Synaesthesia

Wintry although the snowy landscape is outside of my window today, color abounds. There are many hues of white and green and brown out there.
Color is a huge part of my life, or perhaps I should say, enjoying color and the identification of exactly which color is there. Moods have colors, how can a peachy snow from sunrise light be anything but bursting with emotion? Peach cannot be sad.

I can't help myself, started with my daily walk to school with my mother, where we debated the color of the snow that day, how it made us feel, or the sky, and how the sky mirrored the days' events (such as John Lennon's death day, as I recall) or the nascent leaves in the spring or...anything we came across. We derived such joy from those conversations. Is it turquoise, aqua, blue, green, bluey-green or???











Colors always smelled, letters were always colored, emotions were color. It was very clear to me as a child. It was clear to my mother too. One day, she came into the backyard, very excited. She was reading Speak, Memory, and he had lots to say on the topic. We had found a kindred spirit.

From Wikipedia: "Nabokov was a synaesthete and described aspects of synaesthesia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaesthesia) in several of his works. In his memoir Strong Opinions, he notes that his wife also exhibited synaesthesia; like her husband, her mind's eye associated colors with particular letters. They discovered that Dmitri shared the trait, and moreover that the colors he associated with some letters were in some cases blends of his parents' hues—"which is as if genes were painting in aquarelle".

So, my mother read Speak, Memory to me that afternoon, the part in which in his post-polio haze, Nabokov debates what letters are linked to what colors...or as my mom would have spelled it, colours...It started a conversation that lasted to the end of my mother's life, an avocation really, and the joy of it has continued for me.

For me, A has got to be red, scarlet, fresh blood red. Perhaps this is from living in New England, with The Scarlet Letter in our consciousness, not sure. Perhaps it was just because the A block was crafted in such a red, and I am a creature of habit. And for you?




For more on color theory go to: http://www.colorvoodoo.com/color_theory.html

And a strange color-emotion link from: http://www.colormatters.com/factoid.html