Grey Matter

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

Max Kuenkel wrote:
> I didn't clarify what I meant by gray. When I said gray, I was
referring to
> the Gould video "An Art of the Fugue", in which he not only calls that
fugue
> "gray", but also elaborates for several minutes on what he means (it
has
> nothing to do with synesthia, nor with monotony or dullness). He talks
about
> harmony and chromaticism, and compares the harmony of that unfinished
fugue
> ("an infinitely expanding universe") to the harmony of two other
fugues
> ("clear cut modulations").

It is assuredly an emblematic conversation, and one worth a repeated
listening: "...that final fugue has a sense of peace, a devotional
quality that I think even for Bach is really overwhelming." He also
quotes Schweitzer on the first fugue to help explain how the last moves
him more than any other: "...it was a still and serious world, deserted
and rigid, without colour, without light and without motion...."
However, I think it may have something to say about synesthesia after
all.

Speaking of the chromatics of Bach's A of F, Gould says, with a
revealing digression: "...it allows him to write tonally, but without
any of the Technicolour trappings of tonality. For me, these pieces
contain an endless range of grey tints. I mean that as a compliment
because I love grey."

Bearing in mind that "battleship grey" was Gould's favourite colour, and
introducing the concept of synesthesia to an examination of his
cognitive processes, it seems fair to speculate that his version of grey
had depths and dimensions not normally associated with conventional
perceptions of grey. It may have been rather like taking William
Styron's definition of clinical depression, by which night or the
"colour" black becomes "darkness made visible."

Bob wrote:
> I think it's nearly certain that the sense we know best of Gould's,
the sense with which we nearly
> entirely associate him, sound, was just the tip of his sensory
iceberg, the sense he chose and
> disciplined himself to be his artistic passport to others. Early on,
he probably sensed it was best
> to limit his artistic endeavors and communications with others of his
species to one single, simple
> sense that already had a long tradition of accepted, familiar
conventions: classical music, the
> piano. But I've always sensed that everything that Gould did and said
seemed to have deeper and
> somewhat concealed sensory dimensions for him.

To anyone who might share Bob Merton's fascination with "a real hidden
treasure of a book, ?The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast
Memory,? by the Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria," and who also shares his
belief (as I do) that it is "seminal for all of us here who wonder what
unique and mysterious things were going on in the mind of GG, and why
the world appeared as it did to him," I highly recommend a book by
Oliver Sacks entitled "Island of the Colourblind" (1996) for its
illuminating (and I don?t apply that world lightly) first-hand
descriptions of the mysteriously monochromatic world inhabited by a
community of people in Pingelap, Micronesia, who perceive it in terms of
Gould's "endless range of gray tints." As much as I am stimulated by a
world drenched in colours, to read their accounts of colourblindness
(recalling that they do not possess a genuine vocabulary of colour) is
to enter an exceedingly rich and hauntingly beautiful alternative world,
a sort of silver-plated parallel universe governed by patterns. I am
reminded of what Mario said here a few days ago, that it is impossible
to describe in words a primary colour without resorting to metaphors or
to correspondences in other senses. That, I would venture to say, is
what great art attempts to do.

While Gould was certainly not colourblind, reading these opulent
descriptions of grey (the single word "grey" is utterly inadequate to
the task of describing the magnitude of their monochromatic visual
world) helps give one a sense of just how radically different human
perception can be, how much it can vary in subtlety of perception, and,
hence, how relative is our individual sense of the world. In the same
way, Gould clearly "heard" sounds in his own idiosyncratic way and was,
to our lasting appreciation, able to communicate some of that auditory
vision to us.

Perhaps this also helps explain one aspect of Gould's notorious
attraction to the telephone as his primary means of personal
communication, since audio-only connections dispensed with the visual
"distractions" of face-to-face contact. For him, the human voice was
charged with nuances, in which spoken words, vocalizations, and the
silences that separate them, danced with shadows and light.

Prior to reading Sacks' book, I had patronizingly pitied the
colourblind, and although they do suffer some practical difficulties in
navigating a colourists' society (also problems with light-sensitivity;
Sacks brought along a crate of eagerly accepted sunglasses) because they
distinguish between tones and intensities of light rather than by
colour, I now realize that I was utterly mistaken. It's not so much that
they don't see a world composed of millions of colours, but rather, that
they actually see other things that we simply can't see. A qualitatively
different world is available to their senses.

Jim Morrison wrote:
> Elmer/Bob makes it sound to me like Gould had the condition
[synesthesia] as well, [snip]

Under the circumstances, it might make more sense to call it a gift
rather than a condition in so far as the absence of synesthesia (in
other words, non-perforated senses) or the absence of monochromaticism
(the "handicap" of seeing colours) might also be regarded as conditions,
even though they are the states most commonly experienced by most
members of our species. Gould was nothing if not uncommon.

The irony is that his interpretations and performances of classical
music are justly celebrated for their controlled balance of complexity
and clarity, a paradoxical separateness and completeness, where both
universality and exactitude share the same acoustical space, not the
quality of sound one would normally associate with murky, indefinite
shades of grey. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his
music opened up the grey areas, and stripped monochromaticism of its
monotony. Suddenly, grey isn?t just grey anymore (sorry, sounds like a
pitch for haircolour), it?s alive with possibility, an eternal
progression of stages between light and dark, infinitely divisible into
Gouldian variations that mimic the diversity of the chimera of
perceptions that make music out sound possible.

-Birgitte