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Re: Fwd: Nabokov & a color question
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Dear Mary,
I don´t know why we started the discussion about "purpureum" in a posting
about "Ada" but when I selected that sentence about how school-boys could
translate "purpureum", I forgot to add that it came from a site about a
blind Scot poet, born in 1721: Thomas Blacklock. I would not have returned
to the list if I had not also remembered that in "Ada" Nabokov wrote about a
blind patient who suffered from "chromesthesia".
I thought it would be fair to to add a longer paragraph to the sentence that
I had already sent, although it still doesn´t help us with the issue about
how we came to discuss purple seas, nor does it seem to have any special
connection with "Ada".
"Mr Blacklock may attribute paleness to grief, brightness to the eyes,
cheerfulness to green, and a glow to gems and roses, without any determinate
ideas; as boys at school, when, in their distress for a word to lengthen out
a verse, they find purpureus olor, or purpureum mare, may afterwards use the
epithet purpureus with propriety, though they know not what it means, and
have never seen either a swan or the sea, or heard that the swan is of a
light, and the sea of a dark colour. But he supposes, too, that Mr Blacklock
may have been able to distinguish colours by his touch, and to have made a
new vocabulary to himself, by substituting tangible for visible differences,
and giving them the same names; so that green, with him, may seem something
pleasing or soft to the touch, and red, something displeasing or rough"
( Dr. Samuel Johnson took a special interest in this poet and the complete
text was found at "Significant Scots/ Thomas Blacklock" )
ADA:
"Old Paar of Chose had written him that the 'Clinic' would like him to study
a singular case of chromesthesia, but that given certain aspects of the case
(such as a faint possibility of trickery) Van should come and decide for
himself (...) One Spencer Muldoon, born eyeless, aged forty, single,
friendless, and the third blind character in this chronicle, had been known
to hallucinate during fits of violent paranoia, calling out the names of
such shapes and substances as he had learned to identify by touch, or
thought he recognized through the awfulness of stories about them (falling
trees, extinct saurians) (...) until one evening, when a research student
(R.S. - he wished to remain that way), who intended to trace certain graphs
having to do with the metabasis of another patient, happened to leave within
Muldoon's reach one of those elongated boxes of new, unsharpened,
colored-chalk pencils whose mere evocation (Dixon Pink Anadel!) make one's
memory speak in the language of rainbows, the tints of their painted and
polished woods being graded spectrally in their neat tin container. Poor
Muldoon's childhood could not come to him with anything like such iridian
recall, but when his groping fingers opened the box and palpated the
pencils, a certain expression of sensual relish appeared on his
parchment-pale face. Upon observing that the blind man's eyebrows went up
slightly at red, higher at orange, still higher at the shrill scream of
yellow and then stepped down through the rest of the prismatic spectrum,
R.S. casually told him that the woods were dyed differently - 'red,'
'orange,' 'yellow,' et cetera, and quite as casually Muldoon rejoined that
they also felt different one from another.
In the course of several tests conducted by R.S. and his colleagues, Muldoon
explained that by stroking the pencils in turn he perceived a gamut of
'stingles,' special sensations somehow allied to the tingling aftereffects
of one's skin contact with stinging nettles (he had been raised in the
country somewhere between Ormagh and Armagh, and had often tumbled, in his
adventurous boyhood, the poor thick-booted soul, into ditches and even
ravines), and spoke eerily of the 'strong' green stingle of a piece of
blotting paper or the wet weak pink tingle of nurse Langford's perspiring
nose, these colors being checked by himself against those applied by the
researchers to the initial pencils. In result of the tests, one was forced
to assume that the man's fingertips could convey to his brain 'a tactile
transcription of the prismatic specter' as Paar put it in his detailed
report to Van (...) He had dinner with old Paar in his rooms at Chose and
told him he would like to have the poor fellow transferred to Kingston(...)
The poor fellow died that night in his sleep, leaving the entire incident
suspended in midair within a nimbus of bright irrelevancy.
------------------------------------
EDNOTE. "Old Paar" was a real person of whom there is a famous portrait.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2005 10:29 PM
Subject: Fwd: Nabokov & a color question
> Please forgive this question re Homer. Where else should I have asked?
>
> Jansy wrote: ". . . The homeric "purpureum" might not necessarily refer to
> a "wine-red sea" but to the absence of a word for blue. . ."
>
> Was there no word for blue when Homer wrote? I have heard that blue is the
> last color to be named in every language, but have heard no definite
reason
> why this is so. What about Athena's glaucous eyes, which Andrew Lang
> translated as gray eyes and which somebody interpreted, in a program about
> Ulysses, as eyes of the most brilliant blue that television could produce?
> Was the sea wine-red because there was no word for blue? (I've not seen
the
> Mediterranean, but I've seen red wine and it's hard to imagine any sea
that
> color or any shade of "wine-dark". Maybe unfermented juice of purple or
> black grapes? Or maybe on rare occasions, as during an unusual sunset? Or
> maybe I don't party often enough.)
>
> Mary Krimmel
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
>
>
----- End forwarded message -----
I don´t know why we started the discussion about "purpureum" in a posting
about "Ada" but when I selected that sentence about how school-boys could
translate "purpureum", I forgot to add that it came from a site about a
blind Scot poet, born in 1721: Thomas Blacklock. I would not have returned
to the list if I had not also remembered that in "Ada" Nabokov wrote about a
blind patient who suffered from "chromesthesia".
I thought it would be fair to to add a longer paragraph to the sentence that
I had already sent, although it still doesn´t help us with the issue about
how we came to discuss purple seas, nor does it seem to have any special
connection with "Ada".
"Mr Blacklock may attribute paleness to grief, brightness to the eyes,
cheerfulness to green, and a glow to gems and roses, without any determinate
ideas; as boys at school, when, in their distress for a word to lengthen out
a verse, they find purpureus olor, or purpureum mare, may afterwards use the
epithet purpureus with propriety, though they know not what it means, and
have never seen either a swan or the sea, or heard that the swan is of a
light, and the sea of a dark colour. But he supposes, too, that Mr Blacklock
may have been able to distinguish colours by his touch, and to have made a
new vocabulary to himself, by substituting tangible for visible differences,
and giving them the same names; so that green, with him, may seem something
pleasing or soft to the touch, and red, something displeasing or rough"
( Dr. Samuel Johnson took a special interest in this poet and the complete
text was found at "Significant Scots/ Thomas Blacklock" )
ADA:
"Old Paar of Chose had written him that the 'Clinic' would like him to study
a singular case of chromesthesia, but that given certain aspects of the case
(such as a faint possibility of trickery) Van should come and decide for
himself (...) One Spencer Muldoon, born eyeless, aged forty, single,
friendless, and the third blind character in this chronicle, had been known
to hallucinate during fits of violent paranoia, calling out the names of
such shapes and substances as he had learned to identify by touch, or
thought he recognized through the awfulness of stories about them (falling
trees, extinct saurians) (...) until one evening, when a research student
(R.S. - he wished to remain that way), who intended to trace certain graphs
having to do with the metabasis of another patient, happened to leave within
Muldoon's reach one of those elongated boxes of new, unsharpened,
colored-chalk pencils whose mere evocation (Dixon Pink Anadel!) make one's
memory speak in the language of rainbows, the tints of their painted and
polished woods being graded spectrally in their neat tin container. Poor
Muldoon's childhood could not come to him with anything like such iridian
recall, but when his groping fingers opened the box and palpated the
pencils, a certain expression of sensual relish appeared on his
parchment-pale face. Upon observing that the blind man's eyebrows went up
slightly at red, higher at orange, still higher at the shrill scream of
yellow and then stepped down through the rest of the prismatic spectrum,
R.S. casually told him that the woods were dyed differently - 'red,'
'orange,' 'yellow,' et cetera, and quite as casually Muldoon rejoined that
they also felt different one from another.
In the course of several tests conducted by R.S. and his colleagues, Muldoon
explained that by stroking the pencils in turn he perceived a gamut of
'stingles,' special sensations somehow allied to the tingling aftereffects
of one's skin contact with stinging nettles (he had been raised in the
country somewhere between Ormagh and Armagh, and had often tumbled, in his
adventurous boyhood, the poor thick-booted soul, into ditches and even
ravines), and spoke eerily of the 'strong' green stingle of a piece of
blotting paper or the wet weak pink tingle of nurse Langford's perspiring
nose, these colors being checked by himself against those applied by the
researchers to the initial pencils. In result of the tests, one was forced
to assume that the man's fingertips could convey to his brain 'a tactile
transcription of the prismatic specter' as Paar put it in his detailed
report to Van (...) He had dinner with old Paar in his rooms at Chose and
told him he would like to have the poor fellow transferred to Kingston(...)
The poor fellow died that night in his sleep, leaving the entire incident
suspended in midair within a nimbus of bright irrelevancy.
------------------------------------
EDNOTE. "Old Paar" was a real person of whom there is a famous portrait.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2005 10:29 PM
Subject: Fwd: Nabokov & a color question
> Please forgive this question re Homer. Where else should I have asked?
>
> Jansy wrote: ". . . The homeric "purpureum" might not necessarily refer to
> a "wine-red sea" but to the absence of a word for blue. . ."
>
> Was there no word for blue when Homer wrote? I have heard that blue is the
> last color to be named in every language, but have heard no definite
reason
> why this is so. What about Athena's glaucous eyes, which Andrew Lang
> translated as gray eyes and which somebody interpreted, in a program about
> Ulysses, as eyes of the most brilliant blue that television could produce?
> Was the sea wine-red because there was no word for blue? (I've not seen
the
> Mediterranean, but I've seen red wine and it's hard to imagine any sea
that
> color or any shade of "wine-dark". Maybe unfermented juice of purple or
> black grapes? Or maybe on rare occasions, as during an unusual sunset? Or
> maybe I don't party often enough.)
>
> Mary Krimmel
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
>
>
----- End forwarded message -----