THE FORCE OF AN IMAGE:
RING CYCLE
In our mind’s eye, that abstract seat of imagining, we picture the face of a lover, savor a kiss. When we think about him in passing, we have various thoughts; but when we actually picture him, as if he were a hologram, we feel a flush of emotion. There is much more to seeing than mere seeing. The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions. One photo can remind us of an entire political regime, a war, a heroic moment, a tragedy. One gesture can symbolize the wide angles of parental love, the uncertainty and disorder of romantic love, the fun-house mirrors of adolescence, the quick transfusion of hope, the feeling of low-level wind shear in the heart we call loss. Look at a grassy hillside, and you can remember immediately what freshly cut grass smells like, how it feels when it’s damp, the stains it leaves on your jeans, the sound you can make blowing over a grass blade held just so between your thumbs, and other assorted memories associated with grass: picnicking with the family; playing dodge ball in an orchard in the Midwest; herding cattle from the dusty New Mexico desert up to high fields of lush green to graze; hiking through the Adirondacks; making love in a grassy field at the top of a hill, on a hot, breezy summer day, when the sun, shining through the clouds, lights one part of the hillside at a time, as if it were a room in which the lamp had been turned on. When we see an object, the whole peninsula of our senses wakes up to appraise the new sight. All the brain’s shopkeepers consider it from their point of view, all the civil servants, all the accountants, all the students, all the farmers, all the mechanics. Together they all see the same sight—a grassy hillside—and each does a slightly different take on it, all of which adds up to what we see. Our other senses can trigger memories and emotions, too, but the eyes are especially good at symbolic, aphoristic, many-faceted perceiving. Knowing this, governments are forever erecting monuments. Generally they don’t look like much, but people stand in front of them and rush with emotion anyway. The eye regards most of life as monumental. And some shapes affect us much more than others.
For example, I’ve been following the space program closely for the past twenty years, and learning with robust delight about the solar system, thanks mainly to the Voyager spacecraft, which have been sending back home movies of Earth’s closest relatives. What a lovely shock it’s been to discover that half the planets have rings: not just Saturn, but Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and maybe even Pluto. And all the rings are different. Jupiter’s dark, narrow rings contrast with Saturn’s bright broad ribbons. Uranus’s obsidian rings have baguette moons in tow. The solar system has quietly been running rings around all of us. How magical and how poignant. Few symbols have ever meant as much to us, regardless of our religion, politics, age, or gender, as rings. We give rings to symbolize infinite love and the close harmony of two souls. Rings remind us of the simple cells that were the oldest version of life, and the symphony of cells we now are. We reach for the rings on merry-go-rounds. Rings halo what is sacred. We draw rings around things to emphasize them. Sports often take place in the magic ring of the playing field. A sensory kaleidoscope unfolds in the circus ring. Rings symbolize the infinite: We are only ever beginning to end. Rings signal a pledge made, a vow taken. Rings suggest eternity, agelessness, and perfection. We chart time on the face of a clock, as points along a ring. On playgrounds, children shoot marbles into a chalked circle; they are prime movers, acting out planetary mechanics. We bring the world into focus with the globes of our eyes, worlds within worlds. We treasure the well-rounded soul we think we see in a loved one. We believe that, just as a strong circle can be made out of two weaker arcs, we can complete ourselves by linking our life to someone else’s. We who crave the no-loose-ends, deathless symmetry of a ring praise the wonders of the universe as best we can, traveling along the ring of birth and death. The Apollo astronauts returned to earth changed by seeing the home planet floating in space. What they saw was a kind of visual aphorism, and it’s one we all need to learn by heart.
THE ROUND WALLS OF HOME
Picture this: Everyone you’ve ever known, everyone you’ve ever loved, your whole experience of life floating in one place, on a single planet underneath you. On that dazzling oasis, swirling with blues and whites, the weather systems form and travel. You watch the clouds tingle and swell above the Amazon, and know the weather that develops there will affect the crop yield half a planet away in Russia and China. Volcanic eruptions make tiny spangles below. The rain forests are disappearing in Australia, Hawaii, and South America. You see dust bowls developing in Africa and the Near East. Remote sensing devices, judging the humidity in the desert, have already warned you there will be plagues of locusts this year. To your amazement, you identify the lights of Denver and Cairo. And though you were taught about them one by one, as separate parts of a jigsaw puzzle, now you can see that the oceans, the atmosphere, and the land are not separate at all, but part of an intricate, recombining web of nature. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, you want to click your magic shoes together and say three times: “There’s no place like home.”
You know what home is. For many years, you’ve tried to be a modest and eager watcher of the skies, and of the Earth, whose green anthem you love. Home is a pigeon strutting like a petitioner in the courtyard in front of your house. Home is the law-abiding hickories out back. Home is the sign on a gas station just outside Pittsburgh that reads “If we can’t fix it, it ain’t broke.” Home is springtime on campuses all across America, where students sprawl on the grass like the war-wounded at Gettysburg. Home is the Guatemalan jungle, at times deadly as an arsenal. Home is the pheasant barking hoarse threats at the neighbor’s dog. Home is the exquisite torment of love and all the lesser mayhems of the heart. But what you long for is to stand back and see it whole. You want to live out that age-old yearning, portrayed in myths and legends of every culture, to step above the Earth and see the whole world fidgeting and blooming below you.
I remember my first flying lesson, in the doldrums of summer in upstate New York. Pushing the throttle forward, I zoomed down the runway until the undercarriage began to dance; then the ground fell away below and I was airborne, climbing up an invisible flight of stairs. To my amazement, the horizon came with me (how could it not on a round planet?). For the first time in my life I understood what a valley was, as I floated above one at 7,000 feet. I could see plainly the devastation of the gypsy moth, whose hunger had leeched the forests to a mottled gray. Later on, when I flew over Ohio, I was saddened to discover the stagnant ocher of the air, and to see that the long expanse of the Ohio River, dark and chunky, was the wrong texture for water, even flammable at times, thanks to the fumings of plastics factories, which I could also see, standing like pustules along the river. I began to understand how people settle a landscape, in waves and at crossroads, how they survey a land and irrigate it. Most of all, I discovered that there are things one can learn about the world only from certain perspectives. How can you understand the oceans without becoming part of its intricate fathoms? How can you understand the planet without walking upon it, sampling its marvels one by one, and then floating high above it, to see it all in a single eye-gulp?
Most of all, the twentieth century will be remembered as the time when we first began to understand what our address was. The “big, beautiful, blue, wet ball” of recent years is one way to say it. But a more profound way will speak of the orders of magnitude of that bigness, the shades of that blueness, the arbitrary delicacy of beauty itself, the ways in which water has made life possible, and the fragile euphoria of the complex ecosystem that is Earth, an Earth on which, from space, there are no visible fences, or military zones, or national borders. We need to send into space a flurry of artists and naturalists, photographers and painters, who will turn the mirror upon ourselves and show us Earth as a single planet, a single organism that’s buoyant, fragile, blooming, buzzing, full of spectacles, full of fascinating human beings, something to cherish. Learning our full address may not end all wars, but it
will enrich our sense of wonder and pride. It will remind us that the human context is not tight as a noose, but large as the universe we have the privilege to inhabit. It will change our sense of what a neighborhood is. It will persuade us that we are citizens of something larger and more profound than mere countries, that we are citizens of Earth, her joyriders and her caretakers, who would do well to work on her problems together. The view from space is offering us the first chance we evolutionary toddlers have had to cross the cosmic street and stand facing our own home, amazed to see it clearly for the first time.
*Among the many fibs of vision are optical illusions. A puddle forms on the highway in front of you. But, unlike a real puddle, it keeps moving farther away as you approach it. Because it is a hot summer day, with a layer of hot air sitting below a layer of cold air, a reflection (of the sky) is cast onto the road. The word “mirage” slowly forms in your mind. Its etymology means “to wonder at.” When we look at something red, the lens of our eye adjusts to the same shape it needs for seeing something green that is closer. When we look at something blue, the lens changes in the opposite direction As a result, blue things appear to recede into the background, and red things seem to leap forward. Red things seem to be contracting, while blue ones seem to be spreading out. Blue things are thought to be “cold,” while pink things are thought to be “warm.” And because the eye is always trying to make sense of life, if it encounters a puzzling scene it corrects the picture to what it knows. If it finds a familiar pattern, it sticks to it, regardless of how inappropriate it might be in that landscape or against that background.
*From the Latin pupilla, “a little doll.” When the Romans looked into one another’s eyes, they saw a doll-like reflection of themselves. The old Hebrew expression for pupil is similar: eshon ayin, which means “little man of the eye.”
*Because albinos lack a dark layer of cells behind the retina, more light travels around inside their eyes and colors often seem to them quieter and more diluted.
*Oliver Sachs tells of a sixty-five-year-old artist who survived a car accident only to discover that his color vision had entirely vanished because of a brain injury. Human flesh appeared “rat-colored” to him, and he found food ghastly and inedible without color.
*From Latin iris, rainbow + escence, becoming The combination -esc- converts words from a static state to one of motion and process putrescence, adolescence, luminescence.
*An alkaloid extracted from henbane and various other plants of the nightshade family, scopolamine has also been used as truth serum. What a perfect cocktail for a cruise large pupils continuously signaling interest in everyone they see, and a strong urge to be uninhibited and open to persuasion.
*As Laurens van der Post observed among the Bushmen of the Kalahari, “I saw the reason why poetry, music and the arts are matters of survival-of life and death to all of us. The arts are both guardians and makers of this chain; they are charged with maintaining the aboriginal movements in the latest edition of man, they make young and immediate what is first and oldest in the spirit of man.”
Synesthesia
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote
FANTASIA
A creamy blur of succulent blue sound smells like week-old 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:
His 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 sour-smelling 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 “Francis,” 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 everyone experiences some intermingling of the senses. According to Gestalt psychologists, when people are asked to relate a list of nonsense 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 Cytowič traces the phenomenon to the limbic system, the most primitive part of the brain, calling synesthetes “living cognitive fossils,” 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.”
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 together,” 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 correspondances” 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 flies,” claimed that the only way an artist can arrive at life’s truths is by experiencing “every form of love, of suffering, of madness,” 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 Vladimir Nabokov, who, in Speak, Memory, analyzes what he calls his “colored hearing”:
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 the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. Adjacent tints do not merge, and diphthongs do not have special colors of their own, unless represented by a single character in some other language (thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh, a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation).… The word for rainbow, a primary, but decidedly muddy, rainbow, is in my private language the hardly pronounceable: kzspygu. The first author to discuss audition colorée was, as far as I know, an albino physician in 1812, in Erlangen.