← New Books Network
New Books Network
Polina Dimova, "At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism" (Penn State UP, 2024)
01:02:35
Loading summary
Transcript28 lines
- [00:00]
A
This time of year, everyone talks about going dry, but at Athletic Brewing Co. We're skipping that because we prefer going athletic, which isn't dry at all. From crisp goldens to hoppy IPAs and limited releases in between, you'll find something that fits your style. Every single non alcoholic brew is packed with flavor and the same craft experience you love. So yeah, you could call it dry, but there's really nothing dry about it. Find your new favorite near beer@athleticalbrewing.com Athletic Brewing Co. Fit for all times. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:36]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Paulina DiMova about her book titled at the Crossroads of the this Thin Aesthetic Metaphor across the Arts in European Modernism, published by Penn State University Press in 2024. Now, this book combines a whole bunch of and that's kind of the point because we're looking at a time period where across all sorts of arts there were projects and discussions and discourse about experiences of mixing colours, sounds and shapes. And I mean, that's only to begin with, really. So that's a great question for us to explore with this book and our talk today. Like, why was this such a big thing? What did this actually mean? How did it influence all sorts of different kinds of art? So really we get to dive into a whole world, I think, with discussion. So, Paulina, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [01:36]
C
Thank you so much for having me, Miranda. I'm thrilled to be talking to you today.
- [01:40]
B
I'm very pleased to have you as well. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What sorts of questions are you asking? How did this project develop?
- [01:51]
C
I'm a professor of Russian at the University of Denver, but this is just sort of a small, small part of my specialization. I'm a comparative literature scholar by training and research interest in European modernism in literature, music, visual art and science. And in a way, this book tries to cross and overcome various disciplinary boundaries. Just as you mentioned, there's so many different aspects of synesthesia. On the one hand, synesthesia is this literary trope that mixes the senses, colors, sound, shapes, sort of gorgeous visions of this mixing and blending. On the other hand, recently there has been over the past two decades that there has been interest in synesthesia in neurosciences since it was discovered that synesthesia was a real and not not an imagined phenomenon. So, and talking about myself. So why am I doing this? What questions I'm asking in this book? So I've always been interested in literature and the arts, and comparative literature has never been enough for me. So I came to the United States, let's say in 1998, a while ago, for college. And this was my chance to do. To use all of my languages. So I was born in Bulgaria, and I have Russian, German and English to start with. But I'm also a violinist, and I've done composition in the past. And I'm fascinated with visual art. So I wanted to combine all these interests into one. And to do that, for this project, I was trying to figure out what is the way to connect the art. So, like, the very simple, original question is, how do I connect the arts? And, of course, I already knew about the German Romantics and their interest in synesthesia and hearing and seeing the golden flow of the flutes or things like that. And I also had. Had read a lot of Nabokov. And Nabokov is a famous synesthete writer. Synesthete. And I'm not writing about him in the book, but he was one of the initial sort of inspirations for the book because he could taste and feel the letters and see the letters when reading, and he could feel, when really when experiencing text, this tingle in the spine. And I was sort of interested in the sensory experience and how that could be rendered or why that had to be rendered in the arts and how the arts could. Can be interconnected. So synesthesia presented itself as this one trope that interconnected the arts. So you can talk about music and color and text and combine them. And, of course, the interesting part, of course, of this book started when I realized that synesthesia is not just this literary trope, but that it is a real experience. I started reading into the neuroscience of synesthesia, as I said, and the tooth, 2000s, it was already confirmed that it's a real phenomenon because there were FMRI images. So there were magnetic resonance images of sort of the audio cortex and the visual cortex lighting up when synesthetes would hear sounds or hear music. So you could see it imaged in the brain that synesthesia is real. And at that point I was wondering, so why was this interest? So my period is modernism. This is the time when synesthesia was really prevalent and everyone wanted to be a synesthete or artists aspire to connect the senses, to experience synesthesia. And in this way, sort of reveal hidden truths about reality, potentially some mystical truths. This was one of the Inspirations. Synesthesia was considered to be this artistic gift, a higher spiritual sexuality, all these things. But what was fascinating for me to discover is that synesthesia, well, the term itself appeared only in 1892, and the first scientific record or report of synesthesia came in 1812. So, basically, at the same time that the Arats were fascinated with synesthesia, synesthesia was discovered as an experience by scientists. And for me, this was really fascinating that basically the arts and the sciences at the same time discovered there is synesthesia. And of course, the question is, was synesthesia a thing? Before that, did we experience it? Did we suddenly start experiencing synesthesia in the beginning of the 19th century? And before that, no one experienced it? So that was my other big question. What led to the discovery, or at least the scientific. The scientific record of synesthesia at the beginning of the. At the beginning of the 19th century. And I started reading a lot of scholars on visual. On visual studies, visual cultures, thinking about techniques, about observation, techniques, of listening. And I realized that at the beginning of the 19th century, for instance, with Goddess theory of color, we as readers, we as observers of the world, were invited not to look outside onto objective reality, but to close our eyes and see what we can see. So I'm closing my eyes right now, and I see all these sort of flickering images, light spots, things like that, things that are not out there in reality. And this sort of impulse to look at what's inside us, into our inner world was one of the reasons why I believe synesthesia came to our senses. This was also a time when experimental psychology was born. So experiments about perception, so how to differentiate between different weights, what is sort of how. How do we feel? How does our experience correspond to the stimuli we perceive? So all those questions were asked by scientists. And interestingly, artists and scientists at that time worked together to figure out those questions. So this was potentially the most fascinating part of my discovery that synesthesia came to our senses at the beginning of the 19th century, at the time when the arts and the sciences worked together to. To explain how our inner visions work. So, again, like, there was the shift from looking out into the world and to looking into ourselves. And, yep, so I think from there on, I sort of moved to some other figures. So artists who inspired this interest in the synthesis of the arts, which became synonymous with synesthesia. Rikard Wagner is sort of the biggest figure who, with his method of leitmotifs, he never called them that, but these are sort of short musical motifs that can evoke images in your mind. They can evoke feelings, they can evoke particular characters. So these sort of personifications that they're associated with synesthesia, we can personify numbers or names or letters. So Wagner came up with this idea and it again fascinated artists, modern artists, all over Europe. And that idea was taken over by them and developed further in these synesthetic works, as I call them, or multimedia works that I will discuss in my book. And in the end. So my main thesis, the earliest one, and the one that sort of leads me through the whole book, is that synesthetic metaphors anticipate and promote multimedia experiments and adaptations across the modern arts. And I think I'll stop here because I talked a lot and.
- [10:26]
B
Well, you've given us a lot of things to discuss further. So that's a very helpful introduction because it gives us many threads to pull as we go further. And I think the key thing I want to pick up from first, or at least one of the key things I want to pick up from first is this sort of more recent aspect that you mentioned around kind of proving that it actually exists. So when we think about these moments of fascination you've established for us, I think a lot of the reasons why there's this 19th, you know, end of the 19th century moment of fascination with it. Can we turn to talking about the more recent one? Like, what does the current science say about it? And what is that understanding?
- [11:08]
C
Yeah, and of course, this is the second part of my fascination with synesthesia. So on the one hand, it was the end of the 19th century, early 20th century. On the other hand, is this discovery or confirmation or verification that synesthesia is real? So in the current understanding of neuroscience, synesthesia is the sparing of the senses. And for instance, and let me just give a couple of examples. So a person may see letters or numbers as colors. We can hear the colors of sounds or taste sounds, or feel the texture of music, or see numbers or months projected into space or having different colors. So there are like these interesting lines of numbers that we can sort of see projected into space in front of us. And there are also the personifications that I just mentioned. So different numbers can have different personalities. One can be an arrogant male. Two can be an elderly woman. Three can be a boisterous, boyish looking girl. So, and I've heard all of these from friends, synesthetes. I realized I had more friends, synesthetes than I would have imagined otherwise. So. And what is the understanding of synesthesia? So early ON in the 19th century, it was believed that it was extremely rare. So one in 2000, one in a thousand. So most recently, scientists have established through various experimental studies that about 4% of the population have some type of synesthesia. And potentially the most common types of synesthesia are those connecting colors and sounds or letters or so letters, graphemes or vowels with sounds, and also those with months seen sort of on a clock in space with different, with different colors. And what are the theories of synesthesia that exists at this point? And I just want to emphasize that we really don't know how synesthesia works. No one knows yet. There is an interesting battle I will mention, between the arts and the sciences as to who owns it. And this is sort of a current development that was not typical of the late 19th, early 20th century, but we really don't know. But here are the two theories. There is a functional theory and a structural theory of the brain. So how the brain works. So the structural theory is the hyperconnectivity theory. So it suggests that we have an increased number of neural connections in our brain. And this would happen supposedly during neonatal development, so during the development of the brain of a synesthetic baby. So very early on the first couple of months. So this is the time when all of us have a lot of pruning of connections going on so that our senses can get more specialized. But for synesthetes, supposedly that pruning doesn't happen. So more connections remain between sensory areas, between brain areas like the auditory and the visual cortex. Whereas in the neurotypical brain, so neurotypicals most of us, there is more pruning, so there are fewer connections left. The functional theory, on the other hand, suggests that there is a lack of inhibition between the transmission of neural signals, between multisensory and sensory specific brain areas. But so again, these are all suggestions. There are some images that can show again, like cross activation across sensory areas, but again we don't know. And there are scientists and psychologists who say, well those images, they look really nice on the functional mri, on the magnetic resonance image, but you know, you're over interpreting it. It's not exactly that. So this again, and I'm only emphasizing sort of like giving more doubts and like showing the uncertainty that surrounds the phenomen. And because I think this is important for what I will be trying to do or what I, what I did in my book and the way that I'm thinking about the phenomenon now, because neuroscience doesn't have all the answers, and definitely we in the humanities and the earth, we also don't have all the answers, but we need to admit that. And, and I guess if I can continue a little, a little bit further with, with this idea. So this is the neuroscientific explanation. And so what is synesthesia exactly? There are about five criteria that have been established and all of them are destabilized every once in a while. But let's just say synesthesia is an idiosyncratic, automatic and highly nuanced cross sensory or intrasensory response to perceptual stimuli. And it is consistent and unchangeable, persists over time. It is memorable and emotional. And the automatic part of it is that a synesthete, without wanting it, without needing it, if the music happens, if they hear the music, they would see certain colors and those colors need to be specific. They would know what they are and they will always recur the same sounds. And this is of course, if we're talking about color, hearing about experiencing music. So either pitches or timbres of instruments as colors. And there are so many different types of synesthesia. One can count between 65 to 150 different types. So we're thinking here also about smell and taste and textures and touch and colors. So all of those can be related in various way. There is also the so called, I think that was discovered more recently, the mirror touch synesthesia, where someone who is watching a person can experience, let's say, pain or whatever is happening to that person that they're observing. If they're touched, they will experience that touch on their own skin. So it's like again, there is a fascinating variety of types of, of synesthesia. But so these are the neuroscientific criteria. And still there are questions. For instance, in the early 2000s, it was believed that for genuine synesthesia you would need to see all these colors. If you have the color sound synesthesia, for instance, projected in space in front of you or around you, somewhere around you in space. And all of the other people who would see synesthesia in their mind's eye, that wasn't real. Most recently, scholars decided, neuroscientists decided, well, actually there are two different types. There is projector synesthesia and there is associated synesthesia. So those who see these colors in their mind's eye, they have the association type. Then after that, recently there is a similar debate about the criterion of consistency. Usually it's believed that you have to have these one to one correspondences. Let's say the letter A is burgundy red. So yeah, it needs to be very nuanced. It can be Just red, Any sort of red. It's burgundy red. And it may have a texture sort of velvety burgundy red. So A is this and E is green. It's lime green. It cannot be anything else. But again, both in studies by neuroscientists and psychologists, there is a little bit of doubt coming in. Is this consistency always there? Is it required so that we can say, oh, you have real synesthesia or genuine synesthesia, it's not pseudosynesthesia. And I'll talk about pseudosynesthesia a little bit later. So. So I. In my conversations with synesthete, some of them would tell me, well, yes, when I listen to music, I see all these spinning, whirling shapes and circles, but I'm not exactly sure when they come in. I don't think that they necessarily correspond to something in the music. Maybe they do, but maybe they don't. So in a way, they don't belong to this. They don't follow the consistency, that criterion. So what do we do with such synesthetes? Are they synesthese or maybe they're not synesthetes? Again, there isn't. It's not enough. We don't know enough about the phenomenon yet. And another sort of moment where we're not so sure. So supposedly, all these synesthetic connections should perceive over one's lifetime, but we now know that, for instance, in adolescence, certain synesthetes lose the capacity to feel these multisensory, to experience these multisensory perceptions. And later in life, some synesthetes say that their colors would fade. So again, whereas there is so much excitement in neuroscience about what synesthesia is and what it isn't, we still don't know. We still have a lot to learn.
- [21:15]
B
Close your eyes, exhale, Feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.
- [21:30]
C
And breathe.
- [21:32]
B
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [21:39]
C
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts.
- [21:45]
D
New year, new me. Cute. But how about new year, new money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances, check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers, giving you time to power through those New Year's Goals you know you're gonna crush. Start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on FICO scoring model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details.
- [22:13]
C
Experian.
- [22:15]
D
Well, the holidays have come and gone once again. But if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift. Well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it a, an early present for next year.
- [22:30]
C
What do you have to lose?
- [22:31]
D
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time.
- [22:35]
B
50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy. See terms, which is absolutely fascinating. Right. Like it's so cool to be in a moment where there's still so much we don't understand and have all these theories running around. And of course that was true in the late 19th, early 20th century moment as well. Right. Like they didn't have fmris. So what were their theories about what was happening to explain synesthesia?
- [23:05]
C
Oh yeah. So and of course this is my period, so this is the, the most sort of exciting moment for me is to discover in what different ways so scientists and artists thought about synesthesia at that time. So one of the earliest theories of synesthesia was the so called degeneration theory. And it sounds like really, really creepy and scary, but. So Max Nordau, who wrote the book Social Critic Max Nordau wrote, who wrote the book Degeneration in 1892, claims that synesthetes have brains of. Synesthetes are the brains of mollusks. They experience like these sort of primordial organisms. They have like one sense for everything. And this shows the devolution of the human brain in a way. And of course this is in no way true, but it was basically an attack on the arts and the cultural climate of the end of the 19th century. So we had all these decadents and symbolists who were interested in sheer sensory pleasures and the ecstasies of the soul and the senses, as French poet Charles Baudelaire has it, who also claimed to have some sort of synesthetic experiences potentially associated with his use of opium and sort of drug induced hallucinations. So yeah, so one of the theories was the degeneration theory, which has been disproven on all counts. In fact, one important thing about synesthesia, Asia, I should mention, is that it's not a neurological condition. It's not a sickness, it's not an illness. It's more like a trait. Like we have blue eyes or green eyes and it's a trait. So it's a psychological, It's a neurological trait that we have and it's not associated with any deficits. There may be relations, but this is not the norm. So, so, yeah, so there is the, there is the degeneration theory, so that this is potentially one of the earliest ones. But on the other hand, artists and mystics. So of course there was the rise of esoteric movements, spiritualist movements at the turn of the century, for instance, a theosophy who hope to reveal the hidden truths of the world by combining science and the arts and philosophy. So they thought that synesthesia allowed you to perceive the universal correspondences. And these universal correspondences, did they really exist or did they not really exist? It's unclear. But there were scientists who at one point believed that the wavelengths of sound and light corresponded. And they were actually looking for those physical correspondences between sounds and light to explain the phenomenon of synesthesia. And against this idea of synesthesia's degeneration, there was another scientific theory that claimed that synesthesia gave you this evolutionary advantage. It was a higher stage of the development of the human brain. So synesthetes basically were gifted and were ahead of their time. So several paradoxes appear here. One of them is between degeneration and evolution. So is it an evolutionary advantage? Is it the higher stage in the evolution or is it degeneration? The other one is about the universality of synesthesia. So artists at the turn of the century really believe that synesthesia allows you to see, to reveal truths that are beyond a so called truth. So it's, it is universal, but not all of us have access to it. On the other hand, scientists, both then and now, we're talking about how individual and idiosyncratic and subjective synesthesia is. So again, like is it individual or is it the universal? Is it degeneration or is it evolution? And actually, if I can just move a little bit away from the question about, well, not Exactly. In the 1920s and the 1930s, there were experiments done by gestalt psychologists. And it is a very famous experiment that many, many of the listeners to this podcast would know. And it is, if you could imagine two shapes, one is sort of starlike and jagged. The Other shape is rounded and soft and mellifluous in a way. And gestalt psychologists wanted us to match those two shapes, the starlight and the jagged or the rounded one, to two imaginary words. One was kiki and the other one is bouba. And this experiment with slightly different words was conducted and so first in the 1920s, 1930s, and then later on in the 2000s and basically revealed that 95% of people would agree that Kiki, which is sort of this sort of sharper, higher sound, Kiki is sharp and starlike and jagged, whereas buba, just thinking about the sound and how we pronounce it, so that sounds is actually rounded and meliplus and soft. And this here sort of talks about this idea of how all of us may have this weak sense of synesthesia, or weak synesthesia, as it's been called by psychologist Lawrence Marx. So again, there seems to be a sliding scale of synesthesia here. And this is also where my work is coming in, where it's not just, oh, this is this idiosyncratic, amazing ability or higher evolutionary stage and in our development. And then like the rest of us, don't have any idea. No, it seems that all of us know instinctively, intuitively how synesthesia works. We know because we do experience through all our senses. We have this full bodied experience of the world. So it is possible to imagine these correspondences. So again, like even this paradox of individual and universal can be destabilized or subverted with such experiments. And so, yeah, so I mentioned the mystical perception of universal correspondences as well as the physical perception of, or the physical correspondences of sound and light waves. Then there is synesthesia, the refined sensibility of artistic genius. For instance, one of the artists in my book, Vasily Kandinsky, believed he had this sort of genius. There is synesthesia as degeneration and synesthesia as evolution. And yeah, so I think these are a few of the thesis that I develop in my book. And in fact, on page one, I have 20 thesis of synesthesia that I discuss. And I sort of like to think of them as the, this constellation of discourses, experiences, technologies that created, that created and shaped the experience of synesthesia since the beginning of the 19th century and into the early 20th century during the modernist period.
- [31:11]
B
That's really interesting to hear about the many different ideas that were floating around back then about explaining synesthesia and kind of what it meant to have it. So thank you for helping us go back back in time to understand what was being discussed then. And of course I cannot possibly ask you to cover all 20 theses that you talk about in that constellation at the beginning of the book. But could you give us maybe a few examples of ways in which synesthesia was used in this moment to bridge different artistic mediums?
- [31:43]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And I already mentioned one of the ways in which it was used. So thinking about Richard Wagner's leitmotifs. So Wagner always talked in his treatise Opera and Drama about the eye of hearing, how by hearing we can see. And he may not have had synesthesia, but he really thought about this full bodied, multisensory experience that we could have by watching, by experiencing his operas. So in a way, he educated our senses to persist, perceive across sensory modalities. And these leitmotifs, these memorable musical motifs that sort of render various personalities, feelings, objects and images, did that. So in the aftermath of Wagner's work, all artists wanted to synthesize the arts. And of course, what is interesting about Wagner is that his idea of the synthesis of the arts, or the so called. So his total artwork, or Gesamt Kunzwerk in German. So this idea also presupposed a transformation of reality. So our senses will be emancipated and the world will be utopian and beautiful. So this idea. So the social ideas that Wagner had and the aesthetic ideas that he had promised, this transfiguration of the world that would sort of counteract the fragmented modern world of industrial, industrial capitalism and reality. So all the artists that I discuss in the book, or at least the ones that I'm gonna mention now, were inspired by Wagner, and they were Wagnerians and were fascinated with this, with the idea of the total artwork, with the idea of the leitmotifs and how they could use them. So in my first chapter, I discuss Oscar Wilde's play Salome and its adaptation into Aubrey Beardsley's drawings and Ricker Strauss's opera Salome. So, and this first case. And yes, so Oscar Wilde was a Wagnerian and he wanted. He envisioned this play as opening up new horizons for the stage, yet it was considered unperformable. And one important thing about my idea of synesthetic metaphors and synesthesia is that they're always connected to something that is unrealizable, something that cannot be realized at the present moment, but in a future utopian moment, it's going to come true. And my idea of adaptations, of how synesthetic metaphors are used to propel, to inspire, to promote future adaptations across the arts, is that art continue to strive for this ideal for this metaphysical and social transfiguration of reality that would be achieved through art. So going back to Oscar Wilde's play Salome, so it is based on the sparse biblical account about the dance of a Jewish princess for the head of John the Baptist. So she dances for her stepfather Herod, asks him for the head of John the Baptist, urged by her mother, and receives it. So this dance is the first sort of intermediate, I would say, element in the play. And it sort of appeared or was taken over by medieval artists, by Renaissance artists, all the way into 19th century France, where it really flourished with, over with thousands of transformations or adaptations of this. And what is interesting about Oscar Wilde's text and its ability to promote its future adaptations is that the text itself is obsessed both with music and with vision. So it is synesthetic already. It has a synesthetic texture. So on the one hand, all of Walt's characters are gazing at each other, at the princess, at the moon, they're in love with each other. So there are all these androgynous desires flourishing. So here is the visual dimension. And then of course, Aubrey Beardsley, an experimental, quirky artist of the time, created these androgynous, gender bending drawings that were inspired by Salome. But this is only one aspect. So the musical aspect comes in Oscar Wilde's leitmotivic text. So in a way, he used Wagner's leitmotifs in his place. So he used words, sort of repetitive words. So look, look, Something terrible will happen. So there are all these sort of refrains that would happen. And at one point, this repetitive incantatory language, it's not so much about the meaning of what is happening. Everyone knows what happens in the story of Salome. Again, like it's a short biblical moment. And that's it. It's about the music of the language. It sort of becomes hypnotic, mesmerizes us. It's all about the music. And in a way, Wilde's language desires to become music. Salome, for instance, pleads, speak again. And thy voices as music to mine ear. And so yes, the voice should be music. Of course there's going to be an opera that is going to realize that. And even more interestingly, Oscar Wilde, when he wrote the play, so he's an Irishman and he wrote it in French. In French, thy voices as music to my ear is actually thy voices whine to me, or thy voice. I'm drunk on your voice. So here, there is the wine, there is the taste, there is the synesthetic translation from wine. Into music. And this all in a way promotes the adaptation, the transformation of the text later on into music. And in the final moment, Salome, her monologue, so she now has the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. So she's looking at. At looking at the head and she says that she hears a strange music. So looking and looking and hearing of the strange music. This audiovisual metaphor realizes in a way this. This utopia of synesthesia. It's a synesthetic utopia. But of course, in the play, that really cannot happen. What could happen is an opera that could potentially. You can see how Salome's looking at the head of John the Baptist and then he would hear the motif, the leitmotif of Giokanan's voice in Rickert Krauss opera. So again, this is how I connect the art. So the play with its leitmotivic structure, with its obsession with vision and with hearing and with listening to the future adaptations of Salome across the arts. So this is one of my examples, and I'll just briefly mention the next one which potentially is the most paradigmatic of my examples. It is the symphony, the synesthetic symphony by Russian symbolist composer Alexander Skriabin, Prometheus, the Poem of Fire. So Prometheus was actually supposed to be this unrealizable multimedia artwork that Scriven envisioned, which was supposed to be called the Mysterium. So the Mysterium, it was inspired by Theosophy I mentioned. The Theosophy was big at the time, and it was supposed to transfigure and transform the world again, like these Wagnerian ideas of transforming the world through art. But what is interesting about Prometheus is that it includes this interesting part for a light organ in the score. And also there is an autograph score of Prometheus that includes short remarks or short notes on. On how Prometheus should be performed. So basically it says moonlight or flashes of lightning or thunderbolts, and it gives you various colors. And Skiabin imagined a color organ for his work, and he had a friend, an electrical engineer, who constructed this very modest, very small apparatus that had 12 differently colored electric light bulbs that corresponded to the different tonalities, to the 12 different tonalities suggested or evoked in Prometheus. And Scribin never saw the performance, a full scale performance of Prometheus with lights. But his idea of. Of creating it with having this parallelism, synesthetic parallelism between tonalities and colors has inspired performances or realizations of this unrealizable project to the present day. And this initial idea of the mysterium that will include synesthetic music, lights, poetry, dance, sculpture and scents, it actually has filtered in to various performances of Prometheus. So, for instance, in 2024, the San Francisco Orchestra performed Prometheus with colors, of course, with colored lightning and with perfumes. So the production asked Cartier perfumers to create three different scents to correspond to the mood of Prometheus. And it's interesting because although Prometheus didn't include this idea, Scriabin did in fact, believe that any work of art, multimedia work of art, should combine and appeal to all the senses. And again, as I said, this idea, the synesthetic ideas that Scrabin had for his Prometheus continued to be realized in different ways, sort of to the present day, as artists continue to approximate or try to approximate this ultimate mysterium that skeleton was never able to create.
- [43:00]
B
These are such fascinating examples that bring together so many different things. Right. It's not even just the overlap between, I don't know, color and sound. Like, there's so much more complexity in these particular pieces. But, of course, beyond individual works that you analyze, as you've done for us here, you do in the book, too, you also look at how ideas of synesthesia influence the development of, like, entire artistic movements, right? Like, we can even think about influences for the development of abstract art, right?
- [43:29]
C
Yeah. So it's. It's actually fascinating because it would only make sense that since artists in the 19th century were so interested in perception, just thinking about the impressionist and plan, their approaches, sort of like how we perceive the world, how we can represent it, it would make sense that even movements like abstract art may have been inspired by some sort of perceptual experiences. And, of course, so there are competing theories of abstract art as well. One of the sort of the predominant voices and theorization of abstract art. So this is the American voice. Clement Greenberg talks about the purification of the art. So for him, after, it's just like these geometric forms that are simplified and linear, and it's not. There is no content, no literary content, no musical content. It's all about the image and the perception itself. But interestingly, at the time when abstract art developed, artists were fascinated again with such movements as Theosophy, with various sorts of mystical understandings of art. And abstract artists like Vasily Kandinsky and Franceschek Kupka, both of whom I discuss in my book, were precisely part of those movements and were reading very carefully how art can allow us to reach the spiritual or reveal occult truths about the world. And interestingly so Kandinsky, this is the example and I'm going to give you here. Kandinsky was a synesthete, and he in fact recalls experiencing Wagner's music when he was little. And for him, the violins and the winds sort of embodied the pre nocturnal hour. And he saw, saw all his colors in his mind, and he saw wild, almost crazy lines. So in a way, so his responses to music, these wild, crazy lines are precisely those abstract shapes, those shapes that are not connected to the real world, not connected to literary contact, not connected to anything. So these are the shapes that he experienced when he was listening to music. And so artists at the time, so they had. Kanditsky had his synesthesia. But all the other artists interested in mysticism, they were also looking at such books as, for instance, Annie Bezens and Charles Beater's Thought Forms. So these thought forms were precisely such very abstract images of radiating affection, explosive fingers. So you can see these parts and orange and red colors going around. So these very abstract shapes. So artists either saw these treatises, mystical treatises, or experienced some of them either in mystical states. And in mystical states you can have synesthesia like experiences, or they were synesthese. So they were experiencing such abstract images in their minds. And here sort of comes my interventions to. So we have the purification theory of abstract art. Then we have the mystical theory of abstract art and how it is connected to various charts and various tables connecting the senses. So for instance, Helena Blavatsky, who wrote the Secret Doctrines or the major theosophical treatise, so she has a table of pitches corresponding to colors, corresponding to numbers, corresponding to planets. Of course, everything is one big universal correspondence, correspondence. But in 1928, another Gestalt psychologist, Heinrich Kluver, discovered that there are certain form constants, he called them, that we all experience, for instance, when falling asleep, or that people who have been using drugs also see in hallucinations. And these are various stars. So abstract shapes, stars, circles, honeycombs or tunnels. And basically these geometric shapes give us. They give us the abstract shapes that artists like Kandinsky and Kupka, these pioneers of abstractions, used in their paintings. So this is how I sort of moving from the mystical, moving away from the formalist theory of purification, and through the mystical theory of universal correspondences, I basically move to this physiological explanation of the emergence of abstract art, of synesthetic or synesthesia like experiences. Because again, just before we fall asleep, for instance, we may see precisely these form constants, sort of spinning images, circles, bigger circles, smaller circles, lines and shapes that sort of, that can flicker in our mind's eye. And this is where I see that, for instance, artists like Kandinsky projected what they saw in their mind's eye onto their canvases.
- [49:14]
B
I mean, it sounds such a connection. That makes so much sense when you explain it, right? It's like, oh, yeah, no, wait, hang on. That is something many of us experience. And actually, yeah, that does kind of look like abstract art. Right. And so it's really interesting that kind of this is an intervention you're making because it, as soon as you explain it, it's like, yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. So thank you for helping the rest of us be aware of what might be going on here. But of course, I mean, not even of course, right. As if this wasn't enough, right. This entire book, I think probably, I don't know, I'm sure you could have done a book length, deep dive into Salome or picked a few different pieces of art to look at. You've also, as we've discussed, looked at entire movements. It goes further than that. There's a digital companion to the book. Can you tell us about that?
- [50:01]
C
Yeah. So the digital companion. So very early in the project, I was still a graduate grad student. I was thinking, oh, wouldn't it be nice if a book on synesthesia had a digital companion? So I mean, I can't expect that all of my readers read music or especially trying to figure out to decipher Scriven's music, which is very complex and sort of dissonant. Mildly dissonant. How do I even convey that I can describe it? And of course, hopefully all the listeners now would can fathom something in their minds from my descriptions. Oh, their colors, their gorgeous colors, burgundy, whatever. Lime grease. I'm exploring in all these colors. But it's another thing to actually see and hear. So I first started with the idea of having my music examples playable. And the first examples I created already in the early 2000s were my examples for Scribin's Prometheus. But platforms changed, so where I had created them, that didn't work anymore. It was called Score Exchange. Now it basically sells scores rather than allowing for these playable examples. Then I started looking at other digital humanities platforms. So there is this one called Omeka that I was acquainted with. And in the 2000 and tens, at some point, 2015 maybe. So I explored it. But it is for digital exhibits of images and texts. It didn't at least back then, have a multimedia or video and music capabilities. And finally in 2018, so again, this is a long time ago, I discovered Scalar. So Scalar is this free video rich digital platform that is hosted by the University of Southern California. And it allows you to have music and sound and videos and you can annotate them and you can sort of, for the example, sort of click on the annotations and hear precisely the example that I have. So there is this wonderful performance of Prometheus, another of those many realizations, multimedia realizations of it done at Yale from 2009 under Galboy directed it. So I'm able to now have a performance of Scriabin with colors. And sort of the readers of my book, if they go to Digital Companion, they can look at the example, press the button and see exactly what colors appear and what music they can hear. So, and this for me was very, very important. And then I wonder, was that a procrastination technique for me so that I do something other than write the book, or is it maybe just a gimmick that no one's going to pay attention to? And I mean, I know some readers look at it, but very often, more often readers of my book that I've talked to, they are not even aware that the Digital Companion exists. But again, I had to cut about a third of the book before I published it. And there are many things that are missing, including illustrations, color illustrations. I have all the color illustrations in the Digital Companion. I have the music example that are playable and sort of of the cherry on the cake, there are visualizations and I didn't even know if I'll use them, if it's going to be useful for me to think about them. But then there is this one really cool visualization that shows the whole content of the Digital Companion with all the chapters and all the images and media and tags. And it visualizes them as this flickering multicolor dots and connect them. And I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, well, this is Synesthesia's constellation. So this idea of constellation that I've been talking about, all these different multi sensory experiences, multisensory artworks, multimedia technologies, and also aesthetic and scientific discourses. So suddenly in this visualization I can show them as interconnected or loosely connected constellations. I mean, it does look like a constellation. And I mean, I sort of discovered this basically about two weeks before the publication of my book, as I was frantically finishing the Digital Companion because I knew that the book will be out. So I thought the Digital Companion should be up and running. And now I had like this idea that the visualization itself beautifully embodies and shows how synesthesia works, how I think of my book together with the digital companion. So, yeah, and again, for me, the digital companion embodies the text. It gives it voice and sound and color. And we can potentially like thinking about the visualizations. We can sort of drag and pinch, sort of use the tactile sense to play with the content. And. And finally, finally, in a way, my book on synesthesia, it's such a project that I didn't even believe I will ever finish it. And from each of those chapters can come separate books. But the Digital Companion, which it still says it's a work in progress, and it is a work in progress, it allows me to give my book this utopian unfinished dimension because it's still incomplete, I can always sort of add to it.
- [56:01]
B
It's such a cool aspect of the project. So I'm really glad that we had a moment to hear you tell us about it, and hopefully that will prompt listeners to go check it out. But unfortunately, as much as it might be utopian ideal, we cannot, of course, leave this unfinished forever. So as a closing question, in addition to continuing to add to the digital companion as and when things come up, is there anything else you're currently working on you want to give us a brief sneak preview of, even if it has nothing to do with synesthesia?
- [56:31]
C
Well, the thing is, it's really hard to let go synesthesia. So, in fact, as you mentioned, that some of those chapters can be developed into books. So my next project is actually a project on Alexander Schiabin, on the electric Prometheus guy who wanted to transfigure reality through Earth and through the senses. And it's a project about his artistic legacy, about all these avant garde composers and artists who wanted to achieve or attain or realize the mysterium. The mysterium that was never realized. And that basically every adaptation of Prometheus, as well as any adaptation of Scriven's idea of synesthesia and the transfiguration of the reality they're all trying to achieve. So I'm looking at how Scriabin, right after the revolution, so he died in 1915, so he couldn't really say whether he was pro or against the revolution, so it was good for him. But after the revolution, he was appropriated as a prophet of the revolution. And precisely because of this electric organ of lights, because electricity became such a slogan for Lenin. Lenin would say that electrification and Soviet power equals Communism. So in a way, Scriven prefigured these ideas. Then there were other composers who. Immigrant composers who weren't so fond of the revolution and they wanted. And so Nikolaya Buchov is one of them. He created the Book of Life, or tried to create the Book of Life, another multi sensory work with various multisensory instruments like the Color Organ. And Ivan Vishne Gradsky, he had another sort of mystical composition called the Day of Existence. And he also used microtonal music to create rainbow sounds. So, yeah, again, like the synesthetic idea is going on there. And finally, I'm also thinking about continuing my ideas of electricity. I've sort of written. And so beyond my discussion of electricity and Scriabin and my chapter in the book, I've written a couple of more chapters about electricity and symbolist poetry and science fiction in Russia, also about the ideological and scientific ideas associated with electricity right after the revolution in the 1920s. And I sort of focus on these Soviet children's illustrated books. Very beautiful. And again, like they're meant to educate children and to inculcate them ideologically. So that's part of it. So, yeah, and potentially some more work on the census. Thinking about Slavic sensory studies. That's an idea for collected volume that I have as well as I also sort of hope to write another article on synesthesia that would be dedicated to the battle over synesthesia in the earth arts and the arts and the sciences. So who owns synesthesia? Is it us humanities people who talk about literary tropes and artistic tropes? Or is synesthesia as a real, genuine phenomenon? Or like, what is the connection between them? And how can we repair the divides between the arts and the sciences? So this is what I'm hoping to achieve.
- [60:06]
B
Goodness. Well, that sounds ambitious and fun and all sorts of things wrapped up together. So best of luck with the various projects and sort of strands that are all coming together there. And of course, while you are doing that, listeners can read the book we've been talking about and of course look at the digital companion as well, titled at the Crossroad of the the Metaphor across the Arts and European Modernism, published by Penn State University Press in 2024. Paulina, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast Cast.
- [60:34]
C
Thank you so much, Miranda, for taking the time. It was wonderful to talk to you. Thank you.