“It was love at first sight, love at first sight, forever,” wrote Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov. Keen-eyed Billie Eilish fans might have had their interest piqued by the presence of a few “evers” in the mix there, however, aside from the depth the two artists proclaim with their endless remarks, the bond which binds them is in fact much more tangible.
“Our imagination flies – we are its shadow on Earth,” Nabokov also wrote, and it fits much more with the creative kinship between these disparate souls. You see, it wasn’t just how they both boldly waded into the human mind and talked about their unbridled discoveries that bonded them – it was how they experienced the creative process of reflecting their conscious exposures to the masses.
Synesthesia is a condition defined by Frontiers in Psychology medical journal as “a rare experience where a property of a stimulus evokes a second experience unassociated with the first”. There are at least 60 known variations of the condition, including people who see music as colors, words evoke tastes, pictures evoke sounds, sounds resemble shapes, numbers smell funny , etc. So Donald Trump could look like a completely independent phallic form and so on.
Speaking about her experience, Eilish said: “I don’t know why it exists but my brother has it, I have it and my dad has it. It’s a thing in your brain where you associate random stuff to everything. So, for example, each day of the week has a color, a number, a shape. Sometimes I have a smell that I can think of or a temperature or a texture. And that doesn’t mean anything.
However, there is no escaping it when it comes to his creative output. As she continues, “But it inspires a lot of stuff. All of my videos, for the most part, have to do with synesthesia. All of my works of art, all of my—everything that I do lives. All the colors of each song are because they are the colors of that particular song.
Thus, this is part of the reason that much of his work is minimalist. Eilish doesn’t often throw in an unnecessary middle eight or break up a song’s musical texture for something new. In his view, this would be like painting a realistic seascape and suddenly turning some of the waves orange.
This determining factor gives his music a pleasing uniformity. That’s not to say it’s a shade of gray — and, in fact, just because she sees things a certain way doesn’t mean it translates the same for everyone. However, it does make her work carefully considered and pulled from a place of creative flow, as if hovering through a musical color scheme and casting a shadow on the track, to lend Nabokov’s motif.
“It’s called color hearing,” the writer told the BBC in 1962 of his own experiences. “Maybe one in a thousand has it. But psychologists tell me that most children have it, that later they lose that ability when stupid parents tell them it’s rubbish, an A is not black, a B is not brown – now don’t be silly.”
Nabokov would also hear these colors in language, writing: “The long ‘a’ of the English alphabet has for me the hue of weathered wood, but a French ‘a’ evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes the hard ‘g’ (vulcanized rubber) and the ‘r’ (a torn soot rag). Oatmeal ‘n’, soft noodle ‘l’ and ivory hand mirror of an ‘o’ take care of the blanks. I am intrigued by my French “on” which I see as the surface of overflowing tension of alcohol in a small glass.
Interestingly, just like the Eilish family, it looks like synesthesia was passed on to her son. Perhaps even more compelling when it comes to the genetics of this condition is that Nabokov’s wife also considered letters to be colors, and although their own colored letters didn’t calibrate, their son Dimitri seemed to mix up the palette.
Besides this fascinating tidbit, Dimitri also explained how it seemed to affect his father’s writing: “Perhaps the most significant area in which synesthesia may have affected Vladimir Nabokov was that of metaphor. When he describes an object, whether it’s a chance object or an important accessory, it’s a safe bet that his description will not only have a touch of originality but also a color.
In both cases, this way of apprehending the world was intrinsic to their creativity. When things line up, it gives their muse the green light to swoop in and produce a palette of expressionistic language and sound.
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