visual imagination, but being a successful and prolific artist involves skills and traits people with ADHD tend to lack, such as organisation, self-confidence, and attention to detail. Without diagnosis and treatment or help, trying to forge an artistic career with ADHD can feel like trying to construct a patchwork quilt out of snow.
But if I didn’t have ADHD, I probably wouldn’t have synesthesia, and my finished paintings that started life as thoughts that turned into images in my mind’s eye probably wouldn’t exist at all. I might applaud the distinctive lyrics of The Hissing of Summer Lawns and the ambition of Joni Mitchell’s multi-instrumental approach. But I wouldn’t be able to see all the sounds as colours with their own unique textures that morph into the silhouettes of the dissatisfied characters that populate the songs before dispersing seamlessly into the abstract realm of pure emotion.
I hope that our increased understanding of the human brain means that we can create a more accommodating world where there is no need to frame ADHD as either a superpower or a disability. In the meantime, for me at least, rare and transcendent works of art like The Hissing of Summer Lawns make having synesthesia and, by default, ADHD feel temporarily, if not like a superpower, then at least a gift.