The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul. Eric McLuhan

decided to champion the rationality that appeared in Greece alongside the phonetic alphabet. He declared war on the poets and their use of mimesis to communicate the oral encyclopedia.⁶⁴ Mimesis was the exact opposite of rational objectivity and detachment—traits that characterize the phonetic alphabet.⁶⁵ The classicist Eric Havelock pays careful attention to the matter in Preface to Plato:

      Plato is describing a total technology of the preserved word...a state of total personal involvement and therefore of emotional identification with the substance of the poetized statement...A modern student thinks he does well if he diverts a tiny fraction of his psychic powers to memorize a single sonnet of Shakespeare. He is not more lazy than his Greek counterpart. He simply pours his energy into book-reading and learning through the use of his eyes instead of his ears. His Greek counterpart had to mobilize the psychic resources necessary to memorize Homer and the poets...To identify with the performance as an actor does with his lines was the only way it could be done. You threw yourself into the situation of Achilles, you identified with his grief or his anger. You yourself became Achilles and so did the reciter to whom you listened. Thirty years later you could automatically quote what Achilles had said or what the poet had said about him. Such enormous powers of poetic memorization could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity...This then is the master clue to Plato’s choice of the word mimesis to describe the poetic experience. It focuses initially not on the artist’s creative act but on his power to make his audience identify almost pathologically and certainly sympathetically with the content if what he is saying...what [Plato] is saying is that any poetized statement must be designed and recited in such a way as to make it a kind of drama within the soul both of the reciter and hence also of the audience. This kind of drama, this way of reliving experience in memory instead of analyzing and understanding it, is for him the “enemy.”⁶⁶

      Havelock points out that

      Plato was correctly concerned with the emotional pathology of the poetic performance, and it explains also why he chose the term mimesis to describe several aspects of the poetic experience which we today feel should be distinguished. The translation “imitation,” it can now be seen, does not adequately translate his word. “Imitation” in English presumes a separate existence of an original which is then copied. The essence of Plato’s point, the point of his attack, is that in poetic performance as practiced until then in Greece there was no “original.”⁶⁷

      He says later in the book:

      The minstrel recited the tradition, and the audience listened, repeated, and recalled and so absorbed it. But the minstrel recited effectively only as he re-enacted the doings and sayings of heroes and made them his own, a process which can be described in reverse as making himself “resemble” them in endless succession. He sank his personality into his performance. His audience in turn would remember only as they entered effectively and sympathetically into what he was saying and this in turn meant that they became his servants and submitted to his spell. As they did this, they engaged also in a re-enactment of the tradition with lips, larynx, and limbs, and with the whole apparatus of their unconscious nervous system. The pattern of behavior of artist and audience was therefore in some important respects identical. It can be described mechanically as a continual repeating of rhythmic doings. Psychologically, it is an act of personal commitment, of total engagement and of emotional identification.⁶⁸

      The “pattern of behavior” brought into play by the poets is the same experience described by de Lubac, above (pp. 21-22), as tropological knowing. Tropology entails using all of the senses, of both modes of sensus communis, simultaneously.

      Havelock’s observation that the modern student “simply pours his energy into book-reading and learning through the use of his eyes instead of his ears” echoes strangely two familiar statements by St. Paul. “Faith comes by hearing...” he wrote to the Romans (10:17); that is, it would appear now, faith comes by mimesis, by participatory experience, not as mere concepts.⁶⁹

      This saying has long seemed mysterious and enigmatic to us, but considered in the context of a society of non-literates still susceptible to the mimetic spell it would be an accurate technical observation about the operation of media. The second statement is another familiar, and puzzling, declaration: “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life” (2 corinthians 3:6). This, too, could be read as a technical observation about the effect of alphabetic writing: it kills mimesis, as Plato knew, and Aristotle, too. Both men were at pains to sidestep mimesis and the spellbinding power of the poetic establishment that relied on it, in order to take advantage of detachment and abstract thought— the logos hendiathetos.⁷⁰ Plato’s war on the poets, as recapitulated by Havelock in Preface to Plato, was thus the first all-out media war. For at stake was nothing less than the entire enterprise of abstract thought and the new mode of philosophy. Aristotle, for his part, found that the habit of thinking in images and emotions was a major impediment to the sensibility that he required of his students, and he took steps to evade that pernicious habit. Perhaps the major tool in his counteroffensive against the lingering poetic sensibility was the syllogism: it is impossible to syllogize in images.⁷¹ It just cannot be done.

      Synesthesia

      About ten people in a million live extraordinarily rich sensory lives. They live, that is, in full conscious awareness of the sensus communis: they live every moment submerged in the interactions of each of the senses with all of the others: they are called synesthetes. Writes Dr. Richard Cytowic:

      Imagine that you are a synesthete, like Michael Watson. You are standing in front of the refrigerator late at night trying to decide on a snack. You look at the leftover roast but you say to yourself, “No, I’m not in the mood for arches.” Or, contemplating a slice of lemon meringue pie, decide you aren’t hungry for points. You dismiss the thought of a peanut butter sandwich because you know you couldn’t sleep well if you stuffed yourself full of spheres and circles.

      There you stand, bathed in the refrigerator light, casting your eye from shelf to shelf. You shift your feet against the cool floor and finally take a slice of chocolate mint pie. As you do, you feel a dozen columns before you, invisible to the eye but real to the touch. You set the fork down and run your hand up and down their cool, smooth surfaces. As you roll the minty taste in your mouth your outstretched hand rubs the back curve of one of the columns. What a sumptuous sensation. The surface feels cool, refreshing, even sexual in a way.⁷²

      Early in his researches, Dr. Cytowic came across The Mind of a Mnemonist, A. R. Luria’s account of his patient known simply as “S.” “S was not aware of any distinct line separating vision from hearing, or hearing from any other sense. He could not suppress the translation of sounds into taste, shape, touch, color, and movement.”

      Presented with a tone pitched at 2,000 cycles per second, “S” said, “It looks something like fireworks tinged with a pink-red hue. The strip of color feels rough and unpleasant, and it has an ugly taste—rather like a briny pickle...you could hurt your hand on this.”

      The same synesthesia enabled him to visualize vividly each word or sound that he heard, whether in his own tongue or in a language unintelligible to himself. The thing to be remembered automatically converted itself without effort on his part into a visual image of such durability that he could remember it years after the initial encounter. So specific was his ability that the same stimuli would produce the exact synesthetic response.

      “S” was a person who “saw” everything, who had to feel a telephone number on the tip of his tongue before he could remember it. He could not understand anything unless an impression of it leaked through all his senses.⁷³

      On display here is the bodily sensus communis in full operation. Here is how S described his world:

      I recognize a word not only by the images it evokes, but by a whole complex of feelings that image arouses.it’s not a matter of vision or hearing but some over-all sense I get. Usually I experience a word’s taste and weight, and I don’t have to make an effort to remember it—the word seems to recall itself. But it’s difficult to