My Idea of Fun Read Free Page B

know that when you imagine a philosopher, any philosopher, for instance the one you saw asleep in the park yesterday, his scalp-scurf merging seamlessly with a mossy wall, your mental image is sharp only when it is hazy and hazy as soon as you attempt to bring it into sharper focus. Isn't that so? The more you concentrate on your visual memory, the more you attempt to fix it securely, the more it slides away, like a quicksilver bead.
    If this example seems contrived to you, why not try it with something a little less abstract than a philosopher, for example, the visage of the one you love most. Come now, there must be someone to whom you can ascribe such status? Why don't you summon them up, enjoy the charming singularity of their countenance. Now, what can you see? That their eyes are such-and-such colour, that they style their hair just so, that their skin has this very fine grain, quite like microscopic hide? I'll grant you all of that – but not all at once. What you've done with Little Love is to describe an outline for them and then fill it in, piecemeal, as required. As it is to the sympathy, so it is to the photography. You cannot tell me that, when you appreciated the hue of those sympatico eyes, you also managed to take in the raw triangle of the Loved One's tear ducts? And if you did, did you perchance notice if they had any rheum on them, any at all?
    That's what's so achingly sad about your love – that's why it bulges in your heart like an incipient aneurism. For the harder you try to cement it to its object, the more that object eludes you.
    Let me reiterate: it's not like that for me. I can summon up faces from my yesteryears and hold a technician's blowtorch to their cheeks. And then, once the skin has started to pullulate, I can yank it away again and count the blisters, one by one, large and small. I can even dig into them and savour the precise whisper of their several crepitations.
    Now that's how eidetiking differs from yer’ average visualising.
    Usually eidetikers are idiots-savants. Many are autistic. It's almost as if this talent were a compensation for being unable to communicate with others. So it's hardly surprising that they don't find much use for their exceptional gifts. From time to time one will crop up on television, giving the donators at home an opportunity to adopt the moral high ground of someone else's suffering. Or else her résumé will appear, boxed in by four-point rules, well stuck in to a fourth-rate chat mag. These prodigies can take one glance at Chartres and then render it in pencil, right down to the grimace of the uppermost gargoyle on the topmost pinnacle. Big deal. That gargoyle might as well be the eidetikers themselves, for all the jollies they'll get out of their unusual abilities.
    I can tell you, it wasn't like that for me. I didn't have to spend my childhood in an institution, slavering on the collar of my anorak, and waiting for parental visits that never happened. I was an exception – an eidetiker who could communicate normally, who didn't have to resort to calculating fifteen digit roots in my head, in order to get some kind of attention.
    That being said, my eidetiking was something that I was virtually unaware of as a child. Indeed, had I not come under the influence of an exceptional man it's doubtful that anything would have come of it at all. After all, who cares whether someone's visual imagery is particularly vivid or not? Furthermore, how can this vividness be accurately described? I've done my best, but I know that I've begged as many questions as I've answered. Suffice to say that as long as I can remember I've been able to call up visual memories with startling accuracy and then manipulate them at will.
    Most of the time I didn't choose to, and for a longish period, in early adulthood, I temporarily lost the ability. But now I've got it back again. Casting behind me, looking over my shoulder, down the crazy mirror-lined passage that constitutes my