Wednesday, October 19, 2016 // The Statement
7B
by Melina Glusac, Senior Arts Editor
Life is a Mixtape: Living in Color
F
irst, a confession: I’m jealous of
people with synesthesia, and I
always have been.
Colours - Grouplove
Ah yes, jealousy of an inborn neuro-
logical phenomenon. All the great love
stories in the world have spawned from
it, right?
Definitely not. Not at all. It’s just me.
For those who don’t know, synesthe-
sia is, by super fancy definition in the
dictionary, “a sensation produced in one
modality when a stimulus is applied to
another modality, as when the hearing
of a certain sound induces the visualiza-
tion of a certain color.” In college-kid
English: People with synesthesia see a
letter of the alphabet, or a number, and
they inherently associate it with a color.
A is pink, B is green, one is orange and
two is yellow. Sometimes synesthesia
extends to the other senses — illogical
associations involving taste, smell and
so on — but “grapheme-color synesthe-
sia” (letters, numbers and color) is one
of the more common forms. I’m char-
treuse with envy. Is it obvious?
Cry to Me - Solomon Burke
A litany of famous artists and musi-
cians have had it. It permeates the
writing of one of my favorite authors,
Vladimir Nabokov. His doomed narra-
tor in “Lolita” describes a dilemma in
a beloved phrase of mine: “And I was
laughing happily, and the atrocious,
unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect,
eternal horror that I know now was still
but a dot of blackness in the blue of my
bliss … ”
It’s this seizure of broad, airborne
emotions — horror, happiness, disgust
— and attaching them to hues, so as to
enhance our understanding of, well, us,
that intrigues me most about synesthe-
sia. Our bliss is blue — our horror, a dot
of blackness on a quilt of cerulean. This
is how I want to see the world.
Feels Like We Only Go Backwards -
Tame Impala
Mostly, I’m jealous of synesthetes
that see and feel colors when they lis-
ten to music. This type of synesthesia is
called “chromesthesia,” and it comes in
an array of subforms. What’s notable is
a lack of consensus surrounding it; there
is no set “key” to the musical note-color
pairs. B-flat can be yellow to one person,
and red to the next— it’s all up to the solo
synesthete’s mind to make the magical
link.
At the beginning of fall break, my dad
came to pick me up. Our drives home are
a constant source of inspiration for me:
Dad is a musician with an encyclope-
dic knowledge of music, and there’s no
one I’d rather fight with for radio con-
trol. I yell at him about Steely Dan, he
yells at me about Britney Spears, c’est la
vie. But then we come around and hit a
sweet spot, like this past Friday on Siri-
us XMU: Tame Impala’s “Feels Like We
Only Go Backwards.”
I hadn’t heard it in a proper year (one
of those songs with which I abused the
replay button and, alas, grew indifferent
toward), and this time it sounded fuzzy
and familiar. I looked to my left and
noticed my dad bathed in titian light, a
secondhand glow brought about by the
golden trees to the side of the freeway.
It was dusk, and they were whirring
past us at 80 mph, and they made him
tangerine, the steering wheel mustard,
the dashboard a mango blur of setting
sunlight. “Feels Like We Only Go Back-
wards” sounds orange to me now.
“Silver Street (Live)” - Ben Folds
Five
Last week I was stressed in the Uni-
versity of Michigan Museum of Art,
trapped in that ivory edifice of aca-
demic sweat, listening to one of the
only live albums I will actually listen to
(Ben Folds Live). “Silver Street” came
on, with its perfect jazz chord progres-
sions and sad-bar-pianist attitude, and it
calmed me instantly. I thought about the
silver all around. The metallic sleekness
of UMMA — the chrome sheen and the
whites, the stillness of the ivory walls
and the deep blue of the night sky peek-
ing through their windows. It felt the
way silver feels. Beautiful, but sharp.
And then I was in that pink-wine-
haze with “Little Bird” by Annie Lennox
playing, sitting with my housemates at
the kitchen table and seeing mauve on
their phone screens, rose-colored pil-
lows on the couch, the smell of 3 a.m.
“Disco Inferno” feels like red to me now,
the deep crimson of Solo cups at work
and the scarlet smiles of my friends and
coworkers to my left, to my right.
Color is everywhere, but, then again, it
always has been. And we, as people with
brains, can make it show itself however
we want it to, connect it to certain expe-
riences that we want to savor, certain
songs. Even if these associations aren’t
innate, like they are with synesthesia
and those who have it, we can choose to
notice opportunities for connections to
occur — and we can let them occur.
The Village - New Order
Then sometimes, for no reason (and
it’s best if we don’t have one), we can
hear a rainbow.
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIE FARRUGIA