Synesthesia

VN discusses his relationship with synesthesia throughout much of chapter two in Speak, Memory. Even though I do not have the same symptoms related to VN’s condition, I do share some of the conditions pointed out by his mother and have described my conditions in the same manner as Vladimir discusses them in the novel. VN describes his condition using colors to describe how he interprets auditory and textual stimuli. This is one of the few times I have seen VN have trouble in describing a moment in his life. Which is very comforting to me, since every time somebody asks me to describe my epileptic condition I am unable to describe in words the sensations that it brings through my mind and body. During conversations with people, I sometimes will go through strong sensations of déjà vu that would take my mind beyond my standard set of reality. VN explains it so well in the beginning of Speak, Memory by describing it as “I often become aware of a kind of one-sided conversation going on in an adjacent part of my mind, quite independently from the actual trend of my thoughts. It is a neutral, detached, anonymous voice, which I catch saying words of no importance to whatever… and so trivial that I hardly dare give examples, lest the flatness I wish to convey be marred by a molehill of sense.” He even goes as far as to call is “silly.” It is silly when I think about the strong emotions that run through my body when someone’s words will trigger me into an epileptic spell. It takes me to a different plane of reality with different people, different rules of physics, and voices that makes my stomach so sick I often vomit.

These events in VN’s life seemed to have a major impact in his life, because he often alludes to them in his other works. Vladimir discusses John Shade’s encounters with epilepsy in the beginning of canto two in Pale Fire.

Prone on the floor and watched the a clockwork toy—
Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed,
There was a sudden sunburst in my head.

And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountain top, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.

These lines correlate deeply with what goes on in my head when an aura takes over me. Kinbote, of course, is able to degrade these lines into a trek he took as the king of Zembla, but he is also able to convolute the poetic description as a mild form of epilepsy. I am never able to recall what happens in my mind during these aura seizures, because as soon as the feeling leaves me all the sensations and images than ran through my mind are forgotten and only a vague resonance of what has happened is left in my body. If I am ever able to record one of these instances I hope I can translate it into the poetic genius that Nabokov is able to convey.