Spinoza identifies four main modes of perception. The first, he calls hearsay. Things we hear through the grapevine. Rumors. Bromides. Platitudes. Unexamined truisms, such as the linear model of progress via technology : color is an advance on black and white, sound is an advance on silent films, computers and Smartphones have so revolutionized information and social activity that we’re all much smarter than people in the Stone Age, those beetle-browed clods that painted all those bison and horses on the walls of caves. Solitude is for malcontents and eccentrics, books and maps are for luddite hippies and nostalgic holdouts, and cell phones and GPS’s are essential tools for survival.
By this logic, Kim Kardashian is a genius, and Henry
Thoreau is a total idiot.
The second mode of perception Spinoza identifies as
anything we’ve acquired through some vague experience. That is to say, once,
when we were very, very high on hashish or psilocybin or LSD, we realized that
one day we would die, but that in dying, we would become a larger part of the
universe, for that is where we are from, we are all clouds of molecules held
together for a time in order to taste and experience being, simple being,
simple existence, existence with no ulterior purpose, existence as a
manifestation of the fundamental joy and benevolence that is the true marrow of
the cosmos.
The third mode of perception is our understanding of cause
and effect. The perception that if we lift a specified weight of iron each day,
our muscles will grow, and we will look spectacular, capable and strong, our
bodies symphonies of bone and muscle, heart rate and blood. Or, if we drink a
pint of whiskey we will become very drunk and say things we may later regret.
Or, if we drop a watermelon from the top of a high building it will splatter
into a thousand pieces. Or, if we refuse to pay our rent, the marshal will come
and put us out on the street. Or, if we press ‘L’ on the elevator it will take us to the lobby,
and if we press 4 it will take us to the fourth floor, and if we press X it will take us somewhere mysterious, somewhere, possibly, in the clouds, where
angels ride Harley Davidsons fueled with rat farts and Jimi Hendrix plays a
Gibson Flying V guitar dripping with heavenly fire.
The fourth mode of perception is ontological : that
which seizes us with its essence. When we know, for instance, the soul of a
thing, and that it is knocking on our ribcage with its very truth, its very
molecules mingling with ours, tingling in our nerves, potentiating our being
with the power of its truth. The knowledge that one plus one is two, or that a
circle is the set of all points in a plane that are a given distance from a
center. Or that pumpernickel is a form of bread, or that a pump is a device
that moves fluids by mechanical action. There are things that murder the sly
demon of analogy with the solidity of their irreducible pith.
I would like to add a few more modes to Spinoza’s list. Perceptions,
for instance, that are the children of ether, a post-surgical trance in which a
thousand sensations coalesce into a lambent circumlocution of random ideas, and
a fold of blanket becomes a hillock in Hyde Park, or a willow in the
bloodstream sobbing with literature. This is akin to the second mode of
perception, but with one important difference. The experiences aren’t so much
vague as flirtatious, reckless and prodigal as gnomes in a goldmine. This is
where the external world and the internal world meet at an horizon of prairie
motel signs, a Buick LaCrosse burning through winter on a highway to Abilene.
Or a soft punctuation of stars on a sentence of rampant parquet.
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