Palindrome

Palindrome (pronounced pal-in-drohm)

(1) A word, line, verse, number, sentence etc, reading the same backward as forward.

(2) In biochemistry, a region of DNA in which the sequence of nucleotides is identical with an inverted sequence in the complementary strand.

1638: From the Ancient Greek παλίνδρομος (palindromos) (running back again; recurring, literally “literally "a running back”) the construct being πάλιν (pálin) (again, back) + δρόμος (dromos) (direction, running, race, racecourse).  Pálin was from the primitive Indo-European kwle-i-, a suffixed form of the root kwel- (revolve, move round) (kw- becomes the Greek p- before some vowels.  The word palindrome was first published by Henry Peacham (1578-circa 1645) in The Truth of Our Times (1638).  Although derived from the Greek root palin + dromos, the Greek language uses καρκινικός (carcinic, literally “crab-like”) to refer to letter-by-letter reversible writing.  The related palinal (directed or moved backward, characterized by or involving backward motion) dates from 1888.  The noun palinode (poetical recantation, poem in which the poet retracts invective contained in a former satire) dates from the 1590s and was from either the sixteenth century French palinod or the Late Latin palinodia, from the Greek palinōidia (poetic retraction), again from pálin; the related form were palinodical & palinodial.  The word palinode was sometimes applied to the apologies artists and others in the Soviet Union were compelled to publish, often after being accused of formalism or something just as heinous.  Palindrome & palindromist are nouns, palindromically is an adverb and palindromic an adjective.

Pierre Laval (1883–1945; Prime Minister of France 1931-1932, 1935-1936 & de facto prime minister in the Vichy Government 1942-1944).

Even before he spent the final years of his political career as a senior official in the collaborationist regime of Vichy France under Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856-1951), the palindromic Laval was already notorious for his dubious financial dealings while in government and being a party to the Hoare–Laval Pact (1935), concocted with the then British Foreign Secretary Samuel “Slippery Sam” Hoare (1880-1959) with which the pair sought to end the tiresome Second Italo-Ethiopian War (the last of the colonial land-grabs in the era of European colonization) because it was “bad for business”.  Something of a precursor to the 1938 Munich Agreement in which the UK and France acquiesced to the Nazi’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in exchange for what, delusionally, they believed would be Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) final territorial claim in Europe, what the Hoare–Laval Pact offered was a partition of Abyssinia, something which in retrospect would have been merely the first step to Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & Prime-Minister of Italy 1922-1943) absorbing the whole country as a colony of Imperial Italy.  Even for the, by then jaded, people of France and the UK the cynicism was too blatant and the reaction when the details were made public ensured both ministers were dismissed.

Otto Abetz (1903-1958; de facto German ambassador to Paris 1940-1944, left) shaking hands with Marshal Pétain (right), Paris, November 1941.

Pétain had little faith in the arrangements his regime negotiated with the Germans honored, telling colleagues after one meeting: "It will take six weeks to work out all the details and six months for the Germans to forget all about them."  Because Berlin didn't formerly created diplomatic relations with France after the defeat in 1940, Otto Abetz was never properly credentialed as ambassador but wholly he discharged the duties.  His great nephew is Eric Abetz (b 1958; Liberal Party senator for Tasmania, Australia 1994-2022, Treasurer of Tasmania since 2024).

Hoare was an accomplished ice-skater and made a political comeback as did Laval who, sniffing the winds of French defeat in 1940, became a convinced fascist, serving in the Vichy regime between July 1940-August 1944 variously as vice-president of the Council of Ministers and head of government.  He fled to Spain after the Liberation of France but was extradited and put on trial for plotting against the security of the state and collaborating with the Nazis; found guilty, he was executed by firing squad in October 1945.  Old Marshal Pétain fared a little better.  Although also sentenced to death for his role during the occupation, Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970; President of France 1959-1969), then serving as Chairman of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, couldn’t bring himself to sign the death warrant for one of the country’s heroes of World War I and commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, officially on the grounds of “age”.

Perhaps surprisingly, the longest known palindromic word is not German despite their fondness for lengthy compounds.  According to the Guinness Book of World Records the record is held by the 19 character saippuakivikauppias which is Finnish for “a travelling salesman who sells lye (caustic soda)”.  It’s said not often to come up in conversation and seems to exist only a curiosity used in lists of long palindromes where it's the undisputed number one.  In English, palindromes of a few characters are common but examples with more than seven letters are rare.  Tattarrattat (the sound made by knocking on a door), as it’s usually spelled, has 12 characters but is a bit of a fudge because it’s also an onomatopoeia so some lexicographers insist it doesn’t count.  Also cheating but clever is the 11 letter aibohphobia meaning a fear of palindromes, the construct being the suffix -phobia + its reverse.  Adding to the charm is that it’s doubtless a non-existent condition, but it’s suspected there are anyway a few of those in the literature of psychiatry.  From India, there's kinnikinnik, a smoking mixture of bark & leaves (but no tobacco).  English’s longest “real” palindrome appears to be detartrated, the past participle of detartrate (to remove tartrates (salts of tartaric acid)), especially from fruit juices and wines, in order to reduce tartness or sourness).  Not only is it a real word but it describes a common process in the industrial production of foods and beverages.

Announced on an auspicious date.

On 2 February 2020, Lindsay Lohan (b 1986), in a now deleted Instagram post, for the first time publicly acknowledged her relationship with Bader Shammas (b 1987), a group photograph from Dubai, including the couple and her sister Aliana (b 1993), captioned: "@aliana lovely night with sister and my boyfriend bader💗".  The couple would later marry.  2 February 2020 (02-02-2020) was the twenty-first century’s only eight-digit global palindrome (ie it works with either the MM-DD-YYYY or DD-MM-YYYY convention).  The last eight-digit global palindrome happened 908 years earlier on the even more numerically symmetrical 11 November 1111 (11-11-1111) and the next one will be 908 years hence on 3 March 3030 (03-03-3030).  Six and seven digit palindromes are more common.

Palindromic sentences are often created and these are judged not by length but by their elegance which is why “never odd or even” often is cited as an example.  Leigh Mercer (1893–1977) was a word nerd and recreational mathematician who devised the classic "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!" and this approach was in the 1980s taken to its logical extreme in two novels, Satire: Veritas (1980, 58,795 letters) by David Stephens and Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo (1986, 31,954 words) by Lawrence Levine, both said to be palindromically perfect and wholly nonsensical.  Shorter, but of admirable clarity, are the many baptismal fonts in Greece and Turkey which bear the circular 25-letter inscription NIYON ANOMHMATA MH MONAN OYIN (Wash (my) sins, not only (my) face).  This appears also in several English churches.

Sixteenth century German "oath skull" on which defendants swore their oaths in the Vehmic courts (the Vehmgericht, Holy Vehme or Vehm, the alternative spellings being Feme, Vehmegericht & Fehmgericht), a tribunal system established in Westphalia during the late Middle Ages.

Created essentially because of the inadequacies of the official justice system, they're now often referred to as "proto-vigilante" courts but for centuries they filled a niche before they came increasingly to be associated with injustice and corruption before finally being abolished in 1811, a half-decade after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the source of their original authority.

In linguistics, these “grid of letters” are called “acrostics”.  Acrostic was from the Middle French acrostiche & acrostique (persisting in modern French as acrostiche) and its etymon the Late Latin acrostichis, from the Ancient Greek ἀκροστιχίς (akrostikhís), the construct being ἄκρο- (ákro-) (the prefix indicating, inter alia, the extremity or tip of something) + στῐ́χος (stĭ́khos) (row or file of soldiers; line of poetry, verse) (ultimately from the primitive Indo-European steyg- (to climb, go)).  They remain still a popular form for the “word puzzles” appearing in the surviving newspapers and magazines.  In verse, an acrostic is a poem in which the initial letters of each line make a word or words when read downwards (the mesostich (middle) or telestich (final) letter of each line might also be used) whereas in prose the first letter of each paragraph or sentence might make up a word.  It’s speculated the earliest acrostic may have been created as a mnemonic device and used as a tool to aid oral transmission and most of the acrostics in the Old Testament are of the alphabetical or abecedarian (in this context “a work which uses words or lines in alphabetical order”) kind.  For poets however it may have been just an intellectual exercise (or perhaps “a gimmick” if not well-received by certain critics).  Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1344-1400) used a simple acrostic device in ABC, a twenty-four stanza poem in which the first letter of the first word in each stanza is the appropriate letter of the alphabet, from A to Z.  The dramatist Benjamin Jonson (circa 1572–circa 1637) in his Argument (prefacing The Alchemist (1610)) used an acrostic verse (“argument” a technical term meaning “the abstract” or “plot summary”).

The palindromic (or “all-round”) acrostic seen on the oath skull is known as the “Sator square” or the “Cirencester word square” because a copy was in 1868 discovered on a painted wall plaster in what is now Victoria Road in the English town of Cirencester in the Cotswold District of Gloucestershire.  At the time of the inscription, during the Roman occupation of Britain, the settlement was called Corinium.  The best documented of the early examples was one etched onto a wall in the doomed city of Herculaneum, the conclusion of most being Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas should be understood as “The sower, Arepo, makes the wheel work”), the trick being it can be read vertically, horizontally, or in the diagonal.  Known also as pentacles, the “SATOR” was the most commonly found in the Western Esotericism of late antiquity, used by Kabbalists, Gnostics, alchemists and other pre-medieval mystics in the creation of magic spells, amulets, potions etc and were thus often seen in the shops of apothecaries.  For deconstructionists, the translations are:

sator: sower/planter
tenet: he/she/they/it holds/has/grasps/possesses
opera: work/exertion/service
rotās: wheels

There has been speculation about the meaning of this pentacle, some a little fanciful and it’s not impossible things were made up just to fit, rather as "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" was coined to use each letter in the alphabet and "DICK HOOD DID EXCEED" serves no purpose other than to appear the same if inverted and viewed in a looking glass.

ROTAS
OPERA
TENET
AREPO
SATOR

The one on the skull was a second form, copied from an Egyptian papyrus of the late fourth or early fifth century AD:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

Among professionals and amateurs alike, there has been much debate about the possible meaning(s) and although there are a number of permutations, most hint at something like “the sower Arepo holds the wheels carefully”, indicating the care required when sowing the seeds for next season’s crop.  The form may however in some places have been vested with magical or religious significance.  In sixth century Ethiopia, the five words (corrupted to Sador, Alador, Danet, Adera and Rodas), were used as the names of the five nails of Christ's Cross.  In France, the word square was known to have been used as a form of lucky charm and reputedly, one fortunate inhabitant of Lyon was cured of madness by eating three crusts of bread (each inscribed with the square) while making five recitations of the Pater Noster in remembrance of the five wounds of Christ and the five nails.  Presumably encouraged by such an event, Spanish and Portuguese Roman Catholic missionaries took these charms to South America where they were said variously to protect folk from snake bites and aid childbirth.

Samizdat

Samizdat (pronounced sah-miz-daht or suh-myiz-daht)

(1) A clandestine publishing system (really, an ecosystem of sometimes connected but often independent systems) within the Soviet Union, by which forbidden works of literature were reproduced and circulated (also called “underground publishing”).

(2) A work or periodical circulated by this system (a samizdat publication).

1966: A direct borrowing from the Russian самизда́т (samizdat) (self-publishing), the construct being сам (sam) (self) + изда́т (izdát), an abbreviation of изда́тельство (izdátelʹstvo) (publishing house, publishing), the word samizdat coined as a jocular allusion to the compound name of official Soviet publishing organs (Gosizdát for Gosudárstvennoe izdátel'stvo (State Publishing House)).  Even among historians of the Cold War opinion must still be divided on whether samizdat remains a foreign term (and thus italicized) or has been assimilated into English (and thus not italicized); whichever is used, use within a document should be consistent.  A samizdatchik was a person involved in the production or distribution of samizdat.  In English language publications, the first known use of samizdat was in 1966 but the word clearly was in use in the Soviet Union (and presumably elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain) at least as early as the late 1950s and the clandestine production, copying and distribution of works banned by church or state authorities had been practiced for millennia.  Samizdat & samizdatchik are nouns; the noun plural is samizdats or samizdaty.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak’s (1890–1960), first edition, 1957.

The companion word was tamizdat, a direct borrowing from the Russian тамизда́т (tamizdát) literally “published there”, the construct being там (tam) (there) + изда́ть (izdátʹ).  That was a form of clandestine distribution in which writings published abroad were smuggled into the Soviet Union or other places behind the Iron Curtain.  Such works could be by foreign authors, by those in the Soviet Union or those in exile (self-imposed or otherwise); the definitional point was the publications were always banned.  A tamizdatchik was a person involved in the production or distribution of tamizdat although, as was the case with samizdatchiks, mere possession of a copy of something illicit could be enough for the security forces to apply the label; guilt by association often a popular legal device in authoritarian states.  The tamizdat tradition is less celebrated but there have been some notable titles.  Boris Pasternak’s (1890–1960) novel Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Milan and there published in 1957 with Russian language copies soon appearing as tamizdats, swapped, bartered and sold in the vibrant underground trade in Moscow and Leningrad (the old imperial name Saint Petersburg restored in 1991).  The author was in 1958 awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature which didn’t best please the Politburo, compelling him to decline the award.  Times have changed and the novel is now part of the Russian high school curriculum.

Tamizdat Inc

Founded in 1998 and now based in Brooklyn, New York, Tamizdat Inc. is a NPO (non-profit organization) dedicated to promoting and facilitating international cultural exchange.  It appears to be focused on pop culture and originally was established to assist musicians from Central and Eastern Europe reach broader audiences, its activities including organizing tours by bands and staging music festivals.  Prior to streaming services going mainstream, Tamizdat for some years in the early 2000s ran a bricks & mortar music shop and CD distribution centre based in Prague (capital of the Czech Republic) but more recently it seems most involved with assisting those involved in some form of “art” to gain visas to visit the US.  Presumably, serious operations like the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) view Tamizdat Inc with the same sceptical eye they cast upon subversive outfits like the Vatican or the Falun Gong.

The Culture of Samizdat, Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union (2020) by Josephine von Zitzewitz.

Although used mostly by historians and political scientists, samizdat is an accepted term in the jargon of literary theory and its use is not restricted to the Soviet Union or the states behind the old Iron Curtain.  Within the discipline, the term denotes certain “underground writing” (self-publication), circulated in typescript or copies produced on photocopiers or other duplicating machines; what (in this context) makes it samizdat is content expressing views proscribed by the state.  The word entered Western consciousness in 1966 when details emerged of the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial, conducted in Moscow the previous year.  Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–1997) was a literary critic but it was the material he wrote under the pseudonym Abram Tertz which saw Moscow brand him a “dissident”.  That what he wrote was critical of the communist regime was bad enough but his texts were smuggled out of the country and published in the West before returning as contraband, thereby circumventing the state’s strict (and bafflingly inconsistent) censorship regime.

Obviously guilty as sin, Mr Sinyavsky and fellow malcontent Yuli Markovich (1925–1988) were convicted of anti-Soviet agitation in a “show trial” and remarkably, history records them as the first Soviet writers to be convicted solely on the basis of their written words.  Plenty over the decades had been sentenced (sometimes to death) on charges in some way involving what they’d written, but Sinyavsky & Daniel served six years in a penal colony just for the words.  For the Kremlinologists, the most intriguing aspect of the trial was the prosecutor revealing the existence of a large body of underground literature circulating within the Soviet Union so the point of this “show trail” was not to secure a couple of convictions (rarely difficult in a Moscow court) but to act as a warning to other dissidents.  Being a dissident was not easy and one of the under-appreciated difficulties was that the state quasi-tolerated what came to be called “official dissidents”; those who were permitted to be critical… up to a point.  This approach functioned both within the country as a “safety valve” and, for Western viewers, an indication things were not as repressive as anti-Soviet propaganda claimed.  Unfortunately, as the political climate shifted, “official dissidents” could find what was tolerated one month could be judged unacceptable the next with consequences ranging from tiresome to serious.

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), first edition, 1968.

Thus the attraction of adopting a pseudonym and publishing abroad, an additional benefit being duplicating machines were freely available in the West and hundreds or even thousands of copies cheaply could be produced in a way impossible in the Soviet Union where such machines were rare and their use diligently monitored.  As a form of deterrence, the 1966 Sinyavsky–Daniel show trial was not wholly effective because in 1968 the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) completed his essay Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence in which he described the anti-ballistic missile defense projects being explored by both Moscow and Washington as likely to increase the threat of nuclear war.  Initially distributed within the Soviet Union in samizdat, it was smuggled to the West and published in translation.  As a punishment, Sakharov was removed from his role in military research and restricted to studying theoretical physics.  Even more famous was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s (1918–2008) The Gulag Archipelago which, written between 1958-1968, was first published in Paris in 1968.  An exploration of the vast system of Soviet labor camps and penal colonies, the sprawling, three volume work included interviews, reports, statistics and an account of the author’s own experience as a Gulag prisoner.  In the West it remains the best known samizdat and prior to publication, the text in Russian did circulate in the Soviet Union although not until 1989 (in the days of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring) was it openly on sale in some bookshops.

The audio equivalent of all this is magnitzdat, denoting material recorded on magnetic tapes that went on unlawfully to be circulated.  Originally, the audio tape recordings were of spoken text and took advantage of several quirks in the Soviet criminal code: (1) While citizens could not own printing presses or duplicating machines, they were permitted to own tape-recorders and by the mid-1950s, Japanese machines, although rare and expensive, had begun to appear and listening was often a communal experience, (2) although the production of more than six copies of a typewritten text was unlawful, there were no restrictions on duplicating recordings and (3) the only legal liability for the content of a recording accrued to those recorded, not those involved in production or distribution. The construct of magnitizdat was магнитофон (magnit(ofon)) (literally “magnetic tape recorder”) + изда́ть (izdát).  Because of the relatively small numbers of real-to-reel tape recorders available, behind the Iron Curtain, the printed samizdats & tamizdats had a much more profound and far-reaching effect but, in an indication of what might have been possible had the technology been available, by the late 1970s cheap, portable cassette tape players enjoyed wide ownership in Iran and the people around Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900-1989; Supreme Leader, Islamic Republic of Iran, 1979-1989), then in exile in Paris, maintained an energetic programme of distribution to Iran of tapes containing his incendiary speeches against Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980; last Shah of Iran 1941-1979).  Easily duplicated and shared within communities, the Ayatollah’s message spread probably at least as rapidly as would have occurred had he been allowed to broadcast on radio or television and the rest is history.

Lindsay Lohan, Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father) (2005), 2Crow Bootleg.

Technically of course, a magnitzdat was conceptually similar to a “bootleg” recording, a form which in the West enjoyed in heyday in the 1970s & 1980s.  The term “bootlegging” dates from the late eighteenth century when it was used by British customs and excise officers to describe the trick smugglers used to hide contraband in their large sea-boots.  Since then, it’s been applied variously including (1) the distilling, transporting and selling of unlawful liquor (2) unlicensed copies of software and (3) unauthorized recordings of music and film.  In music, bootleg recordings began to appear in some volume in the 1960s and originally were often from live performances.  Frequently created from tapes of dubious quality with little or no editing, these bootlegs generally were tolerated by the industry because they tended to circulate among fans who anyway purchased the official product and were thought of just a form of free promotional material.  Later, when things became more organized and bootleggers began distributing replicas of official releases, the attitude changed and for decades the music and software industries fought ongoing battles against bootleg copies (which in some non-Western markets represented in excess of 90% of software installations).

Broken English (1979) by Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025).

Marianne Faithfull undeniably was beautiful but before Broken English her discography had been a predictable pastiche of any number of “girl singers” of the 1960s, the music rarely original, usually melodic and inoffensive but never with an arrangement hinting her output could be thought “interpretative”.  Broken English startlingly was different and rarely has a repertoire better suited a “gin soaked” voice.  However there was one track with lyrics deemed in some places “obscene” (the words now would raise barely an eyebrow) so in those markets the album appeared with the offending track deleted.  That led to a lively trade in “bootleg” copies (ie those produced for sale in less censorious jurisdictions) and before long most regulators bowed to reality, allowing their citizens to hear Ms Faithful sing the words many likely would hear while walking along city streets.

While obviously there can in form be similarities in samizdats, tamizdats, magnitzdats and bootlegs, the motives for their production and distribution differ.  “Bootleg copies” of this and that are money-making devices that generate profit by evading copyright, thereby denying the payment of royalties to those who hold the IP (intellectual property) or distribution rights whereas the Russian trio existed to publish material proscribed by state censorship.  Behind the Iron Curtain, for those involved in the means of production or distribution, there could be a profit motive (especially resellers in the “secondary market” and beyond) but the primary rationale was to avoid the censor’s pen.  Although philosophers have for millennia discussed and explained the nature of the institutions such as organized religion and what would come to be called “the nation state” (and latterly, political scientists have with increasing levels of complexity added to the literature), operating in parallel with theoretical niceties such as “consent”, “distributive justice” and “social contracts” is “power”.  Politics, as it is practiced, was detailed by the Florentine diplomat Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, 1469–1527) in Il Principe (The Prince, 1532), a kind of “owner’s handbook” of power and its retention and its core dynamic is what’s now known as regime survival, an imperative which long predates Renaissance Italy and although tactics may vary, the strategy remains the same, whether in a besieged Constantinople in 1453, in the Führerbunker in 1945, in the Oval Office in 2021 or among Ayatollahs in Tehran in 2026.  Censorship is an important component in regime survival because if alternative thoughts are allowed freely to circulate, people might get ideas and princes, popes and presidents all well know where that may lead.

Court of the Star Chamber (1951), gouache on paper by Cecil Doughty (1913–1985).

Although created in the mid-twentieth century, the work is in the style of a "period correct" woodcut.  The Star Chamber was formed because of the courts of Common Law and Chancellery had become inefficient, rule-bound and susceptible to external influences and initially it functioned well but later (especially under the seventeenth century Stuarts) it became a tool of repression.

In the West, the notion of “freedom of speech” is a recent arrival; edicts banning “seditious and heretical works” were proclaimed in 1529 during the reign of Henry VIII (1491–1547; King of England (and Ireland after 1541) 1509-1547) who shortly would change his mind about what constituted “heresy”.  Within a decade of the first proclamations, laws were passed requiring books must be licensed for printing by Privy Council or other royal nominees, an indication the printing press in its time was as disruptive an influence as the internet and social media would later prove; in moves that would be applauded by later Soviet governments, in England and elsewhere in Europe, severe restrictions were imposed on the importation of foreign books.  Had these measures worked as intended, political and intellectual life would have been very different but in England (as in Europe), underground and unlicensed printing presses were soon active and often highly productive.  By 1557, the Stationers' Company (an outgrowth of the London craft guild of printers) was granted a “charter of incorporation” which stipulated only members of the company (or others holding a special patent) were allowed to print any work for sale in the kingdom.  In 1586, the Court of Star Chamber introduced an ordinance mandating that no printing press might be set up in any place other than London or the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, the point being that in those places the state possessed the infrastructure to supervise what was being produced.  As the Star Chamber was inclined to do, under the act of 1637 it imposed harsh punishments upon transgressors and even after the court was in 1641 abolished by the Long Parliament the repression not only continued but the consequences for illicit printing became more severe.  Remarkable as it sounds, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658; Lord Protector of the Commonwealth 1653-1658), publishers and printers may have looked back on the administration of the Star Chamber as an enlightened period.  The puritanical Cromwell in 1655 actually banned all unofficial publications but this was found to create more problems than it solved and four years later the Rump Parliament permitted the printing of a limited number of licensed newsbooks but distribution was restricted.

So censorship was not invented by the Tsars or comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953).  The significance of the Stationers' Company’s charter was that structurally it created a regime strikingly similar to that which prevailed in the Soviet Union in which the entire publishing industry could be thought “the government printer”.  What members of the company were compelled to do was record prospectively in the Stationers' Register any publications they proposed to print, something which has made research difficult for historians because not everything recorded ended up being printed.  Nevertheless, the Register remains an important source document of literary activity in the era and although the original purpose had been to prevent the spread of seditious publications, lawyers began to use the entries as evidence when attempting to assert copyright.  That was at the time too novel a notion to impress the judges but the register form part of the template for the first English Copyright Act (1709), which provided the framework on which the rights of writers and publishers would be codified.  Lawyers who experienced the often futile task of arguing their cases before the Star Chamber would have found the Tsarist and Soviet models regulating publishing refreshingly familiar and concepts such as samizdat & tamizdat would have needed little explanation.

Bone Music by Stephen Coates.  The x-ray discs are now minor collectables and while all those decades what Russians paid most influenced by what was claimed to be "on the cut", buyers now especially value the best images, skulls among the more desirable.

The ever inventive Russian youth were early adopters of bootleg recordings and combined recycling with a unique form of magnitzdat.  Because the Communist Party was as scared of rock music as it was of tracts about Western democracy and human rights, such sounds were banned and damned as subversive, decadent, capitalist, imperialist etc; in an authoritarian state, the exact form of the damnation is less important than the fact some label has been applied.  So, rock albums were hard to get but in Soviet homes gramophones (record players) were common so all that was needed was the media.  That was found in the rubbish discarded by hospitals, x-ray images turning out to be an ideal material for cutting the grooves which could be played on a gramophone.   Known by a variety of terms including ribs, music on ribs, jazz on bones or bone music, although the first were produced as early as 1946, most date from the 1950s & 1960s, cut into 7-inch discs (the size of the old 45 rpm “single”).  The machines used to “cut the grooves” were reputedly old 78 rpm phonographs, modified by skilled technicians, trained by the state to do stuff in the service of socialism.  Because of the nature of the material, they had a short life (managing a dozen plays was exceptional) and the quality was (by the standards of commercially produced vinyl pressings) appalling but alternatives were scarce and the improvised recording were cheap, often selling for a few kopeks with only the most desirable bands attracting more than a ruble.

Bone music: A early form of a digital disc.

That so many discarded X-rays were available in a nation in which usually there were shortages of just about everything except Vodka, was a product of circumstances.  With the breakdown of public health systems in the immediate aftermath of World War II (1939-1945) at a time when close to 20 million soldiers and displaced civilians were moving between countries, an increase in the spread of tuberculosis concerned the authorities and the Soviet government, like many, embarked on a vast programme of chest X-rays.  As a public health initiative it was a success but it resulted in large libraries of X-rays being stored in hospitals.  Because these contained a silver nitrate substance, they were a fire hazard and, after a couple of conflagrations, a twelve month limit was imposed on storage so hospital administrators were happy to give their old stocks to anyone who asked.  So, the input cost of the raw material was zero and the production costs were marginal which meant that even if the retail unit price of a bone music cut was less than a ruble, with high volumes, it was by Soviet standards a lucrative business model.  Customer satisfaction however was variable because, bought on street corners, the audio quality was unpredictable as was the content; until played, a buyer couldn’t be certain what they’d bought.  Noting the trend, the government passed a law banning the home-production of recordings of “a criminally hooligan trend” but rock ‘n’ roll was here to stay.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia (pronounced sin-uhs-thee-zhuh or sin-uhs-zhee-uh)

(1) In neurology and psychology, a neurological or psychological phenomenon in which a particular sensory stimulus triggers a second kind of sensation.

(2) The association of one sensory perception with, or description of it in terms of, another, unlike, perception that is not experienced at the same time.

(3) In literary theory or practice, an artistic device whereby one kind of sensation is described in the terms of another.

(4) In medical diagnostics, where a sensation felt in one part of the body as a result of stimulus that is applied to another, as in referred pain.

1892: From the Modern French or the New Latin, from Ancient Greek σύν (sún (with) or syn (together) + αἴσθησις (aísthēsis), (sensation; feeling) from the primitive Indo-European root au (to perceive) + abstract noun suffix -ia.  The word was modelled after existing construction anaesthesia.  Traditional spelling in the British Empire was synæsthesia but the US form synesthesia appears now global.  The meaning in psychology relating to the senses (colors that seem to the perceiver to having odor, etc.) is from 1891.  Synesthesia & synaesthete are nouns, synaesthetic is an adjective and synesthetically is an adverb; the noun plural is synesthesias.  

Clinicians have two categories of synesthesia: projective and associative.  Those who project see actual colours or shapes when stimulated whereas associators will feel an involuntary connection between the stimulus and the sense that it triggers.  For example, in the form chromesthesia synesthesia (sound to color) a projector would listen to a piano and see a purple shape whereas an associator might respond to the music by thinking it “sounds” purple.  There are a number of types of synesthesia, the best known of which grapheme-color synesthesia or the association of colours with letters or words.  In auditory-tactile synesthesia, certain sounds can induce sensations in parts of the body and debate continues about whether the near-universal reaction(s) induced by finger nails on a blackboard indicates synesthesia is a spectrum condition or this example is endemic in human physiology.  Lexical-gustatory synesthesia is the phenomenon of certain tastes being experienced upon hearing certain words.  Mirror-touch synesthesia is where someone feels the same sensation another person feels such as when a synesthete sees another touched on the arm; the synesthete involuntarily feeling a touch in the same place.

Logically, every possible combination of experiences which can occur can be a type of synesthesia.  Like a syndrome, something need not be wide-spread to be a type of synesthesia, it needs just to be specific: someone with the grapheme-color variant might see "Lindsay Lohan" as Lindsay Lohan.  Simultanéisme was a short-lived, early twentieth century movement in French poetry.  The writers aimed to achieve a kind of “simultaneousness of image and sound”, to represent or reproduce human sounds mingled with other sounds (ranging from birds & land mammals to those heard in cityscapes including the then novel automobile).  An attempt to form complex and dynamic onomatopoeiae, types of synaesthesia and kinaesthetic images, the finest surviving examples are in La Trilogie des forces (The Trilogy of Forces, 1908-1914) by the movement's founder Henri-Martin Barzun (1881–1973) and Naissance du poème (Birth of the poem, 1918) by Fernand Divoire (1883-1951).

For many reasons, as a literary device, synaesthesia in the twentieth century became much analysed and discussed with the critics even managing to build theories although it was not at all novel, innumerable writers of prose, poetry and non-fiction for millennia having synaesthetic references in their texts.  It’s a familiar feature of everyday speech, mentions such as “a heavy silence” or a “black look” being commonplace and there are no pedantic literalists who complain when a music critic writes of the “darkening voice” of the aging soprano.  So it’s a mixing of sensations, the concurrent appeal to more than one sense; the response through several senses to the stimulation of one and while as an intellectual exercise than can be made complex, in everyday life it’s just the way people think.

In the medical literature the French term synesthésie had appeared at least as early as 1864 but that was of bodily reflexes and co-sensations rather than the neurological condition and the first use in English in the modern sense is thought to appear in a translation of Jules Millet’s (1965-1982) doctoral thesis Audition colorée (Colored hearing) in which he differentiated synesthésie (for all kinds of combined senses) from those specifically associated with links between colors and sounds.  At the time, scientists and physicians in the English-speaking world were still using the borrowed French term pseudochromesthésie, a long word with a brief history.  In 1848, French physician Charles-Auguste-Édouard Cornaz (1825-1911) was the first to give a name to what would come to be known as synesthesia, calling it hyperchromatopsie (perception de trop de couleurs) (hyperchromatopsia (perception of too many colors)), the rationale for that being Dr Cornaz regarding the condition as the opposite of the well-documented chromatodysopsie (chromatodysopsia (color blindness); the term was the precursor to what would become hyperesthesia.  Dr Cordaz's coining fell into disuse after biographically otherwise obscure French physician Ernest Chabalier in 1864 published a paper using the term pseudochromesthésie (or pseudochromesthesia) (false colour-sensation) which enjoyed general adoption before being supplanted by synesthesia.

However, although the scientific study may have been embryonic, the idea was not and three lines from Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-1867) sonnet Correspondances (Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857)) are illustrative of what was a common technique from the factory floor to the academy:

Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,

Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,

Those translating Baudelaire into English did take a few interpretative liberties with his work but the synaesthetic imagery (mostly) was preserved:

The scents and colours to each other respond.

And scents there are, like infant's flesh as chaste,

As sweet as oboes, and as meadows fair,

Cyril Scott (1879-1970), Baudelaire: The Flowers of Evil (1909)

Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.

Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,

Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;

F.P. Sturm (1879-1942), from Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, edited by Thomas Robert Smith (1880-1942) (1919)

sound calls to fragrance, colour calls to sound.

cool as an infant's brow some perfumes are,

softer than oboes, green as rainy leas;

Lewis Piaget Shanks (1879-1935), Flowers of Evil (1931)

Perfumes there are as sweet as the music of pipes and strings,

As pure as the naked flesh of children, as full of peace

As wide green prairies

George Dillon (1906-1968), Flowers of Evil (1936)

So are commingled perfumes, sounds, and hues.

There can be perfumes cool as children's flesh,

Like fiddIes, sweet, like meadows greenly fresh.

Roy Campbell (1901-1957), Poems of Baudelaire (1952)

Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,

Sweet as oboes, green as meadows

William Aggeler (1904-1974), The Flowers of Evil (1954)

Perfumes and sounds and colors correspond.

Some scents are cool as children's flesh is cool,

Sweet as are oboes, green as meadowlands,

Jacques LeClercq (1891-1971), Flowers of Evil (1958)

Perfumes, colors and sounds answer one another.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,

Sweet as oboes, green as prairies

Wallace Fowlie (1908-1998), Flowers of Evil (1964)

So perfumes, colors, tones answer each other.

There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh,

Soft as oboes, green as meadows,

Geoffrey Wagner (1927-2006), Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (1974)

So perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond.

Odours there are, fresh as a baby's skin,

Mellow as oboes, green as meadow grass,

James McGowan (1938-2014), Flowers of Evil (1993)

Perfumes, colours and sounds respond.

Odours fresh as the skin of an infant,

Sweet as oboes and green as a meadow,

Beverley Bie Brahic, Invitation to the Voyage (2021)

Wassily Kandinsky, color, shape and music

Winter Landscape (1909), oil on cardboard by Wassily Kandinsky.

In Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky’s (1866–1944) particular synesthesia, color and music inextricably were tangled and so precise was it that he associated each note with an exact hue and it was so intrinsic to his being that he once observed: “…the sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble.”  It meant his experience of music was heightened, indeed defined, by the range of visual perceptions which shifted with every note.  The music of Richard Wagner (1813–1883) has had its consequences, good and bad, and it was his vivid visual response to a performance of Richard Wagner's (1813–1883) Lohengrin (1850) at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre that he abandoned his successful career as a lawyer and devoted himself to the painting which had been his hobby.  Accepted as a student at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts, he later described the Wagnerian transformation of his life: “I saw all my colors in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.”  Wagner has led astray a few troubled souls but he guided Kandinsky along a good path; the world can gain much from having more artists but probably has enough lawyers.

Composition VII (1913), oil on canvas by by Wassily Kandinsky.

Whether Kandinsky would have become an artist had he not been a synaesthete can't be known but music certainly drew him to become a certain sort of painter.  His path artistic path he explained by saying: "A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art."  Music he called "the ultimate teacher" and it critical to the development of especially his abstract works; noting the way the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) had abandoned tonal and harmonic conventions in his compositions, he rejected the figure or recognizable object in favor of shapes, lines, and discordant colors which he deployed overlaid on texture to create a rhythmic visual experience which as closely as possible emulated in a two-dimensional space the emotional response he’d experienced when hearing the sounds.  Unsurprisingly, Kandinsky gave many of his paintings musical titles, such as Composition or Improvisation and it wasn’t unusual for critics to use phrases like “Kandinsky’s symphony of colors”.  Kandinsky also perceived color also had the ability to touch the feelings of the viewers, yellow able to disturb while blue awakened the highest spiritual aspirations.  That may have been mapping his experience as a synaesthete on to those not able to enjoy the gift but it was certainly an insight into his visions.  In 1911, Kandinsky published Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) in which he defined the three types of painting: impressions, improvisations and compositions.  Impressions were based on an external reality while improvisations and compositions depicted images summoned from the unconscious, compositions the more formal of the two.  The treatise is one of the landmarks in the theoretical foundations of abstraction and remains an important contribution to an explanation of the techniques with which art can be constructed in an attempt to evoke psychological, physical, and emotional responses.

Improvisation 35 (1914), oil on canvas by Wassily Kandinsky.

As well as the works in which he explored the implications of his synesthesia, Kandinsky painted in other styles including Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstraction, Landscape, Cityscape, Genre, Marina and Allegory.  Although he did paint people in recognizable form (including self-portraits), had Kandinsky painted Lindsay Lohan he’d likely not have been drawn to depicting her in a realistic likeness, attracted instead by the colors he’d have associated with the metaphorical “sound” of her once tempestuous lifestyle and the actual sounds of the music she created.  Quite what might have been colors and shapes of the involuntary visual experience he’d have enjoyed while hearing of her adventures or listening to her tunes is of course speculative but in his 1911 treatise he did map out a quite strict vocabulary linking specific colors to musical instruments and emotional states.  From that would emerge a constellation of colored planes and rhythmic lines, a Lohanic portrait best assessed as a musical composition, visual elements corresponding with timbre, pitch and rhythm.

Black Lines I (1913), oil on canvas by Wassily Kandinsky.

From his visual lexicon, it’s possible to imagine how a visual symphony of Lindsay Lohan might have appeared, her distinctive red hair drawn not as naturalistic strands but, because of the his association of vermilion with the sound of a trumpet, (someting cross-cultural, Dr Johnson (Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)) once describing the color scarlet to a blind man as “the clangour of a trumpet”) there’d likely have been intense, sharp, angular geometric structures or aggressive, flaming slashes of red slicing across the canvas.  Thematically, it would be a “loud” work, suggestive of something sudden and explosive but there would also be “quieter” elements, Kandinsky associating a light, powder blue with the sound of a flute and ultramarine or cobalt with that of a cello or the deeper tones of an organ.  There might have been interlocking concentric circles and smooth, floating curves of blue weaving through the sharp red angles, the “cool” blue tones not balancing but clashing with the “hot” reds, representing both the rhythmic layers of her music and the more melancholy undercurrent of a life lived under the microscope of the tabloid press.  Superficially incoherent because of fragmented geometric shapes and intersecting diagonals, the tension between colors would have created an emotional dissonance, visual “chords” at once seductive and unstable.

Violet (1923), colour lithograph by Wassily Kandinsky.

It’s likely Kandinsky would have been unable to resist so obvious an artistic possibility as Lindsay Lohan’s famous freckles, representing as they do in music a staccato percussion.  On canvas, this would have been translated into a scatter plot of sharp dots peppered not in a defined pattern but randomly, as naturally as they appear on skin.  Kandinsky thought dots (in the sense of “representations of points”) as the ultimate minimalist entity implying a sudden, sharp beat or a silent pause; either way, there would be a spray of rhythmic, percussive dots jumping across the canvas, one’s interpretation of that an element in deconstructing the whole.  While his techniques were multi-layered, he did claim in one aspect there was simplicity because: "Everything starts from a dot."  Shapes being signifiers of an inherent spiritual weight, there would have been triangles because he imagined them as possessing aggressive, forward-moving energy; they would appear with circles representing the soul and peace.  The darkness in her life would have been conveyed by chaotic, clashing black lines and there would also be yellow, a color the artist described as “frenzied” and capable of “violently bothering" the viewer.  All this would typically be “played out” by interactions on the “charged, expectant silence” of a solid, white background.  A viewer would perhaps not recognize even a hint of a human presence and the work would be understood only if the title made explicit Lindsay Lohan was the subject.  Even then, some notes from the artist would be helpful because, while a set of emotional and musical impulses orchestrated in color would be a familiar language to other color-music synaesthetes, the level of abstraction would for others make it mysterious and probably weird beyond immediate understanding.