Synesthesia, which refers to the mingling of one of the five senses with another, itself brings together disparate disciplines and media: neuroscience, trippy drug-experiences, psychedelic music, art and videos, and poetry. The “crossed wires” that it involves are more common than one might assume. Some synesthetic combinations, in fact, have become dead metaphors in English: a “mute color” (auditory and visual), for example, or a “sharp taste” (tactile and gustatory). When used for expressive purposes in literature, however, the sensory leap of synesthesia can be mind-expanding.
I remember my astonishment in undergraduate school when I first read a synesthetic simile in a scene called the teichoskopia (“view from the walls”) in Homer’s Iliad. After Helen of Troy identifies a comparatively short and stocky man down on the battle plain as Odysseus, the counselor Antenor recounts that, when he first saw him in an assembly, he didn’t think much of him. He concludes:
But when Odysseus with his big chest voice
was speaking words like snowflakes in a storm,
you’d say no man on earth could rival him.
Yes, the image is meant to show the multitude and dynamism of the words uttered by Odysseus, but snowflakes? The emphasis in the first line is clearly on sound—the power of his voice. The leap from heard to seen things, however, pushes his words into the realm of the magical (and beautiful). That example shows the auditory becoming visual. Another instance of synesthesia that has fascinated me for years makes the visual auditory. In the Introductory Canto to Inferno Dante encounters a she-wolf which obstructs his attempt to gain the summit of a hill:
As someone buoyant while his profits rise
turns fatalistic when a slump comes round,
and every prospect in him wails and cries,
so that relentless creature, gaining ground,
hedged and harassed me rearward, step by step,
back down to where the sun is without sound.
As the wolf snaps and charges, Dante walks backward down the hill until its summit eclipses the sun from his view. He is not in total darkness, but where sunlight (the direct and, implicitly, audible kind) can no longer be perceived.
Interest in synesthesia as a neurological condition has boomed since the Australian sociologist Judy Singer spawned the Neurodiversity Movement with her honor’s thesis in 1998. My encounters with synesthetes have fascinated me throughout my life. In undergraduate school, for example, I had a crush on a friend who saw colors light up in the periphery of her vision in response to music. She had perfect pitch. I remember strumming a chord on my guitar and asking her which one it was. She answered correctly: “G Minor.” When I asked how she knew, she said, “Because it’s purple.” Endowed with the same sonic vision, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin introduced the chromola, an organ that projects a color for each of the twelve notes, to the instrumentation for his tone poem, “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire” (premièred in 1911). His express purpose was to show audiences the visual phenomena he witnessed in his mind.
The French poet Baudelaire, a very likely synesthete, is famous for cross-pollinating different strains of sensory information in his poetry. In her poem “The Bight” Elizabeth Bishop goes so far as to place Baudelaire’s synesthesia not just in his poetry but in his mind as well:
. . . the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
Most often Baudelaire processes olfactory information in terms of sights and sounds. In his sonnet “Exotic Perfume,” after huffing the scent of his mistress’s bosom, he hallucinates a “Fantasy Island” populated by succulent fruits, sinewy males and unsuspecting females. He then zooms in to its harbor, and a poem that started with a leap from scent to vision ends on a leap from scent to sound: a sea-breeze wafts in the cinnamon-mango tang of tamarind which, in turn, goes synesthetic when it, as a harmony, “mixes with sailors’ chanteys.” Trippy. Baudelaire was psychedelic long before the Summer of Love.
So many winking whiffs. So many piquant whistles. In retrospect, it is uncanny how often synesthesia, both the literary and neurological kind, caught my attention as a quirk or novelty. I felt drawn to it.
Last February at age 49, I was given a diagnosis that explained a great deal in my life: I am extremely neurodivergent. I have, in addition to severe ADHD, a form of linguistic synesthesia. Words sounded aloud or in my head have an often unwieldy, mentally palpable heft and girth to wrestle with (literally) and can apply a pressure so great that I involuntarily cringe and groan, sometimes in public. They have voltage and can give a zap that makes me not just twitch, but convulse; they have wattage and can blitz my vision with a flash. The zaps and flashes are exhilarating—I want them. The images, rhythms, connotative resonance and play of poetry are my bread-n-butter but, in the end, I judge the goodness or greatness of a poem by the amount of sensory phantasmagoria it excites in my mind, the Geiger counter. This internal activity and its external manifestations, I now know, are not normal. I always just assumed that my brain operated the same way as most everyone else’s and that I was, vaguely, “excitable.”
The diagnosis has clarified certain tendencies in my work. There is, for example, an emphasis on sound (alliteration, assonance, rhyme, etc.) in my poetry, as critics have observed. I now understand that this instinct is an attempt on my part to share with readers the pressing mass and at times brutal percussion of words that can recycle, against my will, in my mind. I have often written in the alliterative verse of Beowulf, in which sound is the main structuring-principle. Here is a passage from my poem “The Unmaking” which tries to capture the climactic moment in the demolition of a ten-story building:
The hard-hatted brain at the helm of the crane
stoically lowered the stainless-steel-stranded
rope and raised a wrecking ball.
The arm pivoted, and pendulous poundage
followed it, walloped the wall and wow:
instant inward disintegration.
One of the many, many downsides to my condition (common in those with ADHD) is a sensitivity to the timbres and decibel levels of light. Dante’s “silent sun” has personal resonance in that LED light bulbs (now standard in the United States) emit a light that can be insufferably “shrill” to me. Sunlight, also, can be quite nagging. These lines from my poem “The Fallout” (written before the diagnosis) describe what should be a post-blizzard wonderland in Minnesota:
Winter was all night. Wednesday, dawning,
detonates megatons of snow.
Nothing is beige except that awning.
Nothing is black except that crow.
The sizzling revelation this is
(squinted through saturated slits)
glares like the sting a cobra hisses,
glints like that pitch the bellbird hits.
I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about neurodiversity and the arts. The movement to regard neurodivergent conditions not as disabilities but as welcome varieties of human brains and minds is cathartic and long overdue. I am reluctant, however, at least when it comes to art-making, to run with the admittedly appealing campaign to champion the enhanced capacities that can come with these conditions as “superpowers” because the conditions themselves can present so many obstacles not just to sitting down and making art but to getting through the day. Ultimately, the task of artists remains the same, however their neurons might be arranged: to use every gift they have to create work that connects and will continue to connect with fellow humans, both neurodivergent and not. Very grateful for my recent revelation, I am now going to get back to laboring to do just that as a more conscious artist.
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