The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [144]
Since November 2005, when Amaranthine-1001 received FDA approval, Noel Burun has declined all interviews, public honours and scientific awards. He has also declined credit for the compound, attributing its discovery to a research team composed of Henry Burun (now deceased), Norval Blaquière (now deceased), Jean-Jacques Yelle and Samira Darwish. Patent and other monies are therefore to be split four ways, with the estate portions going to Norval’s mother and Henry Burun’s widow.
With regard to Noel Burun’s synaesthesia, it was not eradicated by Dr. Vorta but rather reduced to a hyper-mild form, one that no longer warps his communications with strangers. His memory, accordingly, was reduced to a fraction of its former potency. Despite suffering acute— vein-openingly acute—despair over his looted inner world, he has come to accept this disease of ordinariness as a trade-off.
While Noel Burun and Samira Darwish have jealously guarded their privacy, there are unconfirmed reports that the couple lived briefly on the southwest coast of Long Island, and in the fabled city of al-Hillah, where Samira did the groundwork for a community/arts centre. There are also unconfirmed reports that their baby girl is a synaesthete.
Notes
1 This entry from NB’s adult diary (05/05/91) first appeared in my Curiosités mnémoniques (Montréal: Memento Vivere, 1993, p. 27). Seemingly sunk without a trace, the book, thanks to discerning praise from several scientists, slowly grew to a recognition it has never forfeited. Reproduced below, from the book’s twelfth impression, is NB’s colour chart.
2 Synaesthesia (following definitions by Fleurnoy 1895, Vernon 1930, Marks 1975, Cytowic 1989, Vorta 1990) is a condition in which one type of sensory stimulation evokes the sensation of another. In NB’s type, sound triggers the perception of vivid colour; like Vladimir Nabokov and many others, NB also perceives written letters in colours. In North America, female synaesthetes predominate in a ratio of 5:1 and left-handed synaesthetes (like NB) at 4:1. Synaesthesia is also reported by those who have used hallucinogenic drugs, such as lysergic acid diethylamide or mescaline, as we shall see.
3 I have never used chimpanzees in my research.
4 There is no evidence to suggest that Proust was a synaesthete, nor do I recall ever mentioning him (possibly a misread word in NB’s diary). Be that as it may, we can add two painters to the list, Kandinsky and Hockney, as well as French composer Olivier Messiaen and (perhaps) the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eistenstein and Japanese poet Basho¯ . No two synaesthetes, of course, see the same sound colours: to Rimsky-Korsakov the key of F# major appeared green, to Scriabin it appeared violet. (The score of the latter’s Prometheus incorporates multicoloured lights.) Rimbaud’s synaesthesia (“I invented the colours of the vowels!—A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green— I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant,” he says in Une saison en enfer, “Délires II: Alchimie du Verbe”) was enhanced by hashish and absinthe. As for Baudelaire, he alludes to his synaesthesia in the poem Correspondances: “Like drawn-out echoes, which from a distance/Merge into a deep and shadowy unity/As vast as night, as vast as light,/Scents, colours and sounds harmonize.” And in Flowers of Evil he declares, immortally: “I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.”
5 Physicist Richard Feynman among them, who declared: “When I see equations, I see the letters in colors — I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahke and Emde’s book, with light tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.”
R.P. Feynman,