Object synaesthesia

I’d forgotten Petula Clark. Until, that is, a couple of nights ago when I watched a superb BBC4 documentary about Cindy Sherman. There she was, Petula, that is, in a suitably noir-ish 1965 video, performing Tony Hatch’s “Downtown”, with its wonderful piano intro.

Back in the previous decade, in 1953, Petula had recorded a version of “Poppa Piccolino”, which was a Number 2 UK hit for Diana Decker in the December of that year. Yes, it's easy to mock, though part of the melody presages "Being for the benefit of Mr Kite". I was three years old at the time, and that song was a major component of my mental life for a significant part of my early childhood. Initially a favourite, as self-consciousness grew "Poppa Piccolino" became an embarrassment. In part, that was because it was far more important to me than just a song, and I shall return to this point in a moment.

A few weeks ago I posted a blog called “Implausible boundaries of association”, in which I considered how, when viewing a certain local thoroughfare, I always thought of Bournemouth, for no very good reason. Though peculiar, this is a kind of mental activity that has been reported by others, for example, by John Cowper Powys (who could be a little strange at times) who commented that he “thought with” the Nothe fort in Weymouth and other features along the Dorset coast, and also by the very sane Jonathan Meades in his “Encyclopaedia of Myself”, when he refers to a particular T-junction in Salisbury where he always used to think of the Duke of Edinburgh. In my earlier blog, I suggested that these sort of odd associations could be described (though not explained) by Douglas Hofstadter’s concept of the implicosphere. There are, it seems, few limits to analogy and association, although convention denies respectability, meaningfulness or even sanity to the more unlikely ones.

One species of analogy which has become fashionable in recent years, even to the extent of being claimed as a neuro-atypical conceit by some who don’t actually enjoy / suffer from it, is synaesthesia, the condition in which an input in one sensory modality is experienced, fully or in part, in another, hence “coloured hearing” or experiencing the letter M as pea green. An enormous number of such oddities have been reported in the literature, to the extent that synaesthesia must be considered “normal”. However, confusion arises because of the quasi-synaesthetic terminology  implicit in everyday language – so that we speak of a loud shirt, a warm relationship, a sharp cheese, a brittle voice, or bright prospects. There is a blur between genuine (physiological) synaesthesia and the dead metaphors of linguistic commonplace.

In the same way that senses merge or transpose in proper synaesthesia, it has been suggested that other cognitive or affective fusions or crossovers could take place, possibly leading to exceptional abilities or creativity – for instance the (unproven) idea that Einstein might have experienced some commonality, some blurring, of spatial and mathematical skills, to his advantage. We should also recall that many words attract private, subtle emotional auras, which probably help us to remember them, and motivate us to action. Association is normal. More or less. It’s what we do when we think.

Quite where the dividing line lies between clinical synaesthesia and the normal associational nature of thought itself, is unclear. A fascinating zone exists, a mental melting pot, where we encounter, for instance, the schizotypal thought processes of some creative people (as well as those with mania, autism or schizophrenia), and the (usually unexamined) associations that lead to phobias and sexual fetishes. Mental association lies at the rich and unpredictable core of what it means to be a human being.

The American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) famously referred to the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of babyhood, a time when nothing made sense, when there was no understanding of what was important or of what “went with what”; a time before thought as adults know it. While “normal” in infancy, unless we escape from this kind of proto-thought we will soon be in trouble, yet if we still retain traces of this ability into adult life, enhanced creativity may be a consequence. So often we need to break the mould, we need unexpected strategies that apparently lack rationality. Though without any evident  personal creative benefits, here we must return to “Poppa Piccolino”, and to the most ridiculous implicosphere and proto-thought complex that I can recall from my early childhood.

Near my grandparents’ home in Flintshire was, and is, the Queensferry Bridge. Back in the day it was heavily used by vehicles travelling between Manchester or Merseyside and the North Wales coast and was painted a serious “engineering” grey; today it is coloured a ludicrous bright blue, as befits the banality of our times, and is by-passed by an uninteresting structure carrying the A494 dual carriageway. The Ferry Bridge, as I and the locals called it, or what is now formally known as the Old Queensferry, Jubilee or Blue Bridge, has been granted Grade II listed building status since 2005 – and I should think so too. Designed by Mott, Hay and Anderson and built by Sir William Arrol and Company  between 1925 and 1927, it is a double bascule bridge of unique design, although a few fairly similar structures exist elsewhere, in Chicago, for instance.

For a considerable portion of my childhood much of my thinking was “with this” bridge, and “Poppa Piccolino” – the tune and lyrics, which start with “All over Italy ...” - were fused intimately with it. Along with, er, the colour grey, hair clippers, plasticine, fears of fish and thunderstorms, empty low loaders, and much else, now unfortunately (or mercifully) forgotten. A “blooming, buzzing confusion” it certainly was. As implicospheres go it was impressive and insane; it was in my brain – perhaps it was my brain. I was in it; it was me. If anyone ever posthumously dismantles my neuronal architecture someone will need to go out and stop the traffic, otherwise who knows what might happen. Cars might plunge into the tidal River Dee. Meanwhile I propose the term “object synaesthesia” for this kind of thought process.

Oh, Hoppery Day

There was a day last week, Wednesday I think it was, when I received a postcard (something of a pleasurable rarity these days) from a friend who lives in the Netherlands. He’d visited an exhibition of American Realist art in the north-eastern Dutch town of Assen, and the card was of “Morning Sun”, painted by Edward Hopper in 1952. Wonderful. I enjoy a good Hopper of a Wednesday morning. As, arguably, the greatest Realist painter of the twentieth century, Hopper has long been one of my favourite artists. Also, as someone happy in the ordinary, shabby environments of daily life, he is someone to whom I can relate. As, I suspect, can many people.

Later that day, full of Hoppery anticipation, I watched a programme, one of a series, about American art. This one was supposedly about the effects of the big city – essentially New York – upon artists living there, and especially on those who had emigrated from eastern Europe. Just my sort of thing, or so I thought. Sadly, the programme was a total disappointment, with a presenter who – despite an uncanny ability to identify the Brooklyn Bridge at close range - frequently got in the way (literally as well as figuratively) of the works he was describing. He made me feel itchy, and not in a nice way.

You can’t libel the dead, which is just as well. Hopper was described as a voyeur who rode the elevated lines of New York City so that he could look in upon ladies through upstairs windows. That’s how he got his material for the likes of “Morning Sun”, according to this presenter. My understanding – gleaned, admittedly, from books, and not from any inside source available only to clever people in the art world - is that Hopper mostly used his wife, Jo, as the model for the female subjects in his paintings. While it was made clear that Hopper was not a Peeping Tom in the normal sense, “voyeur” is a word with a specific meaning. Unfortunate, to say the least.

Next, Hopper was labelled a curmudgeon, not – one might have imagined - an essential fact in a high speed tour of the man’s role in art history. Then there was all the usual tired old guff about “Nighthawks”, loneliness and alienation in the big city, the psychological spaces between people, and so on. Yawn. Nothing about the sheer beauty of the paintings, the atmospheres, their inspiration, the celebration of place, the lights and weathers and seasons and times of day. Just the old urban alienation shtick. Voyeurism, curmudgeon, alienation. Tick. Job done.  And then rapidly off topic to something that the presenter evidently liked; some celebrated daubs by émigrés with long and crunchy birth names whose pernickety enunciation he  repeatedly demonstrated. Not really what you want in a programme with the potential to educate and to appetise. Hopper-maligned, I hopped off to bed, hopping mad.

Inevitably, as a Realist, as a technically competent artist, whose works are pleasant to look at and easy to understand, and as someone with wide appeal (as witnessed by calendar sales, year after year) Hopper is not a significant focus of interest for the Art Establishment. He’s not likely to impress the polysyllabically enabled critics and curators who – together with the works they so admire - were so effectively destroyed by the superb Jonathan Meades, in a recent programme on “Jargon”.

As usual, Meades was inventive, scathing, hilarious, hugely intelligent, hyper-articulate, rivetting, making full use of television as a medium upon which can be presented simultaneously an imaginative and knowledgeable presenter able to act and to mimic, accompanied by pertinent background images, text, and music. Proper multimedia. One’s only criticism of Meades is that he provides so much that it’s hard to take it all in. This single programme about the present day abuse of language could and should be expanded into a whole series, covering, for example, corporate life, television reporters, sports, politics, academia, the internet, and the diversity and equality industries. Meades makes one painfully aware – sometimes from laughing too much - of just how moronic most television, and most of modern life, actually is.

A modern life which would have been the despair of Edward Hopper. Famously, the artist stated that his ambition was to paint the sunlight on the side of a house. What he also painted, although I don’t think he ever said as much, explicitly, was silence. While loneliness and alienation are not desirable states, aloneness, solitariness, and quiet can be. Silence is what, so often, we lack.

 
In the overcrowded cities of our overpopulated land it’s hard to find somewhere uncontaminated not so much by the banalities of excessive commentary and advice on how we’re supposed to think but by hideous noise; “attention, this vehicle is reversing”, car alarms, someone jabbering highly important nonsense into a phone, some discordant hate-filled noise blaring from a portable gadget or car-bound device. The curse of electronics and its spin-offs. And the visual insults. Perfect views ruined by big fat ugly parked cars, skips, scaffolding, graffiti, phone masts, wind farms, ill-placed signs, delivery vans, yes, always a bloody white van comes tearing round the corner the moment you reach for your camera. 

Oh, for an empty street, silent but for perhaps an ambient hum of city energy, the miaouw of a streetwise moggie, the confident clatter of a distant train, a plaintive horn on a riverboat, even the occasional echo of a school playground – streets away - off a vast blind wall … Sunshine and silence. Something to paint. Oh, Hoppery Day.

The Joy of HS?

It would not be the first time that a hurried, ill-considered and spuriously conceived solution to the inadequacies of Britain’s railways would have been imposed upon the population. When pondering such an eventuality, sometimes it’s useful to examine historical precedent, and current television schedules are helping us to do so. In the same week that the route of HS2 north from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds was announced, BBC2 have shown (1) “Beating Beeching” – a celebration of some of Wales’ former steam railways - and (2) the endlessly upbeat, brightly-shirted and lightly-luggaged Michael Portillo travelling on the restored West Somerset Railway, formerly part of the GWR to Minehead. Such lines are very evidently loved and are popular; the affection they arouse speaks of values immensely more profound and valuable than financial profit or efficient transit. An intimacy with the sense a place and an enjoyment of the very experience of travel – and quite possibly a rejection of the shallow present – are among the emotions they engage.

Arguably, half a century ago, Dr Richard Beeching did more than any other single individual to destroy valued components of our national heritage, and the lifestyles, livelihoods, values and imagery that went with them. However, hate figure though he was and remains, just like his lookalike Heinrich Himmler, he was “only obeying orders”. For the government of the day recognised that something had to be done to make the nation’s railways more efficient, and Beeching was their chosen axeman. Unfortunately, the odious Doctor threw out the baby with the bathwater, the baby in this case answering to names like Birmingham Snow Hill and Nottingham Victoria – along with parts of rural and industrial Wales, holiday Cornwall, normal Norfolk, and much else.

We are in a similar situation now. Today, we know that we need high speed rail routes in the UK. Most other developed countries have built them, and anyone who has travelled on such lines overseas, or on HS1, can attest to their attractions and to how they alter one’s perception of distance and of the geographical relations between places. Unfortunately, as with Beeching, the primary motivation for HS2 as presented so far appears to be purely financial and political rather than anything much to do with travel, and its announcement has been accompanied prominently by predictable mantras about “growth” and “regeneration”.

The idea of high speed rail routes is a good and exciting one, reduced journey times can be valuable and speed itself can be fun, but in our enthusiasm for these routes it’s important that we build them for the right reasons and in the right place. Something like HS2, with add-ons, needs to be built, and the sooner the better. Hopefully, what we have been shown so far is only a work-in-progress, and something better will emerge in due course, tempered by discussion, debate, and informed input. For the moment, the plan appears to pose a number of bizarre peculiarities, among them being that the proposed lines:

·         Originate from Euston, where there is relatively poor Underground connectivity, and none with Crossrail or Thameslink;

·         Do not connect with Eurostar;

·         Do not connect to or go via Heathrow;

·         Terminate at Curzon Street in Birmingham, thus avoiding the extensive interchange facilities at New Street;

·         Pass directly beneath East Midlands Airport without stopping;

·         Avoid the city centres of Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield.

One can see the point of hub stations, but not if the time taken to reach them negates the time saved by the faster trains. One suspects a lack of joined-up thinking and of a project being driven purely by economic factors – perhaps spurious ones or those not amenable to reliable estimation - rather than on utility.

It may be argued that if we are going to spend huge sums on high speed rail, why not spend a few more billion to get a network that might actually be useful to real people. What we risk otherwise is another Beeching-style disaster that future generations will have to repair, and which generations even further on will be able to make endearing little TV documentaries about.

For the moment this is a plan bolstered by attempts at cost-benefit quantification. That the figures may be completely wrong doesn’t matter; they have been calculated precisely using impeccably up-to-date techniques and technologies, they are objective, you bet, and the necessary people have been suitably impressed. The sort of people who talk about “train stations”. As always, quantitative wins over qualitative, objective over subjective, hard over soft, simply because they are easier to deal with – valid or not - and to present convincingly.

Subjective, aesthetic, environmental, ethical and personal factors – the ones that matter to most people – are invariably dismissed in decision making of this sort. Sadly, that says a lot about the priorities of those who govern us and, indeed, about the kind of people we are. But just because the powers that be choose to ignore them, such factors haven’t gone away, they never do, and from time to time they’re celebrated by truly intelligent people, as some of them were earlier this week.

Tuesday evening (29 January) saw the return of the wonderful Jonathan Meades to BBC4 in “The Joy of Essex”. Never mind Essex and the gently punning title, Meades is himself a pure joy to watch and to listen to, one of the few mind-expanding legal highs available via a television set, although I know he irritates some people. This time his stereotype-ignoring and cliché-bashing itinerary included examples of early modernism in East Tilbury and Silver End, the relics of doomed utopian communities that occasionally turned dystopic (“the full horror of team spirit”), and – shall we say - specialised places like Frinton, Canvey Island and Jaywick – all, in their way, refuges from the petty tyrannies of governments and bureaucracies. “Under the counter Essex”, homes for “the little people”, the “poor whites”. We need such refuges more than ever today.

Among his many erudite, hilarious, subversive, wackily allusive and laterally-thought observations was one about how we have fetishised Nature, so that we give greater rights to wildlife than we do to mere people, or “homesteaders” as Meades called them in this instance. So, if we accept Meades’ argument, as I do, all those who find their homes and their lives blighted by the prospect of HS2 had better get busy and discover some obscure variety of weed or rodent living on their patch; just saying that they “don’t want HS2 here” will only evoke the sarky “NIMBY” reflex from those trough-snouters who stand to gain from the project or those who smugly live nowhere near the proposed trajectory. Even the remotest hint of a possibility of a rare newt should do the trick and will send the planners scurrying back to their virtual drawing boards. Purely human, quality-of-life concerns won’t do it, I’m afraid.

Meades clearly has a strong feeling for the qualities of places – he observes, he connects apparently disparate ideas together creatively, and he and his articulacy challenge us to follow him. I suspect his trademark verbal extravaganzas sometimes lurch into amused self-parody, but no matter. What he does is to bring meaning and value to the places he visits, an arbitrary, qualititative and subjective process, but one that he shares with us in his uniquely entertaining style. Rather than impoverishing the lives of many while lining the pockets of the few, this is an approach that adds value to life and to our geographical environment, a value that lies way beyond the calculating abilities of the likes of Beeching or the proponents of the current version of HS2.

1 February 2013