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Passage III
strawberries dropped onto a tin sieve as mother approaches in a halo of color, chatter, and a perfume like thick golden butterscotch. Newborns ride on intermingling waves of sight, sound, touch, taste, and, especially, smell. As Daphne and Charles Maurer remind us in The World of the Newborn: sHis world smells to him much as our world smells to us, but he does not perceive odors as coming through his nose alone. He hears odors, and sees odors, and feels them too. His world is a mêlée of pungent aromas—and pungent sounds, and bitter-smelling sounds, and sweet-smelling sights, and soursmelling pressures against the skin. If we could visit the newborn’s world, we would think ourselves inside a hallucinogenic perfumery.
In time, the newborn learns to sort and tame all its sensory impressions, some of which have names, many of which will remain nameless to the end of its days. Things that elude our verbal grasp are hard to pin down and almost impossible to remember. A cozy blur in the nursery vanishes into the rigorous categories of common sense. But for some people, that sensory blending never quits, and they taste baked beans whenever they hear the word “Francisâ€, as one woman reported, or see yellow on touching a matte surface, or smell the passage of time. The stimulation of one sense stimulates another : synesthesia is the technical name, from the Greek syn (together) + aisthanesthai (to perceive). A thick garment of perception is woven thread by overlapping thread. A similar word is synthesis, in which the garment of thought is woven together idea by idea, and which originally referred to the light muslin clothing worn by the ancient Romans.
Daily life is a constant onslaught on one’s perceptions, and every-one experiences some intermingling of the senses. According to Gestalt psychologists, when people are asked to relate a list of non-sense words to shapes and colors they identify certain sounds with certain shapes in ways that fall into clear patterns. What’s more surprising is that this is true whether they are from the United States, England, the Mahali peninsula, or Lake Tanganyika. People with intense synesthesia tend to respond in predictable ways, too. A survey of two thousand synesthetes from various cultures revealed many similarities in the colors they assigned to sounds. People often associate low sounds with dark colors and high sounds with bright colors, for instance. A certain amount of synesthesia is built into our senses. If one wished to create instant synesthesia, a dose of mescaline or hashish would do nicely by exaggerating the neural connections between the senses. Those who experience intense synesthesia naturally on a regular basis are rare—only about one in every five hundred thousand people-and neurologist Richard Cytowic traces the phenomenon to the limbic system, the most primitive part of the brain, calling synesthetes “living cognitive fossilsâ€, because they may be people whose limbic system is not entirely governed by the much more sophisticated (and more recently evolved) cortex. As he says, “synesthesia …. may be a memory of how early mammals saw, heard, smelled, tasted and touched.â€
While synesthesia drives some people to distraction, it drives distractions away from others. While it is a small plague to the person who doesn’t want all that sensory overload, it invigorates those who are indelibly creative. Some of the most famous synesthetes have been artists. Composers Aleksandr Scriabin and Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov both freely associated colors with music when they wrote. To Rimski-Korsakov, C major was white; to Scriabin it was red. To Rimski-Korsakov, A major was rosy, to Scriabin it was green. More surprising is how closely their music-color synesthesias matched. Both associated E major with blue (for Rimski-Korsakov, it was sapphire blue, for Scriabin blue-white), A-flat major with purple (for Rimski-Korsakov it was grayish-violet, for Scriabin purple-violet), D major with yellow, etc.
Either writers have been especially graced with synesthesia, or they’ve been keener to describe it. Dr Johnson once said that scarlet “represented nothing so much as the clangour of a trumpet.†Baudelaire took pride in his sensory Esperanto, and his sonnet on the correspondences between perfumes, colors, and sounds greatly influenced the synesthesia-loving Symbolist movement. Symbol comes from the Greek word symballein, “to throw togetherâ€, and, as The Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature explains, the Symbolists believed that “all arts are parallel translations of one fundamental mystery. Senses correspond to each other; a sound can be translated through a perfume and a perfume through a vision. .....Haunted by these horizontal correspondences†and using suggestion rather than straightforward communication, they sought “the One hidden in Nature behind the Many.†Rimbaud, who assigned colors to each of the vowel sounds and once described A as a “black hairy corset of loud fliesâ€, claimed that the only way an artist can arrive at life’s truths is by experiencing “every form of love, of suffering, of madnessâ€, to be prepared for by “a long immense planned disordering of all the senses.†The Symbolists, who were avid drug takers, delighted in the way hallucinogens intensified all their senses simultaneously. They would have loved (for a short time) taking LSD while watching Walt Disney’s Fantasia, in which pure color dramatizes, melts into, and spurts from classical music. Few artists have written about synesthesia with the all-out precision and charm of Vladimiar Nabokov, who, in Speak, Memory, analyses what he calls his “colored hearingâ€:
Perhaps “hearing†is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet … has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of ….....â€
Synesthesia can be hereditary, so it’s not surprising that Nabokov’s mother experienced it, nor that it expressed itself slightly differently in her son. However, it’s odd to think of Nabokov, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Huysmans, Baudelaire, Joyce, Dylan Thomas and other notorious synesthetes as being more primitive than most people, but that may indeed be true. Great artists feel at home in the luminous spill of sensation, to which they add their own complex sensory Niagara. It would certainly have amused Nabokov to imagine himself closer than others to his mammalian ancestors, which he would no doubt have depicted in a fictional hall of mirrors with suave, prankish, Nabokovian finesse.
Those who experience intense synesthesia are rare. Which cluster are synesthetes?
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
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