Synaesthetics

Composition VIII, 1923 - Kandinsky - source

I've been working to synaesthetically intertwine colors with letter, word and number. An age old Kandinskian effort, but solely for my own mnemonic purposes. For example. 0 = white. Seems natural to me, the white on a page around printed words is seen as silence. White is a kind of blank, an emptiness, a zero. The letter B is blue. It just looks like Blue. The two circles leaning against the wall, tired, drunk, squashed, blue. And 2 is also blue. Rhyme. But the image of the man on his knees, head bent over, in prayer or defeat, is blue. Blue smells like the sea, for obvious reasons. And the same: tastes like water. And so on... making myself into Pavlov's dog: 20 is blue on white, a drunk man kneeling on a white sheet, remembering the taste of rain, perhaps a sailor on a deserted island praying on a white sail, dying of thirst. This associative process of mnemonic creation, of cracking words open like oysters, searching for pearls amidst the labial folds.