Bringing your Descriptions to Life

Abstract

This is an experiment suggested by José Silva and Philip Miele. I’ll wager that your salivary glands started pumping out liquid as you imagined yourself biting into the lemon. The lemon became real for you; your imagination tricked your body into believing it would have to cope with a mouthful of pure citrus. That is one of the things that writing does: it entices the reader into an ‘unreal’ world, a world ‘really’ only composed of funny marks on a page, and through those marks makes the reader consider something which may form no part of normal life. It throws words like real and normal into question, continually challenges and subverts the things we take for granted, the things we think we know.

CLOSE your eyes and sit quietly.

Bring into your inner field of vision — a lemon.

Examine it closely.

It is porous, with a little green dot in the middle of each pore.

Feel the knobbly, cool surface.

Imagine a knife.

You are slicing the lemon in half.

You raise one half to your mouth and sink your teeth into it.

What has happened?