Sonorous Green Ideas
What will it be like when you can induce synesthesia?
We wound up at the Poreč manor after twilight. The old man stepped out into the dining room in an open bathrobe, underwear high, belly puffed, beard unbarbered. You all! he shouted (though he hadn’t met most of us before). You’ve come to do that synesthetic programming business? Very well, leave Carol out of it. But it was Carol’s idea, said someone — Ernesto? Luca? (I forget who said it, the sight of the Adriatic had grabbed me by the throat — literally, somewhat, by the throat) — and then the old man, Carol’s uncle, Uncle Poreč, shook his head, some melancholic feeling had come over him, it seemed, and he told us how he used to go to Trieste to get “chemicals” from the sailors, yes, even he, once upon a time, enjoyed rewiring his brain.
But what you’re doing is not like that! he shouted, enraged anew. You all are bankers or nouveaux technologists from Central Europe (which was untrue, and Central Europe is an imagined community anyway), this is unnatural, it’s not the way we’re meant to open the gates of perception. Ernesto countered: It’s not like you were born in the twentieth century, Uncle, you’re not that old, you’re just as complicit in this artifice as we are, and if you once felt a tickle on your scalp when smoke came out of your pipe, getting high with a Friulano sailor, how’s that different from what Anna’s doing on her laptop — oh! make the music tonight like the beat of a hummingbird’s wings, Anna (he slid down in his chair), let those Austrian place-names taste like a rich cream sauce, let’s live, Anna, let’s live!
Uncle Poreč allowed us to pilfer his cabinets for drinks, for food, for money, and laze about on his furniture — although he spidered around, still in his open bathrobe, and monitored us without quite watching us. Anna, who had been a curator in an earlier phase of her career (in Innsbruck, so perhaps the old man was correct about Central Europe), guided Carol, Ernesto, Luca, and the others to some polyphonic experience, while I drunk in the sky that hung over the Adriatic, it darkened to a Neptune kind of blue, reflected real-time in the water, there were a few small boats anchored, rocking in these planetary waves, newborns in the nursery.
But it’s not giving yourself over to nature, Uncle Poreč said to Anna, scowling at the output on her laptop, it’s too designed, you don’t participate in this manner. You’re not that old, said Anna, echoing Ernesto’s earlier remark, and besides, watch — and Anna played the stirring opening of “Daphnis et Chloë” and, poof, Carol’s body quivered, as some para-fantasy (who knows what!) took root inside her and she twirled her wine glass with a grin. Maybe we don’t participate, Anna continued, maybe it’s not of the world, but it’s alongside the world. Don’t you dare, replied Uncle Poreč, pulling his bathrobe tight in his fist, don’t you dare quote complicit philosophers to me.
What about you? Uncle Poreč said, turning now to me. Anna isn’t programming you, I see, she’s not turning your greens to fives, but you look dumbfounded all the same. Ah, I told him, I’m a poet, that’s why, and I’m a fool for Ravel; as for this so-called programming, I too dislike it. Oh, oh, oh, don’t be funny, he said, she programmed you, I must have missed it — but you know, when I was your age, we had to encounter strangers, we had to bolt our brains together in order to make progress. Now this? What will happen to society? To culture? To communal living? I said it was a difference of degree, not kind, I said life has always been one titanic plasma and it’s just where you draw the lines, isn’t it? I said ultimately all that mattered were starry nights and a view of the sea. I said — but too late, he was asleep, purring quietly.