Re: GG : Greyness, synaesthesia, and non-verbal communication

[Birgitte Jorgensen <bj@kemmunet.net.mt>]

Thanks, Kate, for a revealing description of your brush with synesthesia.

Kate Clunies-Ross wrote:
> And much of what we
> need to say simply cannot be said in words, so we look for other channels.
> And in Gould's case, what a channel he had, with his music.

For me, much of the pleasure in both words and music derives from their
imprecision. It seems that in art, as in life, just as one closes in on the
target, one finds oneself on the threshold of yet another "infinitely expanding
universe" of meanings.

> Most colourblind people of course see a whole range of colours; they simply
> cant distinguish some  (usually red and green) that appear totally different
> to the rest of the world.

While it?s true that the legally "colourblind" are those who merely have a
defect in the retinal cells, who misread colors, seeing brown, for example,
where others might see red, the term is actually a misnomer. The people of
Micronesia studied by Oliver Sacks are exceptionally rare (1 in 30-40K) cases
of congenital colourblindness. That is, they are totally colourblind because
they have no functional cones, which are cells that specialize not only in
colour perception but also in the apprehension of fine detail. Achromatopes, as
they are called, must rely solely on the scantier input of the rods, which,
being more sensitive to light than the mediating cones, we use for night
vision. Thus, they cannot "construct" the mental sensation of colours.
Apparently, this condition can also result from a stroke, but I leave the
implications of that up to your imagination.

It?s absorbing reading, but of relevance to this thread is the way that Sacks
speculates on how the substitution of a palette of grey for Technicolor might
alter the very concept of seeing and how it might differ from the perceptual
parameters of those who revel in a color-saturated world:

"Would they, perhaps, lacking any sense of something missing, have a world no
less dense and vibrant than our own? Might they even have developed heightened
perceptions of visual tone and texture and movement and depth, and live in a
world in some ways more intense than our own, a world of heightened reality ?
one that we can only glimpse echoes of in the work of the great black-and-white
photographers? Might they indeed see us as peculiar, distracted by trivial or
irrelevant aspects of the visual world, and insufficiently sensitive to its
real visual essence?"

If the visual references can also be regarded as auditory allusions, then
Sacks? line of inquiry, and especially his notion of heightened perceptions,
might well serve as a framework for navigating the architecture of Glenn
Gould?s mind.

In the context of ideas about non-verbal communication, it?s worth noting that
a 19th-century visitor to the island of the colourblind found them to be
"remarkably versatile linguists."

It?s fortunate that Kate?s experiences under dental anesthesia, when she heard
qualities of light translated into sounds, have given her some insight into the
leakage between senses that occurs with synesthesia. I recently read about a
Canadian political leader who found God in the dentist?s chair when she had a
near-death experience while under anesthesia. I would venture to guess that the
general level of dental hygiene could be raised substantially if more people
were aware of these side-effects of anesthesia.

I neglected to mention at the start of this thread the fact that Oliver Sacks
also happens to be the neurologist who wrote the forward to the paperback
edition of Peter Ostwald's notorious (at least on this discussion list)
psycho-bio, "The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius." I own the hardback edition, so
I haven't yet read Sacks' piece, but I cannot imagine that it would be there
for any other reason that to muster support for Ostwald's contentious theory
that Gould suffered from a mild form of autism known as Asperger Syndrome. In
the book, which is otherwise quite responsible and accountable to fact, Ostwald
barely does more than give it a passing mention; he never really explains
himself fully or manages to give anything more than a few anecdotal bits of
evidence to back up such a patently absurd posthumous "diagnosis." But, slight
as it is, the reference to Aspberger's is one of those provocative elements
that just leaps out of a book and into the welcoming arms of jaded book
reviewers, who live for this sort of thing.

The list is all too aware of my stand on the autism issue (100% contra), but
that doesn't mean I think Sacks is a 100% crank. On the contrary, he has a
sharp, wide-ranging mind, he's an eloquent and erudite writer, and I think he's
a brilliant, even daring, scientist. And, he?s a humanitarian. On the other
hand, those statements are contingent and provisional; they might very well
undergo revision, if not retraction, after I read his forward to Ostwald?s
book.

Sacks has also written a book on migraine (warning: it?s highly technical and
not as entertaining as his other works) that contains intriguing descriptions
of migraine aura, a sensation that appears to mimic synesthesia, or perhaps it
IS a temporary state of synesthesia. He posits that the rapturous visions that
come compliments of an intense migraine aura were the muses that inspired Alice
in Wonderland and the ecstatic art of Hildegard von Bingen.

Perhaps an interesting thread might now begin on the nature of imagined music
in the minds of the congenitally deaf vis-à-vis the interior symphonies that
buoyed the thoughtwaves of Glenn Gould.

-Birgitte Jorgensen

PS-
Kate Clunies-Ross wrote:
>PS I loke the idea of a multiligual F-Minor, but how would it work? Would
>people provide their own translations of what they write? Its a bit
>worrying! I can get by in French, and have a smattering of Romanian, and if
>I dig deep into the dark recesses of my memory, there might be a spot of
>Latin there...but how many Romanians or Ancient Romans subscribe to F-Minor?
>  Alas, I have no German, Spanish,or Italian...and as for Russian, Japanese,
>or Finnish....oh dear.....

Well, let's deal with the differences in UK/US/Canadian/Oz/NZ English dialects
first, shall we? You say tomahto, we say tomayto, you write synaesthesia (UK),
I write synesthesia (US). Actually, Canadians like me are a bit schizophrenic
when it comes to choosing between the spelling rules of the Queen's English and
the more logical American English and you will find me writing gray as often as
I write grey. Alas, spell-checkers just don?t seem to get it.