A Natural History of the Senses

  The confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leaking and drafts by more solid walls than mine are. To my mother, though, this all seemed quite normal. The matter came up, one day in my seventh year, as I was using a heap of old alphabet blocks to build a tower. I casually remarked to her that their colors were all wrong. We discovered then that some of her letters had the same tint as mine and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes. These evoked no chromatisms in me whatsoever.

  Synesthesia can be hereditary, so it’s not surprising that Nabokov’s mother experienced it, nor that it expressed itself slightly differently in her son. However, it’s odd to think of Nabokov, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Huysmans, Baudelaire, Joyce, Dylan Thomas and other notorious synesthetes as being more primitive than most people, but that may indeed be true. Great artists feel at home in the luminous spill of sensation, to which they add their own complex sensory Niagara. It would certainly have amused Nabokov to imagine himself closer than others to his mammalian ancestors, which he would no doubt have depicted in a fictional hall of mirrors with suave, prankish, Nabokovian finesse.

  COURTING THE MUSE

  What a strange lot writers are, we questers after the perfect word, the glorious phrase that will somehow make the exquisite avalanche of consciousness sayable. We who live in mental barrios, where any roustabout idea may turn to honest labor, if only it gets the right incentive—a bit of drink, a light flogging, a delicate seduction. I was going to say that our heads are our offices or charnel houses, as if creativity lived in a small walk-up flat in Soho. We know the mind doesn’t dwell in the brain alone, so the where of it is as much a mystery as the how. Katherine Mansfield once said that it took “terrific hard gardening” to produce inspiration, but I think she meant something more willful than Picasso’s walks in the forests of Fontainebleau, where he got an overwhelming “indigestion of greenness,” which he felt driven to empty onto a canvas. Or maybe that’s exactly what she meant, the hard gardening of knowing where and when and for how long and precisely in what way to walk, and then the will to go out and walk it as often as possible, even when one is tired or isn’t in the mood, or has only just walked it to no avail. Artists are notorious for stampeding their senses into duty, and they’ve sometimes used remarkable tricks of synesthesia.

  Dame Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day’s writing. When I mentioned this macabre bit of gossip to a poet friend, he said acidly: “If only someone had thought to shut it.” Picture Dame Edith, rehearsing the posture of the grave as a prelude to the sideshows on paper she liked to stage. The straight and narrow was never her style. Only her much-ridiculed nose was rigid, though she managed to keep it entertainingly out of joint for most of her life. What was it exactly about that dim, contained solitude that spurred her creativity? Was it the idea of the coffin or the feel, smell, foul air of it that made creativity possible?

  Edith’s horizontal closet trick may sound like a prank unless you look at how other writers have gone about courting their muses. The poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word. Then he would close the drawer, although the fragrance remained in his head. Researchers at Yale University discovered that the smell of spiced apples has a powerful elevating effect on people and can even stave off panic attacks. Schiller may have sensed this all along. Something in the sweet, rancid mustiness of those apples jolted his brain into activity while steadying his nerves. Amy Lowell, like George Sand, enjoyed smoking cigars while writing, and in 1915 went so far as to buy 10,000 of her favorite Manila stogies to make sure she could keep her creative fires kindled. It was Lowell who said she used to “drop” ideas into her subconscious “much as one drops a letter into the mailbox. Six months later, the words of the poem began to come into my head.… The words seem to be pronounced in my head, but with nobody speaking them.” Then they took shape in a cloud of smoke. Both Dr. Samuel Johnson and the poet W. H. Auden drank colossal amounts of tea—Johnson was reported to have frequently drunk twenty-five cups at one sitting. Johnson did die of a stroke, but it’s not clear if this was related to his marathon tea drinking. Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin, and many others felt that they did their best work if they wrote in the nude. D. H. Lawrence once even confessed that he liked to climb naked up mulberry trees—a fetish of long limbs and rough bark that stimulated his thoughts.

  Colette used to begin her day’s writing by first picking fleas from her cat, and it’s not hard to imagine how the methodical stroking and probing into fur might have focused such a voluptuary’s mind. After all, this was a woman who could never travel light, but insisted on taking a hamper of such essentials as chocolate, cheese, meats, flowers, and a baguette whenever she made even brief sorties. Hart Crane craved boisterous parties, in the middle of which he would disappear, rush to a typewriter, put on a record of a Cuban rumba, then Ravel’s Boléro, then a torch song, after which he would return, “his face brick-red, his eyes burning, his already iron-gray hair straight up from his skull. He would be chewing a five-cent cigar which he had forgotten to light. In his hands would be two or three sheets of typewritten manuscript.… ‘Read that,’ he would say, ‘isn’t that the grrreatest poem ever written!’ ” This is Malcolm Cowley’s account, and Cowley goes on to offer even more examples of how Crane reminded him of “another friend, a famous killer of woodchucks,” when the writer “tried to charm his inspiration out of its hiding place by drinking and laughing and playing the phonograph.”

  Stendhal read two or three pages of the French civil code every morning before working on The Charterhouse of Parma—“in order” he said, “to acquire the correct tone.” Willa Cather read the Bible. Alexandre Dumas père wrote his nonfiction on rose-colored paper, his fiction on blue, and his poetry on yellow. He was nothing if not orderly, and to cure his insomnia and regularize his habits he went so far as to eat an apple at seven each morning under the Arc de Triomphe. Kipling demanded the blackest ink he could find and fantasized about keeping “an ink-boy to grind me Indian ink,” as if the sheer weight of the blackness would make his words as indelible as his memories.

  Alfred de Musset, George Sand’s lover, confided that it piqued him when she went directly from lovemaking to her writing desk, as she often did. But surely that was not so direct as Voltaire, who used his lover’s naked back as a writing desk. Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Truman Capote all used to lie down when they wrote, with Capote going so far as to declare himself “a completely horizontal writer.” Writing students often hear that Hemingway wrote standing up, but not that he obsessively sharpened pencils first, and, in any case, he wasn’t standing up out of some sense of himself as the sentinel of tough, ramrod prose, but because he had hurt his back in a plane crash. Poe supposedly wrote with his cat sitting on his shoulder. Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, and Lewis Carroll were all Standers; and Robert Hendrickson reports in The Literary Life and Other Curiosities that Aldous Huxley “often wrote with his nose.” In The Art of Seeing, Huxley says that “a little nose writing will result in a perceptible temporary improvement of defective vision.”

  Many nonpedestrian writers have gotten their inspiration from walking. Especially poets—there’s a sonneteer in our chests; we walk around to the beat of iambs. Wordsworth, of course, and John Clare, who used to go out looking for the horizon and one day in insanity thought he found it, and A. E. Housman, who, when asked to define poetry, had the good sense to say: “I could no more define poetry than a terrier can a rat, but I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us.… If I were obliged … to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion.” After drinking a pint of beer at lunch, he would go out for a two- or three-mile walk and then gently secrete.

  I guess the goal of all these measures is concentration, that petrified mirage, and few peop
le have written about it as well as Stephen Spender did in his essay “The Making of a Poem”:

  There is always a slight tendency of the body to sabotage the attention of the mind by providing some distraction. If this need for distraction can be directed into one channel—such as the odor of rotten apples or the taste of tobacco or tea—then other distractions outside oneself are put out of the competition. Another possible explanation is that the concentrated effort of writing poetry is a spiritual activity which makes one completely forget, for the time being, that one has a body. It is a disturbance of the balance of the body and mind and for this reason one needs a kind of anchor of sensation with the physical world.

  This explains, in part, why Benjamin Franklin, Edmond Rostand, and others wrote while soaking in a bathtub. In fact, Franklin brought the first bathtub to the United States in the 1780s and he loved a good, long, thoughtful submersion. In water and ideas, I mean. Ancient Romans found it therapeutic to bathe in asses’ milk or even in crushed strawberries. I have a pine plank that I lay across the sides of the tub so that I can stay in a bubble bath for hours and write. In the bath, water displaces much of your weight, and you feel light, your blood pressure drops. When the water temperature and the body temperature converge, my mind lifts free and travels by itself. One summer, lolling in baths, I wrote an entire verse play, which mainly consisted of dramatic monologues spoken by the seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz; her lover, an Italian courtier; and various players in her tumultuous life. I wanted to slide off the centuries as if from a hill of shale. Baths were perfect.

  The Romantics, of course, were fond of opium, and Coleridge freely admitted to indulging in two grains of it before working. The list of writers triggered to inspirational highs by alcohol would occupy a small, damp book. T. S. Eliot’s tonic was viral—he preferred writing when he had a head cold. The rustling of his head, as if full of petticoats, shattered the usual logical links between things and allowed his mind to roam.

  Many writers I know become fixated on a single piece of music when they are writing a book, and play the same piece of music perhaps a thousand times in the course of a year. While he was writing the novel The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, Paul West listened nonstop to sonatinas by Ferruccio Busoni. He had no idea why. John Ashbery first takes a walk, then brews himself a cup of French blend Indar tea, and listens to something post-Romantic (“the chamber music of Franz Schmidt has been beneficial” he told me). Some writers become obsessed with cheap and tawdy country-and-western songs, others with one special prelude or tone poem. I think the music they choose creates a mental frame around the essence of the book. Every time the music plays, it re-creates the emotional terrain the writer knows the book to live in. Acting as a mnemonic of sorts, it guides a fetishistic listener to the identical state of alert calm, which a brain-wave scan would probably show.

  When I asked a few friends about their writing habits, I thought for sure they’d fictionalize something offbeat—standing in a ditch and whistling Blake’s “Jerusalem,” perhaps, or playing the call to colors at Santa Anita while stroking the freckled bell of a foxglove. But most swore they had none—no habits, no superstitions, no special routines. I phoned William Gass and pressed him a little.

  “You have no unusual work habits?” I asked, in as level a tone as I could muster. We had been colleagues for three years at Washington University, and I knew his quiet professorial patina concealed a truly exotic mental grain.

  “No, sorry to be so boring,” he sighed. I could hear him settling comfortably on the steps in the pantry. And, as his mind is like an overflowing pantry, that seemed only right.

  “How does your day begin?”

  “Oh, I go out and photograph for a couple of hours,” he said.

  “What do you photograph?”

  “The rusty, derelict, overlooked, downtrodden parts of the city. Filth and decay mainly,” he said in a nothing-much-to-it tone of voice, as casually dismissive as the wave of a hand.

  “You do this every day, photograph filth and decay?”

  “Most days.”

  “And then you write?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t think this is unusual?”

  “Not for me.”

  A quiet, distinguished scientist friend, who has published two charming books of essays about the world and how it works, told me that his secret inspiration was “violent sex.” I didn’t inquire further, but noted that he looked thin. The poets May Swenson and Howard Nemerov both told me that they like to sit for a short spell each day and copy down whatever pours through their heads from “the Great Dictator,” as Nemerov labels it, then plow through to see what gems may lie hidden in the rock. Amy Clampitt, another poet, told me she searches for a window to perch behind, whether it be in the city or on a train or by the seaside. Something about the petri dish effect of the glass clarifies her thoughts. The novelist Mary Lee Settle tumbles out of bed and heads straight for her typewriter, before the dream state disappears. Alphonso Lingis—whose unusual books, Excesses and Libido, consider the realms of human sensuality and kinkiness—travels the world sampling its exotic erotica. Often he primes the pump by writing letters to friends. I possess some extraordinary letters, half poetry, half anthropology, he sent me from a Thai jail (where he took time out from picking vermin to write), a convent in Ecuador, Africa (where he was scuba-diving along the coast with filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl), and Bali (where he was taking part in fertility rituals).

  Such feats of self-rousing are awkward to explain to one’s parents, who would like to believe that their child does something reasonably normal, and associates with reasonably normal folk, not people who sniff rotten apples and write in the nude. Best not to tell them how the painter J. M. W. Turner liked to be lashed to the mast of a ship and taken sailing during a real hell-for-leather storm so that he could be right in the middle of the tumult. There are many roads to Rome, as the old maxim has it, and some of them are sinewy and full of fungus and rocks, while others are paved and dull. I think I’ll tell my parents that I stare at bouquets of roses before I work. Or, better, that I stare at them until butterflies appear. The truth is that, besides opening and closing mental drawers (which I picture in my mind), writing in the bath, beginning each summer day by choosing and arranging flowers for a Zenlike hour or so, listening obsessively to music (Alessandro Marcello’s oboe concerto in D minor, its adagio, is what’s nourishing my senses at the moment), I go speed walking for an hour every single day. Half of the oxygen in the state of New York has passed through my lungs at one time or another. I don’t know whether this helps or not. My muse is male, has the radiant silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly.

  POSTSCRIPT

  There is a point beyond which the senses cannot lead us. Ecstasy means being flung out of your usual self, but that is still to feel a commotion inside. Mysticism transcends the here and now for loftier truths unexplainable in the straitjacket of language; but such transcendence registers on the senses, too, as a rush of fire in the veins, a quivering in the chest, a quiet, fossillike surrender in the bones. Out-of-body experiences aim to shed the senses, but they cannot. One may see from a new perspective, but it’s still an experience of vision. Computers now help to interpret some of life’s processes, which we previously used only our senses to seek, trace, and understand. Astronomers are more apt to look at their telescope’s monitors than to consider the stars with their naked eyes. But we continue to use our senses to interpret the work of the computers, to see the monitors, to judge and analyze, and to design ever newer dreams of artificial intelligence. Never will we leave the palace of our perceptions.

  If we are in a rut, it is a palatial and exquisite rut. And yet, like prisoners in a cell, we grip our ribs from within, rattle them, and beg for release. In the Bible, God instructs Moses to burn incense sweet and to His liking. Does God have nostrils? How can a god prefer one smell of this earth to another? The rud
iments of decay complete a cycle necessary for growth and deliverance. Carrion smells offensive to us, but delicious to those animals who rely on it for food. What they excrete will make the soil rich and the crops abundant. There is no need for divine election. Perception is itself a form of grace. In 1829, Goethe, writing about color theory, said: “One searches in vain beyond phenomenon; it in itself is revelation.”

  There is so much physical variation among people—some have strong hearts, some have weak bladders, some have steadier hands than others, some have bad eyesight—it’s only logical that senses should vary, too. Yet how much in agreement our senses are—so much so that scientists can define a “red wave” by saying that it is produced by a vibration of 660 millimicrons, which stimulates the retinas to see red. Tones are defined equally precisely, as are the temperatures at which we feel hot or cold. Our senses unite us in a common field of temporal glory, but they can also divide us. Sometimes briefly, or, as in the case of artists, for a lifetime.

  I woke one morning this winter after a sudden heavy snowfall to see the evergreens in front of my house bent in half under a burden of snow and ice. Unless I freed them, they would snap under their own weight, so I took a shovel and started bashing the branches to shake the snow down. Suddenly one of the heaviest branches let fly, and snow burned my face like sunlight, iced and clung and kept on pouring as I stood, chin tilted toward the dam-burst, pillar-calm, with my every sense alert. But what a puzzle for the neighbor boy, jarred from his play by that basso whump!, to see a madwoman gripped by her own storm. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him wrinkle his face, then ravel his sled-tow and tramp away. For me, time did a lazy soft-shoe; long minutes seemed to pass, and I thought of mammoths, goose down, Ice-Age cunning, the long white drawl of a glacier on the move, snow avalanching down a polar chasm. For him, the same moment fled like a gnat.