Message

Subject: Re: Fwd: Nabokov & a color question

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 -----
>
>
>

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