There was an era when (he) made music out of everything: his life, his feelings, and, naturally, his writing. As for his poems, it was as if every verse carried its own musical pattern, a kind of dual dimension; and by “dual” I mean what Space and Time are in physics; where his rhythms, both syllabic and musical, would hold a perfect, synchronized duality. But to be honest, I didn’t see anything special in his poems, so I supposed it was as if some savant mind had tried to make the syllables, the tempo, the scale, or whatever, fit somehow ma(themat/gic)ally into a single space-time weave, and that this fabric would even have texture, taste, color, and musical tone. Ah! I can’t breathe. And I, a mere mortal, could only dissociate them to perceive each aspect individually, one by one, but never together. He had musical synesthesia, and I, to decipher it, had imagination and letters.
Do you know what antidissociative means?—he would insist, wanting me to understand—It’s seeing a pianist pursue a violinist’s rhythm with absolute precision, until, pulse by pulse, she’s able to generate a perfect submelody that coheres (even more) the sound of the string instrument she’s chasing. You know?—I didn’t; it was a time when I didn’t want to understand anything— Musically, it’s as if the discrete coexisted beside the continuous, as if, for an instant, Einstein’s energy quanta became music and I could taste it. Ta, tá, ta ♪♫♬ But you, you still can’t feel the battle inside the harmony—as if I had synesthesia too!—so fragile, so close to breaking under the piano’s delirium of grandeur, and yet again subdued by the violin, forming, only then, her: the perfect melody—he said, nearly undone by emotion—, a delirious texture, with all its ingredients.
Fuck.
He was talking about musical energy.
When I finally understood, it was already too late. Years passed and his poems were no longer public; he grew sharply critical of the simplicity he saw in them, and he stopped being moved by music. I think his decline started there: a musical synesthesia without emotion is death. I guess that—and this is where the insight hit—synesthesia is, by definition, anti-dissociative.
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