Karl Holubar

Hrčak - Portal of scientific journals of Croatia

Pismo UrednikuLetter to lhe EditorLETTERTO THE EDITORSir:On the interplay of the senses.KpqT 4 co yct U€ool evr olvorlr Trop'[o)(Od. xix: I 72)Your beautiful new joumal stimulates me to come in with a letterto the editor, reffering to the article by Pavlovii and Stuk [ ] on thesynaesthesia between colors, tastes, and the perception of the colourof the sea and it: relevance to the people ashore.What is the colour of the sea? Green, blue, slate-grey, or what?Obviously this depends on a plethora of factors, latitude, time of theday, season, wind, percipitation, angle of observation, plus some fac-tors in the mood and eye of the beholder, and on the type of con-ceptual context, poetry, epics, novels or weather forecasts.Homer [1] in his epic, praised the island of Crete, as "handsomecountry, fertile, thronged with people well past counting - boastingninety cities...", - (as the modern and praised translation of Robert Fa-gles [2] puts it). He uses the adjective oinopis, wine-coloured, in songnineteen of the Odyssey. Well, what colour has wine then? Red,white, ros6, golden, ruby, tawny, purple - you name it. And, surelysynaesthesia takes place with the latter shades of colour, paralleled bymany of the nuances our geusic system can produce.And the olfactory sense, does it lag behid visus and geusis? Moscertainly not. Perhaps this sense is more powerful than all the others.Phylogenetic factors could point to that. How does it read inSiisskind's novel cf Grenouille [3]? "Tout cela, il le pouvait, pour peuqu'il le volut. I1 en avait le pouvoir... un pouvoir plus fort que le pou-voir de I'argent, ou que le pouvoir de la terreur, ou que le pouvoir dela mort: le pouvoir invincible d'inspirer I'amour aux hommes... car moije savais que je d6sirais le parfum et non la jeune fille."122Kipling wrote "smells are surer than sights and sounds to makeyour heart-strings ciack" [4], a capacity that links our behaviour to theoutside world [5].All of the above should be before us in our minds, especially asphysicinas, the more so bacause the present-day wodd seemingly(and wrongly) insinrmtes that vision is all- and over-important for ourimpressions, motives and actiofls.[] Pavlovid E, Stuk A: Certain colours match with certain tastes,seen through a prism of phaenomena of synaesthesia and symbolismof Mediterranean colours and tastes. AMHA 2003; l: 41-43[2] Fagles R: The Odyssee, Penguin, New York 1996 p.396, v. 194ff[3] Slisskind P: Le Parfum. Histoire d'un meurtrier. Fayard, Paris1986, p.276-277[4] Kipling R, quoted by Diane Ackerman: A natural history of thesenses, Vintage Books Edition, San Francisco 1990[5] Cromie WJ in, Sexual ID switch is found, in, The HarvardUniversity Gazette 7 February 2002, reporting on research in mice byCatherine DulacProfessor Karl Holubar MD FRCP GSEInstitute for the History of MedicineUniversity of MennaWiihringer Strasse 25A-1090 Venna, Austria123

O međuigri osjetila

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Hrčak - Portal of scientific journals of Croatia