1. My wife sings in a community chorus. As a dutiful husband, I went to her concert last Saturday and listened. Typical of me, my mind wandered. I like to say I have a nimble mind, but when I’m being honest, I confess that “nimble” is a euphemism for “easily distracted”. While I listened to the chorus, I found myself distracted by two women sitting ahead of me and to the left. Their heads bobbed up and down but not in time to the music. I wondered if they were playing a game. I leaned forward and strained to see what they were doing. They were resting sketch pads on their knees and drawing their impressions of the concert. At intermission, I spoke to them. The one woman is a professional artist visiting from Turkey. The other, a competent amateur, is her host while she visits. I said it was a very synesthetic thing they were doing, listening to a concert and interpreting it with sketches. I wonder if many artists draw what they hear?
2. After the concert, we went to a birthday party for a friend, a mezzo-soprano named Maria, and during a lull, she and I talked about the artists I had seen. It seems to me that singing opera is also a synesthetic experience. There is the libretto (the text of the story) and the musical score and there is the drama which the singers bring to life. Maria gave my reflection another turn of the screw by suggesting operas in which parts portray artists acting within operas. There is Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter). Tosca’s lover, Mario Cavaradossi, is a painter. And Berlioz based an opera on the memoirs of the Florentine sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini.
3. I drank too much wine, then went home and fell asleep. The next day, around noon, I noticed that my hand was missing. When I looked away, it was there, and when I stared at it directly, it disappeared. This could mean only one thing: I was getting a classic migraine. Soon, I saw squiggling lights in front of my eyes. Typically, this stage of the migraine lasts only five or ten minutes. The curious thing about the squiggling lines is that they respond to sound. If someone shouts or slams a door, the lights fly up in sudden peaks before they resume their squiggling patterns.
Synesthesia happens when input from one sense stimulates another sense. The classic example, often cited in the literature, is composer Olivier Messiaen, who saw colours when he heard music. I experience an associated phenomenon, known officially as ordinal linguistic personification—the perception of gender and personality in ordinal numbers and letters. I wrote about it here. Sometimes there’s more than that. Sometimes powerful images stimulate sounds—the opposite of what Messiaen reported. One of the most striking instances of this happened to me while driving through Alberta last fall. We came upon a decapitated buck. It looked like a headless buck was rising out of the asphalt. As we approached, a roar mounted in my head. By the time we reached it, the roar was a wall of white noise as loud as Niagara Falls.
I have a hypothesis. I think all people are synesthetes. At the very least, all people have synesthetic experiences. I think most people don’t notice because they desensitize themselves to this experience. This seems like a natural response. Too much sensory input would be overwhelming. Nevertheless, I believe most of our modes of expression have synesthetic roots.
Here are some illustrations, beginning close to home, then moving outward to modes of expression that are less familiar (to me).
My Blog. Even though my blog concerns itself mostly with the power of words, I adhere to a simple rule: each post must include something of visual interest. If it’s a book review, then an image of the cover. If it’s a story, then a photo of something thematically related to the story. I’m not unique in this. Most online content strives to integrate different media and appeal to more than one sense.
Poetry. Perhaps the oldest form of human expression, poetry attends not only to the content of the words, but also to their musicality, their rhythm and timbre. What’s more, we agree (perhaps by some tacit contract) that one of the measures of a poem’s merit is the extent to which its words stimulate images in our minds. Hence the word imagination. By convention, we have decided that good poetry is imaginative poetry.
Spectacle. We love spectacle. We love to assault our senses with sights and sounds. We get it in our living rooms with Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, Glee, Smash. We get it in big tents when we go to Cirque du Soleil, and on big screens when we watch Titanic in Imax 3D. Add to it the smell of popcorn and the tack of our shoes on the floor and our experience is complete. We go to Glastonbury and Burning Man and, if we’re rich, we try to get a shot into outer space.
Aldous Huxley suggested the reason we do these things is that they give us an intimation of a transcendent reality. I’m more inclined to think they awaken in us the memory of synesthetic experience which we knew in infancy but have suppressed because survival requires it.
I don’t know if my speculations are true. Sometimes it’s nice to retreat to a dark and silent place, and then, to re-enter the world as if I’m being born to light and sound.
The sun rises like a bomb and roars overhead until, come nightfall, it whispers again.
