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

of words, reported in various ways by all other synesthetes, brings immediately to mind Grammar’s insistence on Realism (rather than Nominalism) as the raison d’etre for etymology as a science, the observation that words are rooted in experience, that words are the storehouse of experience, and that words have a real relation to the things and processes they name.⁷⁵ And that a language is an organ of perception.

      Like S, a synesthete simply experiences his sensus communis in the foreground of his awareness while the rest of us have it operating behind the scenes, outside consciousness.⁷⁶ The mystical experience of anagogy, too, relies on the sensus communis both of body and of intellect. There is no place in anagogy for detachment or objectivity.

      Concerning objectivity, there is the testimony of Jacques Lusseyran, who, when he was seven years old, was blinded in a schoolyard mishap. He recovered vision almost instantly through the operation of the sensus communis:

      I did not become a musician, and the reason was a strange one. I had no sooner made a sound on the A string, on D or G or C, than I no longer heard it. I looked at it. Tones, chords, melodies, rhythms, each was immediately transformed into pictures, curves, lines, shapes, landscapes, and most of all colors. Whenever I made the a string sound by itself with the bow, such a burst of light appeared before my eyes and lasted so long that often I had to stop playing.

      At concerts, for me, the orchestra was like a painter. It flooded me with all the colors of the rainbow. If the violin came in by itself, I was suddenly filled with gold and fire, and with red so bright I could not remember having seen it on any object. When it was the oboe’s turn, a clear green ran all through me, so cool that I seemed to feel the breath of night. I visited the land of music. I rested my eyes on every one of its scenes. I loved it till it caught my breath. But I saw music too much to be able to speak its language. My own language was the language of shapes.

      Strange chemistry, the chemistry which changed a symphony into a moral purpose, an adagio into a poem, a concerto into a walk, attaching words to pictures and pictures to words, daubing the world with colors and finally making the human voice into the most beautiful of all instruments!⁷⁷

      He goes on:

      For my part I had an idea of people, an image, but not the one seen by the world at large. Frankly, hair, eyes, mouth, the necktie, the rings on fingers mattered very little to me. I no longer even thought about them. People no longer seemed to possess them. Sometimes in my mind men and women appeared without heads or fingers. Then again the lady in the chair rose before me in her bracelet, turned into the bracelet itself. There were people whose teeth seemed to fill their whole faces, and others so harmonious they seemed to be made of music. But in reality none of these sights is made to be described. They are so mobile, so much alive that they defy words.

      People were not at all as they were said to be and never the same for more than two minutes at a stretch. Some were, of course, but that was a bad sign, a sign that they did not want to understand or be alive, that they were somehow caught in the glue of some indecent passion. That kind of thing I could see in them right away, because, not having their faces before my eyes, I caught them off guard. People are not accustomed to this, for they only dress up for those who are looking at them.⁷⁸

      Moreover, he finds that he can read voices like a book.

      What voices taught me they taught me almost at once. I ended by reading so many things into voices without wanting to, without even thinking about it, that voices concerned me more than the words they spoke. Sometimes, for minutes at a time in class, I heard nothing, neither the teacher’s questions nor the answers of my comrades. I was too much absorbed in the images their voices were parading through my head. All the more since these images half the time contradicted, and flagrantly, the appearance of things....

      A beautiful voice (and beautiful means a great deal in this context, for it means that the man who has such a voice is beautiful himself) remains so through coughing and stammering. An ugly voice, on the contrary, can become soft, scented, humming, singing like the flute. But to no purpose. It stayed ugly just the same. As for hypocrites, they were recognizable immediately.⁷⁹

      Lusseyran characterizes his synesthetic sense as a sort of limitless mental screen:

      Names, figures and objects in general did not appear on my screen without shape, not just in black and white, but in all the colors of the rainbow. Still, I never remember consciously encouraging this phenomenon. Nothing entered my mind without being bathed in a certain amount of light. To be more precise, everything from living creatures to ideas appeared to be carved out of the primordial light. In a few months, my personal world had turned into a painter’s studio.

      I was not the master of these apparitions. The number five was always black, the letter L light green, and kindly feeling a soft blue. There was nothing I could do about it, and when I tried to change the color of a sign, the sign at once clouded over and at once disappeared. A strange power, imagination! It certainly functioned in me but also in spite of me.⁸⁰

      More pertinent to our investigation, perhaps, is his observation about the effect of tinkering with the senses. For half a century now, it has been a commonplace of media studies that each technology extends one or another sense or faculty, according it a sort of hyperesthesia, which has then the effect of numbing the bodily sense extended and rearranging the interplay between the other senses—what we have been calling the sensus communis.⁸¹

      When I came across the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name— hallucinations? I had learned to my cost how wrong they were.

      From my own experience I knew very well that it was enough to take from a man a memory here, an association there, to deprive him of hearing or sight, for the world to undergo immediate transformation, and for another world, entirely different but entirely coherent, to be born. Another world? Not really. The same world rather, but seen from another angle, and counted in entirely new measures. When this happened, all the hierarchies they called objective were turned upside down, scattered to the four winds, not even like theories but like whims.

      The psychologists more than all the rest—there were a few exceptions, Bergson among them—seemed to me not to come within miles of the heart of the matter, the inner life. They took it as their subject but did not talk about it. They were as embarrassed in its presence as a hen finding out that she has hatched a duckling. Of course, I was more uneasy than they were when it came to talking about it, but not when it came to living it. I was only sixteen years old, and I felt it was up to them to tell me. Yet they told me nothing.⁸²

      Fortunately, Lusseyran has set down a remarkably detailed account of his recovery of sight. It is not optical vision, as you and I know it, but sight as registered by the other senses in the sensus communis: