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:
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