theoracle

Ha! I was just looking at this book:

• Baron-Cohen, S. and Harrison, J. (Eds., 1997). Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-19764-8.

And was like, "S. as in Sasha? He studies synesthesia TOO?" Mais non. [Pat, pat.] This S. author's first name is Simon. All's well and right in the universe, as much as ever, anyway.

But I do have a question. I must be over-simplifying synesthesia, because it seems like this isn't at all weird. Wouldn't most people probably say that music is visual in the mind's eye? Isn't this why we can almost hear songs, or at least a few notes, when we look at some of Kandinsky's work? Plus, we can giggle when we think of art depicting the experience...as...here we go - synthetic synesthetics. Ba-bing!

[crickets]

And isn't it obvious that the senses intermingle? Sweet, dear, disturbed Baudelaire (and Rimbaud) - of course you were right about this.

On another note, doesn't it seem like this study could be applied to understanding other sensory/emotive relations - like when we touch people and suddenly can see nothing but a bright wash of a color, and then we also understand what that color means?

(I know, Eastern and Western color associations are typically considered contrary to one another but that's looking more to their immediate object/concept associations rather than 'meaning' associations, as in almost on an animal level. For example, red in the West is tied to anger where it is tied to life in the East. Both cultures also tie it to love. The translation for red then should simply be 'very important,' like an unconscious highlighting marker. White in the West has come to symbolize purity - although only as recently as the Victorian Age [scowl] - so American brides typically wear it in the marriage ceremony, though white is worn for death ceremonies in Japan. [Too perfect, right? You may play your Billy Idol...now.] White then signifies simply a shift or passage. The claim is that this is what Druids wore for ceremonies as well, but like we'll ever really know. Having stolen the costume of the Nazareno in Spain where the white robes denote the time of penance, there's about a thousand jokes to be made at the expense of Klan members but instead I'll just offer up the mental fix of adding the red letters of DUNCE to their caps. It helps, at least on our insides. Still, even with the KKK, any color could've been used to cover its members from head to toe in disguise, but the costume serves to mark the shift from Known to Unknown - which can also be said of Western weddings and Eastern death ceremonies as each is precisely this shift from the Known to the Unknown. To sum up and finally begin to shut up on this, then, color-meanings do seem to be universal if we learn to look more as we do in dream interpretation - not at the object-obvious ['ping'...now a term in the world] but at the deeper association. I tink dair's sumpting to diss.)

Now who knows someone who knows someone who researches this stuff? Because I WANT ANSWERS.