Musings about the way my brain works

I am not a visual person (despite the fact that I keep staring at pictures of the boy I have a crush on).
There is some sort of weird trip in my brain that makes it hard for me to make pictures from words and vice-versa. If you say "picure your room in Bartlett", I can do that. I actually sometimes remember when something happened by remembering which room in Bacchus I was in when it happened, and sometimes that's a picture. But I hate long descriptive scenes in books, at least descriptions of imagery. Give me dialogue any day. I love dialogue, if it's well-written. You want to describe a day? Describe how it tastes, how it smells, how it feels, how it sounds. There are 5 senses, but so many writers spend so much time on describing what something looks like.

I understand why, certainly. Sight is a powerful sense, we use it all day, everyday, to get where we're going, to recognize our friends and family, to find things, etc. I suppose maybe I see sight as a utilitarian sense, and also as a distraction. I can and do find pleasure in beautiful things, certainly, but I don't stare at pretty things the way I repetively stroke something that is nice to touch. I close my eyes when I kiss, when I eat something delicious, when someone is rubbing my back or scratching my chin. When I want to focus, I close my eyes.

I care more about the sound of a man's voice than the way he looks. I care about the texture of his skin when he touches my hand, I care about the way he smells, the way he moves through space, the way I feel around him, all far more than I care about how he looks. Which is not to say I don't care about the way a man looks, because I do, but it is not as important as a million other things (and if you don't believe me, I could prove it with pictures).

I know what my friends look like, but I can't describe them to you in anything other than the vaguest terms if you want to know what they look like. This frustrates people sometimes. I can sometimes call to mind the mental picture of someone I was talking to, but I can't say what they looked like. I can tell you who they were sitting between, maybe what they were wearing (if I was paying attention). I can tell you how tall they were relative to me, if they had long or short hair, etc, but I don't have a knack for describing people, and my memory is as much about the context of meeting them- their story, who they were with, etc.

I cannot learn by watching. Well, I can, I can learn certain things. I can learn what something looks like by seeing a picture, which is far more helpful to me than a description. But if you want to teach me how to do something, you have to let me do it. I am only now, as an adult, realizing how much of a kinesthetic learner/thinker I am, because my ability to learn academic material via auditory and visual methods was strong enough that I never had any problems. And of course, different styles work differently for different subjects. But I have a tactile imagination. I don't think in pictures, I think in sensations. In words, too, yes, a lot (especially in conversations/monologues). But if you ask me to imagine my dream house, for example, I will tell you that it is warm, and filled with things that are soft, that it encourages snuggling. It has a huge claw-foot tub that I can float in. It smells like freshly baked bread in the winter and citrus in the summer. It is filled with laughter and books and balls of yarn. But the picture that comes into my head will be borrowed from something I've seen before, not created new. (this tendency, by the way, to borrow pictures, leads to some occasionally amusing and occasionally mildly disturbing dreams) My ideal man is taller than me, broad-shouldered, masculine. He has smile lines around his eyes. That's about it, visually, and most of that isn't even a visual preference, it's because I love the way it feels to be held by someone taller/bigger than me.

The reason I started writing this was because I was talking about movies over in cleolinda's LJ and I was saying that visuals in film should always serve the narrative. They should set the scene, the mood, but they shouldn't be there just to be pretty. Of course, really everything in a film should serve the narrative, not just the visuals. But I imagine there are some people who would argue that the whole point of a film is that it's nice to look at. I like film as a story-telling medium because it gets me out of tedious descriptive passages. No 5-page discourse on the landscape will ever give me the picture that one long shot will, and it's far more pleasurable to see than to read. I hate reading battle sequences, I don't understand half of what's going on and I get lost in the action. I don't mind watching them (though I still maintain that pretty much every movie ever, and most of the world, would be made better with less fighting and more kissing).
And now my train of thought has moved to the station where we talk about how B is lame, which is a sign that it is time to stop writing and go on a quest for lunch.