WHAT IS THE HOLOSPHERE?

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The holosphere is my greatest frustration as a writer, because there are no words in the English language dedicated to describing it.

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Those who have read books and attended workshops on creative writing will be familiar with the principle of invoking the ‘five senses’ when writing a scene, in order to help the reader feel it, see it, taste it, smell it, hear it. English is well suited to this strategy because it contains so many words that describe the sensations that the five senses deliver.

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Only…we have more named senses than just The Five. I read somewhere that there are quite a lot of them actually – more than one might expect. Our sense of balance, for example, is an easy one to acknowledge. What about sense of proportion? Is that recognised by the experts as an actual sense? I don’t know – it just occurred to me. Seems like a good one though. And beyond the additional named senses I feel we have even more, unnamed, senses. And this is where my frustration as a writer makes an appearance, because the tools of my craft are words, and unfortunately there are no words to specifically express the sensations delivered to me by the unnamed senses.

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The word ‘holosphere’ is a new word, made up by myself, to represent that thing which my combined senses, named and unnamed, sense and feed back to me. The holosphere is the sensation of a moment that I can experience yet not convey in words. It is more than atmosphere. The atmosphere of a moment contributes to the holosphere, as does the sights within it, the sounds, the scents, the textures, etc. But the holosphere is: that sensation of the moment that is experienced as a result of all of the named and unnamed senses combined.

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Yes, it is the combination of everything I am sensing at any given moment, including the atmosphere I sense around me, external to me, and the many layered activity going on within me. It includes sense of time, sense of place, sense of relationship. Sense of relationship is a huge one because everything is in relationship to everything! My different senses are in relationship to each other. Relationships themselves are in relationship to each other. And so infinity is created. The holosphere is the full experience of a moment, and the holosphere of each moment has its own unique, distinctive ‘flavour’, just as the taste of a strawberry is distinct from the taste of a cigarette.

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The holosphere tells me everything I need to know about a particular moment without the need of a single word or concept, just as the taste of a strawberry tells me all I need to know about the taste of that particular strawberry.

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The holosphere gives me way more information than can be processed on a purely intellectual level – as I say, it tells me everything there is to be told about the moment in question.

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In order to detect the holosphere it is necessary for me to be paying attention, to be awake to the moment, to be truly present. I do not ‘hear’ every sound that reaches my ears, or ‘see’ everything that is before my eyes. And so it is with the holosphere: there is always a holosphere present, but I don’t always notice it, so adept have I become at selecting which perceptions I wish to tune into and which I wish to tune out. I sensed the holosphere distinctly when I was very young. Everything was new to me and I was highly sensitized to the new world and the new body I found myself in. As an adult I now tend to sense the holosphere more readily in moments when I am in love, or in an unfamiliar place, or having some kind of adventure or novel experience. Much of the rest of the time I pass through the holosphere without giving it a thought, or a glance, or a sniff.

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As a writer I wish to convey the essence of any moment that feels important to me. The holosphere of such a moment, whether fictional or recalled or current, is felt keenly by me – it is THE thing I most wish to convey – and…ho, ho, ho…there are no actual words that have been invented to convey it.

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Such is my dilemma.

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Well, life moves on. Consciousness evolves. Language evolves. A short while ago there wasn’t even a word for the holosphere, and now there is. So what comes next? Here I am, on the frontier of literature, and I have only made one small step forward. What am I hoping may happen next? That a whole vocabulary of new words will arise that describe the different flavours of the holosphere? Hmm, well it would be a bit excessive to come up with a separate and unique word to describe the shape of each and every snowflake that ever existed, so a word for each distinct flavour of the holosphere would seem a tad excessive and unwieldy to me. But there are ways to talk about the shape of a particular snowflake. Once we have identified that such a thing as a snowflake exists, and then got hold of a microscope and had a good look at one, we naturally find ways to describe its shape.

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Perhaps it will be the same with the holosphere. Perhaps, simply by recognising there is a holosphere present in each moment we can begin to find ways to describe it. I say ‘we’ because really I can’t do this alone. If I’m the only person going about the place using the word holosphere then I won’t be conveying anything to anybody but myself, and that won’t come close to satisfying my writerly urges.

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So please, you folk who have an interest in expressing what hasn’t been expressed before, you writers who feel ready to explore a new frontier, come with me. Here is a space to do it. I will put my experimental attempts here – dive into the bubbles below. And you can send me your own experiments, or examples from literature that you think evoke the holosphere, and if they touch me in some way I’ll put them on here too .