Worlds unseen

Re-reading "Bright Colors, Falsely Seen," I am noticing how synaesthesia isn't just about making involuntary sensory associations, but for many, it's about transcending the material world. It's an almost supernatural power to leave the material world and experience worlds unseen. The first time around, I ignored this emphasis, because I didn't think it was relevant; but going through it a second time, it's all over the place.

I am particularly struck by a passage, I think I quoted before with a different meaning.

"synaesthesia can occassionaly be experienced by nonsynaesthetes, during altered states of consciousness.  Though the most notorious of these states is the LSD trip, synaesthetic perception commonly accompanies intoxication with other hallucinogens, including mescaline, hashish and dimethylrtptamine"

Originally, I thought this either supported the public's view that synaesthesia is nothing more than a high or that by altering frame of thought, normal people can also experience synaesthetic ability. Now, I keep thinking of Kubla Khan and how Coleridge was high when he wrote it.

Dann- the author of Bright Colors- dwells on a few Romantic poets and their quests to "express sublime moments of expanded consciousness poetically" by employing "intersensory metaphors."  His examples include another Coleridge poem: "The Eolian Harp." "A light in sound, a sound-like power in light." It's not synaesthesia, but it's an attempt to get there. But it's true synaesthetes like Nabokov, who have the natural ability to perceive beyond material boundaries.  His abilities (synaesthesia and eidetic imagery) have been "viewed as a 'next step' in human cognitive evolution," a step which gives off a feeling of sci-fi/mystic, and I don't know what to think of that.

Reading through Dann's examples, I gather that nonsynaesthetes, who are looking for answers and means of expression beyond this one, have to alter their consciousness in order to acquire the necessary traits (though they don't always come). But is it possible to look through synaesthetic frames of mind without drugs?  To make multisensory observations or to see the imagined worlds truly?  I think Wallace Stevens might be one. Lewis Carroll.  I guess that's one of the questions my paper is trying to figure out.

order and disorder- trying to make some sense

"there arose in its wake the suspicion that there is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate; I mean the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension"

I'm going baby steps with Foucault. I got frustrated with the main text, and I was flipping through the preface again and I noticed that I had underlined the above passage. I found it weird in a way, because I can't imagine a place where something would be "disordered." Looking at synaesthesia and dyslexia, in which "things" are linked together in a syntax that seems inappropriate, I find that that is a kind of unconventional order.

Connoisseur of Chaos
!. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order

Flipping back to the text itself, I was reading in the the chapter, "Representing":
"it marks the point where resemblance enters an age which is, from the point of view of resemblance, one of madness and imagination. . . the madman-- is the disordered player of the Same and the Other.  He takes things for what they are not, and people one for another. . . He inverts all values and all proportions, because he is constantly under the impression that he is deciphering signs: for him, the crown makes the king"

It's Kinbote.

A mixture of madness and imagination. . . does synaesthesia or dyslexia require a sense of madness to function?  I don't think so.  N/m

Reading onward, Foucault talks about Similitude, and I think that's where "imposition" as opposed to "discovery" comes in-- "when we discover several resemblances between two things, to attribute to both equally, even on points in which they are in reality different, that which we have recognized to be true of only one of them." I get the sense that at one time, this was okay, but now, it's a kind of deception- it's mirrors and illusion. It sounds negative, but I don't think it is.  So long as the person remembers that it's a fiction.

Looking back at the end of Kinbote's commentary, I think he might actually be aware of the fiction he's created, because he looks forward to a new one in his desire to exist- to continue existing. Then again, maybe not- He is a madman/lunatic, who imagines himself to be that king.

I don't think I'm making much a point here- I'm just musing.

Reading with a Wallace Stevens lens

I was reading Steven's Adagia this weekend and when I read them, I couldn't help connecting them to "Pale Fire"  -
                                         "I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line." ln 971-978

"A poem should be part of one's sense of life"
"It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem"

It's funny- when I think about my first reading of the poem, "Pale Fire," I only think of Kinbote/Botkin and the way he sees his "life" in the lines, because the commentary dominates the poem. Going through the poem and commentary again, I see how much Kinbote twists and imagines himself into the lines and it makes me think.
"Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words."

Stevens says that poetry/imagination has to have a basis in reality or it is mere fancy or fantasy.  Kinbote's tale appears to be the latter, but I think his perception takes in real life and shifts it into that image he wants to see.  Maybe.  It's difficult, because Shade took in events from his life and made his poem-- translating things into poetry.  Kinbote takes that poetry and creates a royal life for himself.  I suppose Shade has packed his life into a poem and Kinbote has unpacked the poem into a life.  Is it a cycle or a spiral? Or is reality lost in the shuffle? An added confusion- Nabokov is the poet, who created Shade's world, which seems real enough based on our reality, and the poem, which Kinbote applied to his life, a world also created by Nabokov, which seems to have no basis in reality beyond the reality in the poem.
Life imitates Art.

I'm not sure exactly how that relates to my thesis, but I think it's interesting.