Simon Ings looks back at how synaesthesia has captured imaginations for over a century, although many of the descriptions and art forms that inform us of the condition are being expressed by those who do not have first hand experience of it.
When I was young, I used to see colours for certain sounds. We lived on the trunk road between Portsmouth and London. Car horns made red spider-shapes in front of my eyes. The liveries of the corporation buses smelled exactly like unripe blackcurrants.
I have to dredge my memory for these images because they fell away very early: they can't have lasted much beyond the age of six. Coloured shapes for number lasted a while longer; mental arithmetic was easy for me because my private colour-sense sometimes fed me the answers. Then, when I was seventeen and might have put this trick to some account, it too faded away.
I wasted my twenties. I didn't want to get out of my head. I just wanted to put my head back together the way it had been. Music, poetry, climbing mountains – nothing is so intense now that breaks the barriers between my senses. I'm (horrors) normal.
This is, of course, a cheap way of getting your attention. It's true enough (mind you, how could you be sure?) but it works by setting up a power-relation: I saw something you couldn't, and you will have to come to me to find out what it was. It uses your curiosity against you – rather like the title of that book by Maya Angelou, 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.' (You can almost hear the 'So There'.)
(Above) If our thoughts are not made of sensations, what are they made of? Nichola Bruce and Rebecca Marshall's
Entoptic Visions captures the light show our minds make of pitch-darkness.
The experiences that grazed me go by the name synaesthesia. Some people live with synaesthesia for the whole of their lives. Others – artists, film-makers, poets and writers – have a long history of imagining the experience of synaesthesia without actually having had any first-hand experience of it. This is not a criticism. Imagining their way into other heads is, after all, what artists do; problems arise only when the knowledge they espouse is in some way damaging or fraudulent. Artists like telling the truth. This is why art's reliance upon science is greater than individual artists ever like to admit.
A rare and fruitful art-science collaboration was featured last Saturday night at NFT3, when I was talking with the animator Samantha Moore and Dr Jamie Ward about their recreations, on film, of synaesthetic experience.
Dr. Jamie Ward is a psychologist who is trying to unpick the nature of the synaesthesia. He spends a lot of his time explaining how many different types of synaesthesia there are. There are people who smell sounds, who feel shapes, who see numbers as colours – the variations between synaesthetes is immense. Even people who on paper share the same 'sense' may assign very different qualities to their experiences.
Moore, who makes animated documentaries, wants to capture the experience of synaesthesia as accurately as possible. Ward, an academic, wants to use Moore's films in experiments to further understand the condition. Neither of them are synaesthetes. Both of them have simple, clear-cut agendas.
Other people's agendas have not always been so easy to unpick. As Jules Millet, despondent at the rapid popularisation of synaesthesia, once grumbled, 'The seers have surged forth from all parts like mushrooms after an autumn rain.' His remark is over a hundred years old, but those mushrooms still smother the truth about synaesthesia - if, indeed, there is any reliable truth to be had over so subjective a condition.
Synaesthesia swept through the European consciousness at the end of the nineteenth century like an intellectual virus, piggy-backing every imaginable cultural, religious and intellectual agenda.
For example, Darwin's dangerous idea had thrown up one vital, unanswered question: did human consciousness evolve, the way the human body evolved? Was it still evolving? Maybe synaesthesia was a sign of its evolution...
Meanwhile, for those trying to winkle out a human dimension to the findings of the new physics, synaesthesia suggested nothing so much as the perception of hitherto undetected rays.
And, as always, moral panic – that great, undervalued creative agent in cultural life – was whipping up a tasty shock-tale of how pandemics of hysteria, nervous exhaustion, masturbation and synaesthesia were poised to swallow Western civilisation whole.
Experiments in mediumistic vision: Annie Besant and C W Leadbeater's cross-modal interpretation of music by Wagner: '...a vast bell-shaped erection, fully 900ft in height'.
Histories of art and synaesthesia inevitably circle around the triumvirate of Rimbaud, a poet, the composer Scriabin, and the painter Kandinksy. They were the most famous synaesthetes of their day – and not one of them was truly synaesthetic.
Arthur Rimbaud: Vowels
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels
One day I will tell of your latent birth:
A, black hairy corset of shining flies
Which buzz around a cruel stench,
Gulfs of darkness; E, whiteness of vapors and tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, quivering of flowers;
I, purples, spit blood, laughter of beautiful lips
In anger or penitent drunkenness;
U, cycles, divine vibrations of green seas,
Peace of pastures scattered with animals, peace of the wrinkles
Which alchemy prints on heavy studious brows;
O, supreme Clarion full of strange stridor,
Silences crossed by words and angels:
—O, the Omega, violet beam from His Eyes!
From Rimbaud, A. 1967: complete works, selected letters. Wallace Fowlie, trans. & ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
He doesn't give a damn if 'A' is red or green. Arthur Rimbaud cribbed the terms of his 'synaesthetic' poem Voyelles (Vowels) from medical textbooks.
In October 1883, Arthur Rimbaud's poem 'Vowels' was published. Its cross-sensory imagery launched a fad which consumed fin de siecle Paris and shows no sign of abating today. Wherever media graduates gather together and hurl themselves giggling down the bottomless pit signposted 'multimedia' you can be sure there's a well-thumbed copy of Arthur Rimbaud left under somebody's bed.
Ironically, according to his friend the poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud was not, and never claimed to be, a synaesthete. 'In my knowledge of Rimbaud, he doesn't give a damn if 'A' is red or green,' Verlaine wrote – but story-starved biographers have a way of turning a person's good ideas into their 'life secrets'.
The composer Alexander Scriabin was an out-and-out charlatan who copied his synaesthetic experiences out of a Theosophist text-book in an attempt to establish his reputation as the founder of a new art of colour-music. 'It is not likely that Scriabin's experiment will be repeated by other composers,' wrote a reviewer for the Nation: 'moving-picture shows offer much better opportunities.' Ten years later, Walt Disney proved him right: Fantasia was released in 1937. Mind you, it is impossible not to like Scriabin. His music is intelligent and moving, and his stage shows are pure prog-rock: one of his symphonic scores includes instructions for projecting colours over the sides of Zeppellins.
Then there are the hard cases – neither victims of the fads they started, nor shameless manipulators, they are, as a group, very easy indeed to send up, less easy to understand.
(Above) A new art of colour-music: Norman McLaren's short film Loops, produced in 1952, shows how closely artistic experiments can be taken for illustrations of synaesthesia.
'The truth, manifold and one': Kandinsky’s colour study gropes towards a universal language of colour and form.
Shedding the anxiety of influence: Kandinsky acquires his own 'voice' through pure abstraction.
The painter Wassily Kandinsky is one of these. Kandinsky wanted to create an art that transcended his own time and culture, Frankly, any artist worth the gunpowder necessary to blow them through the barn door would say the same.
Kandinsky went so far as to create a radically new art, an abstract art that – to steal from another pioneer entirely, the writer Joseph Conrad – 'brings to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying [the world's] every aspect.'
The trouble is, the more universal an art is, the more vague and portentious it becomes. The more meaning it contains, the less meaning it conveys. Every religion on earth has room in its image repertoire for white light, because white light is the only thing everyone can agree on. It symbolises everything and means nothing. To defend himself against the charge of producing pictures that meant a lot to him and nothing to anyone else, Kandinsky had to anchor his abstractions in some reliable universal system. A champion of Theosophy, an esoteric philosophy promulgated by the mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Kandinsky recruited that movement's experiments in mediumistic vision to his own project. The components of his mid-period canvases contain clear borrowings from the paintings of occult investigators like Annie Besant. It was not plagiarism, as such. But it was another wall of the rhetorical prison Kandinksy was building for himself.
The problem was this: if he was only illustrating the theories of theosophist writers and painters like Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, then he could not be much of a painter.
And Kandinsky's early works were mere illustrations of Theosophist imagery. The only way he could escape being a mere illustrator, the only way he could take possession of this image repertoire and really begin to experiment with it, is if he shed his anxiety of influence, and the only way to do that was to claim that he, too, experienced mediumistic visions.
The more meaning it contains, the less meaning it conveys: Annie Besant and C W Leadbeater's 'thought-form' depicts 'vague intellectual pleasure'.
Was Kandinsky synaesthetic? This is not quite the right question. (Kandinsky, like Rimbaud, wanted off the band-wagon; he kept having to explain to people that he wasn't trying to paint music. The question should be, I think, to what extent did Kandinsky have to lie to himself to make his art possible?
Synaesthesia appears to offer so much by way of liberating us from the divisions that exist between the senses; and because all states of altered consciousness come with a dramatic sense of their own importance, it's not too much to say that they seem even to offer a way out of time, space and the body.
I've just spent the last two years of my life hacking through the literature of vision for a new book, a history of the eye. Knowing what I know now, I'm pretty sure I'm done with these sorts of promises. I think they're rubbish. More: I think they corrupt people.
I think synaesthesias are to do with thinking. (After all, if our thoughts are not made of sensations, what are they made of?) I think they are components – invisible to most of us, visible to a few – of the way we string our thoughts together. Experiencing them is a gift, but it is a gift that does not count for very much. It's as vital, and as fleeting, and as meaningful, as a cloud of hawthorn blossom, before the wind comes and blows it all away.
Simon Ing's new book The Eye - A Natural History is available now.