SYNESTHESIA

Synesthesia – or the merging of the senses – is an enterprise that Currado Malaspina has devoted himself to sporadically and unsystematically. Each time he attempts to make works of art to be “ingested” through multiple means he has failed with miserable nobility. Like the knight-errant Alonso Quixano, Malaspina is a mythmaker, an unpaid dreamer, a follower of phantoms and ultimately a fool.

He’s in Euboea right now, renting a small cabin on a quiet cul-de-sac on the east side of Chalcis. He told me that he is spending most of his time reading Juvenal’s Satires and listening to Parsifal on his I-Pod. Occasionally, in order to offset the blunting of the senses that comes from forced isolation and habit, he visits Madame Erzulie’s very upscale gentleman’s club where he has taken an unhealthy fancy to the portly nineteen-year old twins Indra and Inemes.

He is also making small sketches of imaginary Greek sculptures and sending them to friends with cryptic annotations written on the backs. I received the drawing above with the phrase “dactylic hexameter covering an encyclopedic range” scrawled in a near indecipherable handwriting as if his hand were a club or a charred twig dipped in brine.