Blake’s Synaesthesia, The Visionary Heads

Blake’s synaesthesia, although it cannot be traced as a continuous feature of his life, reappeared spectacularly in the late 1810s when his visual art offers a rare opportunity to study not only the nature of his synaesthetic percepts but also the immediate context of their recurrence when, for the first time, he had a group of supportive friends who left documentary records of their encounters with him. The Visionary Heads, a sequence of pencil portraits (and one tempera) produced, c. 1819–1825, were the outcome of his Ordinal Linguistic Personification Synaesthesia. In short, the distinctive appearances of the historical figures he drew in the Visionary Heads were the products of the synaesthesia events that provoked them. Ordinal Linguistic Personification (OLP) synaesthesia is a modality not accurately classified until 2006 as ‘the involuntary association of animate qualities such as gender/personality to linguistic units such as letters/numbers/days.’ That is, the reading or auditing of graphemes (words, parts of words, vowels, consonants etc.) trigger synaesthetic concurrent personifications, sometimes with elements of personality. Mary Whiton Calkins was amongst the first to identify the principal characteristics of OLP when she gathered over five hundred respondents from her students at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in the early 1890s. One of them reported, for example, ‘“Q is odd and stands by himself as rather an eccentric middle-aged man. R is like a maiden lady, an advisory friend of S, a young, handsome girl. T is the devoted admirer of S.”’ That is, this type of synaesthesia triggers personifications in response to graphemes, in some of cases even bordering on personality. In this particular response, one can discern elements of cultural and historically marked predispositions apparently influencing responses to grapheme shapes, even suggesting elements of personality; ‘Q is odd,’ ‘R is … a maiden lady,’ ‘S [is a] young … girl.’