"learning disabilities," synaesthesia and my paper topic

As I flipped through all my notes from the semester, I noticed I had scrawled the word, "dyslexia," along the pages quite a few times.  For me, it keeps popping up: mirrored writing, inverted letters, de-coding meaning, word play.  (It doesn't hurt that my other class has been talking about the topic and my older brother is dyslexic) And as I read Pale Fire, hopping back and forth and all around, I remember thinking about how my brother Sam describes his "learning disability."  He says the letters don't necessarily move to different places each time he looks at the page and not all the letters seem inverted, but they just aren't "really" there.  He can see them on the page, but the meaning floats.  It takes effort for him to pin it down.

A few times (wild moments of mine), I imagined Nabokov as dyslexic.  I know he really couldn't be, because he was a novelist, but the way he plays with words and mirrors and images, it's like he has his own code, and rather than conforming to the "normal ways" of language, he's making readers conform to his. I have been lolling that idea in my head for awhile; and it turns out he does have his own code. 

Nabokov is both a synaesthete and an eidetic imager.  Synaesthesia is "an involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in an another sense" (Dann).  He "hears" colors, or rather sound stimulants induce visual sensations (color).  So, he can see music and words in color, and because visual cues, like color, are triggers for memory, Nabokov's was pretty fab.  With that in mind, his memoir, "Speak Memory," makes a lot of sense, because he can "hear it" (and because he is an eidetic imager). Eidetic is closely related to synaesthesia, in that the person can recall a memory in vivid detail.  Sight, and to a certain extent, sound, smell and taste, from a memory can be brought forward and experienced, felt.  We could probably have sent Nabokov to fulfill that "sea" experiment weeks back, because he could not only experience it there, but he could probably have brought it back to the class.  Though, I guess we still wouldn't have truly known what it was like, because it would have been all in his head.

There are some scientists (and the like), who attach terms like "dysfunctional," "imagined," and "distracting" to the synaesthesia and eidetic (Dann).  They don't see the value in it, because whatever a synaesthete perceives is not perceived by anyone else (even amongst synaesthetes, the colors and sensations felt differ from person to person-- one might hear "a" as a yellow, while another sees it as green), and the reality of the perception is questioned. The eidetic images, from what I've been reading, seem similar to hallucinations.  What is recalled is lived again in the moment, spilling into it and for some, lines can be blurred.  But I find all of it- the sensory absorption, the memories and the experience- to be quite a gift.  Whether or not I can truly understand or see the world from his viewpoint, Nabokov offers such a different perspective on the world we perceive to be true.  He takes what we see as normal (which isn't normal for him-- and might be incomprehensible to others, who de-code differently) and flips it-- now he is norm, the knower and we are the ones who don't understand.  It's an inverted world, cryptic and frustrating for us, but full of truths, we probably wouldn't have seen otherwise.

For my paper topic, I want to delve deeper into this realm of perception (de-coding) and reality; how what Nabokov experienced in his life is reflected in his main characters in Pale Fire and how his characters choose to project their perceptions, inverted shades and shadows, mirrors and glass, in or maybe as an "unreal" landscape. 

Or something to that effect.  


Dann, Kevin T.  Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge